Mistakes were made, my R34 Story

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

CHOP IDLE TOONS

[MBS206]

49 minutes ago, Dose Pipe Sutututu said:

CHOP IDLE TOONS

I'll Chop Stick your Tuna!

[MBS206]

I also find it hilarious, everyone thinks chop idle tunes sound cool, and they do...

Because they sound like an angry rotary engine idling.

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

This sounds beaut

 

 

[Kinkstaah]

The cam I am actually putting in (a few posts up) is actually smaller than my current one. At least duration/overlap wise.

All the chop stuff I hear just sounds like an engine running badly, because it is. I then envision driving it around in 1st gear and being massively sad about it bucking to the beat of said chop. There is an idle video of someone with a similar cam floating around the internet, but mine is a custom cam (so is his) so it'll never be the same, plus the fact exhausts are entirely different.

What I want to do is put some bullet mufflers/race mufflers in to replace a couple sections straight pipes that currently replace the two extra cats that I don't need. But this is even further down the line!

[Kinkstaah]

These arrived today!

Sadly I'm going to probably be smart and enjoy the car as is over the summer/sunny period and save the ~2 weeks downtime it'd take to swap the heads over and tune later in the year.

Maybe.

It's going to be pretty damn tempting seeing these bolt on funs just sitting in storage when they're ready to go. There's a non-zero chance I end up @The Bogan'ing it.

[The Bogan]

1 hour ago, Kinkstaah said:

These arrived today!

Sadly I'm going to probably be smart and enjoy the car as is over the summer/sunny period and save the ~2 weeks downtime it'd take to swap the heads over and tune later in the year.

Maybe.

It's going to be pretty damn tempting seeing these bolt on funs just sitting in storage when they're ready to go. There's a non-zero chance I end up @The Bogan'ing it.

God I love shiny engine parts 🥰

Are you looking for more horsetorques in the mid range? (Smaller cam) Or just more horsetorques every where? (Big heads and bigger revs)

Assumption: they were not bought late night shopping on the interwebs after drinking too many beers, which is typically how I pull pins on things......🤣

The evolution of your car is coming along nicely, I sometimes wish I didn't get bored with my cars and keep flipping them, maybe the MX5 will be different

 

[The Bogan]

Maybe not 🤪

[MBS206]

2 hours ago, Kinkstaah said:

These arrived today!

Sadly I'm going to probably be smart and enjoy the car as is over the summer/sunny period and save the ~2 weeks downtime it'd take to swap the heads over and tune later in the year.

Maybe.

It's going to be pretty damn tempting seeing these bolt on funs just sitting in storage when they're ready to go. There's a non-zero chance I end up @The Bogan'ing it.

What blows me away, is watching some of the US guys, like Tony Angelo at Stay Tuned. LS1, buys a set of heads for $1200, drops a mild cam in, pulls all the electrics, drops a basic inlet manifold with a carb, MSD thing for spark, and roll it out to make 550hp.

[Kinkstaah]

4 hours ago, The Bogan said:

God I love shiny engine parts 🥰

Are you looking for more horsetorques in the mid range? (Smaller cam) Or just more horsetorques every where? (Big heads and bigger revs)

Assumption: they were not bought late night shopping on the interwebs after drinking too many beers, which is typically how I pull pins on things......🤣

The evolution of your car is coming along nicely, I sometimes wish I didn't get bored with my cars and keep flipping them, maybe the MX5 will be different

The engine stuff is Greg Autism to the Max. I contacted Tony Mamo previously from AFR who went off to make his own company to further refine AFR heads. He is a wizard in US LS world. Pretty much the best person on earth who will sell you things he's done weird wizard magic to.

The cam spec is not too different. I have a 232/234 .600/603 lift, 114LSA cam currently. The new one is 227/233 .638 .634. The 1.8 ratio roller rockers will effectively push this cam into the ~.670 range. These also get Mamo'ified to be drilled out and tapped to use a 10mm bolt over an 8mm for better stability.

This is what lead to the cam being specced. The plan is to run it to 6800. (6600 currently). The Johnson lifters are to maintain proper lift at heavy use which is something the LS7's supposedly fail at and lose a bit of pressure, robbing you of lift at higher RPM. Hollow stem valves for better, well everything, Valve train control. I dunno. Hollow is better. The valves are also not on a standard valve angle. Compression ratio is going from 10.6 to 11.3.

The cam is smaller, but also not really... The cam was specced when I generated a chart where I counted the frames of a lap video I had and noted how much of the time in % I spent at what RPM while on track at Sandown.

