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| One of the cool features that the VQ35DE has are these piston squirters. These help keep the pistons cool under boost by spraying oil under the crown. These are standard equipment. |
With all the parts in hand Nick Hunter assembled our engine and verified all of our clearances in one day. When assembling the engine, Nick used VQ35HR head bolts. These bolts are much stronger at a Rockwell hardness of 36C vs the old bolts 26C. The HR bolts also have three more engaged threads. The HR bolts have a higher torque setting and increased clamp when combined with our Cosworth gaskets should end our sealing problems.
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| This girdle helps greatly stiffen the bottom end by tying in all of the main caps, helping the VQ take turbo boost with no problem. |
With our engine assembled, we got a few more goodies to help our vehicle out. Koyo sent us their latest high fin density radiator. This radiator is a direct drop in fit for the 350Z. Our car already had a Koyo Heavy Duty race radiator but this latest radiator is designed for Z’s that have forced induction, improving cooling with an increased fin count.
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| The VQ crank is fully counterweighted, has generous overlap and nice fillets making it just about bulletproof for boosted applications. Nick used plenty of assembly lube to help keep things good under initial start up. |
JWT reflashed our ECU to raise the rev limit to 8000 rpm and to their best guess of what the tuning should be based on similar engine combinations to ours. Since we were not going to be able to actually tune our engine perfectly, we also obtained an AEM water methanol injection system for absolutely quelling any chances of detonation that might arise. We used a dual nozzle system for the delivery of additional water/methanol mixture. We spent the last few hours of the third day crating up our engine and delivering it to our freight forwarder to ship it to Qatar. With fingers crossed, we got ready for the last stop of our adventure, on to Qatar.
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