You can see the huge difference between the skinny OEM bolt and the thicker and many times stronger CARR bolt. Bolts are usually the first point of failure in a connecting rod and we spared no expense to put a strong part here.
You can see the much stronger and wider small end of the connecting rod between the stock rod on the right and the Carrillo on the left. We speced a wider small end and wider and more beefy pin boss on our custom pistons. Carrillo and JE coordinated together so the clearances would be correct between the two.
You can see that the odd tapered small end of the stock rod was contributing to piston pin flex and odd wear even at stock power levels. You can see the witness marks on the part here. There was also a lot of clearance between the pin and the small end of the rod. This usually contributes to a lot of ticking noise. These problems were completely eliminated in our new design. We are really puzzled to as why Nissan did this, especially when some Nissan engines in the past had a history of excessive small end clearance making noise.
The OEM crank was micro-polished in the journals and precision balanced before being cryo and WPC treated. We had to give our not-so-strong stock crank a fighting chance for survival. We think it will be fine as long as power and RPM levels are kept to a reasonable level of 280 whp and 6500 rpm.