The current cam/heads are a bit mismatched, the standard LS1 heads are the restriction to power, which is why everyone CNC's them to get a pretty solid improvement. Most of the difference between LS1->LS2->LS3 is really just better stock heads. The current cam is falling over about 600rpm earlier than it 'should' given the rest of my current setup.

CNC'ing heads closes the gap with regards to heads. Aftermarket heads eliminate the gap and go further. The MMS heads go even further than that, and the heads I have in the box could quite easily be bolted to a 7.0 427ci or 454 and not be any restriction at all.

Tony Mamo previously worked with AFR, designed new heads from scratch then eventually founded his own business. There he takes the AFR items and performs further wizardry, CNC'ing them and then manually porting the result. He also ports the FAST102 composite manifold:

Before and after


There's also an improved racing crank scraper and windage tray. Helps to keep oil in the pan. Supposedly gains 2% power. Tony also ports Melling oil pumps, so you get more oil pressure down low at idle, and the same as what you want up top thanks to a suitable relief spring.

There's also the timing chain kit with a Torrington bearing to make sure the cam doesn't have any thrust.

Yes I'll post a before and after when it all eventually goes together.

It'll probably make 2kw more than a setup that would be $15,000 cheaper :p

[Kinkstaah]

So my car is finally back from paint!

This took an absolutely insane amount of work and should get it's own build thread - but I didn't build it. It was completed by Troy @ https://scalekustoms.com.au/

I originally bought the AOSHIMA URAS Type R kit while I was in Japan, it's supposed to look like this when assembled:

Now, I thought that was cool enough until I opened the box with Dismay, as there's no way I could possibly have completed it. The thing is 1/24 and has details down to the steering wheel horn button, which is a 2mm diameter sticker.

I originally wondered if someone could make it at all, as is - But then things got a little carried away. It's worth noting that the model does not have an openable bonne, let alone engine bay, OR an openable boot. - Troy has worked wonders with 3D printer and presumably better eyes than I will ever have.

My photos suck, so I will post up some of his in-progress ones he sent to me during the way. Unsuprisingly, he is very detailed.

A lot of these are out of order. But he:

1) Made a LS engine and an engine bay appear out of thin air
2) Made the bonnet removable
3) Printed the rims I will buy in the future (or any rim you want)
4) Printed and added the wing that is going on
5) Tinted my back windows as this is what my car has IRL (privacy glass)
6) Added a licence plate.
7) Somehow did the interior
8) 3D Printed my actual seats
9) Made the exhaust under the car connect even though this is likely invisible.
10) Created a boot with my fking battery box, power steering reservoir, subwoofer and toolboxes back there.

To say it's insane is an understatement.
And I f**ked it all up because when I was re-mounting the wing (it broke in transit) I spilled glue everywhere and ripped paint up and Gregged the rear half of the car.

Which about makes sense.
Also, this arrived on the same day.



Quite the change from:


I spent 16 hours per day over the next 3 days pre-christmas putting the interior back together, mounting lip, fixing various bodykit problems with window mouldings, etc. and servicing, rebuilding my 370z brakes to go on the car 'soon', messing with heights to check clearances for new wheels, etc. I also had a foray into mounting wiper-mounted washer jets which was an absolute disaster. The bodyshop has welded (and painted) over the stock jet locations for reasons unknown to everybody (i.e they forgot)

I also wanted to wire in the oil pressure sensor on Christmas Eve which was a BAD IDEA.

You do not know terror like pulling your ECU apart, pinning in half-fitting pins that aren't the right ones, but trying anyway because it's Christmas eve, putting your ECU back together and having a no-start condition with a fuel pump not priming.

Then you undo all your work and the fuel pump still doesn't prime.

So after all that terror and horror and pain and tedious disassembly, the issue was the relay in the boot which seems to have died/stuck when I was turning the car off and on about 700 times testing shitty washer jets. I also re-wired the fuel pump power plug which fell apart in my hands. I am very happy I had 3 extra pre-made ones from a few posts/last Christmas's breakdown.

https://bluewireautomotive.com/products/10-x-pcm-ecm-ecu-terminals

I have put an order for these in, so I can actually add the pins to the ECU properly. The commodore ECU does not have the pins for Oil Pressure via ODB2. However the ECU can support it if you create the pins and wire them in.

So for round two, and somehow attempting to route that into the engine bay through my impossible engine bay grommet is a fight for another day.

It's 40C in Melbourne tomorrow, I am half tempted to drive the car with the aircon on to deliver presents to my partner's family and see if it helps with the overheating-on-40C-days-in-traffic-with-aircon-on-only issue that the vents were intended to solve.

Do I feel lucky?

[soviet_merlin]

Well, do ya, punk?

Seriously though, let's fu<king go! The colour and kit looks amazing on the car. Do you have any shots from the rear?

I don't quite follow how the model came around. You bought the white kit and he modified it to match your car? Looks nuts either way!

[Kinkstaah]

I bought the model back in Japan in Feb. I realised I could never build it, looked around for people who could build it, turns out there's some very skilled people out there that will make copies of 1:1 cars or near enough.

I'm not really a photo guy... but people were dragging me in a group chat for the choice of bumper as someone else saw the car before it was finished as they are also a customer of that shop. I took the photo in the above post because I was pretty confident that the lip would work wonders for it.

Here's some more in-progress and almost-done pics. It gives a good enough idea as to what the rear looks like!
 

I have also booked in a track day at the end of January. Lets all hope that is nothing but pure fun and games. If it's not pure fun and games, well, I've already got half an engine spare in the cupboard 

[soviet_merlin]

Ooo, quite aggressive! I hope there'll be a professional taking photos on the trackday that you can get. Should look great there!

[MBS206]

On 12/25/2024 at 10:21 PM, Kinkstaah said:

I have also booked in a track day at the end of January. Lets all hope that is nothing but pure fun and games. If it's not pure fun and games, well, I've already got half an engine spare in the cupboard 

Alright guys, I've got good odds the motor survives due to a majority of spare parts.

Who's taking bets on clutch, who's on transmission, and who's go diff?

Happy to also take bets on if it still overheats in traffic or not 😛

 

 

Car looks amazing by the way. I've never been a fan of R34 rears, so really, I don't think any body kit etc solves that for myself, but the front end looks amazing!

[GTSBoy]

I'll take clutch for 50 Eddie.

[Kinkstaah]

1 hour ago, MBS206 said:

Happy to also take bets on if it still overheats in traffic or not 😛

All of those are near new/brand new/done under 10,000km!

This means something! It also doesn't necessarily mean anything....

The idea is of course to fit wider tyres and rims, and to go with engine head updates, I'm sure it will be faster the subsequent time out.

But TBH the difference will largely be in driver mod between one day and the next I'm sure. To say I am unseasoned after many years away from even driving remotely fast is an understatement. Giving it half throttle and "Whoa, that's a bit excessive.." and realizing I'm doing 80kmh in a 100 zone is evidence enough lol.

I have noticed that there is heat haze/steam/air/something absolutely steaming out of the car after parking it. I didn't drive it in the 40C day for testing yesterday, but on Christmas day it was ~32 and you could literally see the air coming out from the bay after parking the car.

Whether that's enough though.. 

 

[MBS206]

1 hour ago, Kinkstaah said:

All of those are near new/brand new/done under 10,000km!

This means something! It also doesn't necessarily mean anything....

The idea is of course to fit wider tyres and rims, and to go with engine head updates, I'm sure it will be faster the subsequent time out.

But TBH the difference will largely be in driver mod between one day and the next I'm sure. To say I am unseasoned after many years away from even driving remotely fast is an understatement. Giving it half throttle and "Whoa, that's a bit excessive.." and realizing I'm doing 80kmh in a 100 zone is evidence enough lol.

I have noticed that there is heat haze/steam/air/something absolutely steaming out of the car after parking it. I didn't drive it in the 40C day for testing yesterday, but on Christmas day it was ~32 and you could literally see the air coming out from the bay after parking the car.

Whether that's enough though.. 

 

Hopefully it's enough to help with the temps!

I was also only shit stirring, regarding Murphy's Law basically.

I've found, what ever spare parts I have, are the parts I don't break. Ever.

Also have never had issues with oil/spinning bearings until I put oil pressure gauges on the car. 😛

[The Bogan]

3 hours ago, Kinkstaah said:

All of those are near new/brand new/done under 10,000km!

This means something! It also doesn't necessarily mean anything....

The idea is of course to fit wider tyres and rims, and to go with engine head updates, I'm sure it will be faster the subsequent time out.

But TBH the difference will largely be in driver mod between one day and the next I'm sure. To say I am unseasoned after many years away from even driving remotely fast is an understatement. Giving it half throttle and "Whoa, that's a bit excessive.." and realizing I'm doing 80kmh in a 100 zone is evidence enough lol.

I have noticed that there is heat haze/steam/air/something absolutely steaming out of the car after parking it. I didn't drive it in the 40C day for testing yesterday, but on Christmas day it was ~32 and you could literally see the air coming out from the bay after parking the car.

Whether that's enough though.. 

 

Tape some wool onto the vent then take it for a drive

I did this to my reverse cowl and was instantly unhappy, as anything over about 60kph would have the wool enter the engine bay, thus just adding underbonnet pressure and stooging my coolant stack, it did let alot of heat out when stationary though, which really didn't help once the car was moving, with the reverse cowl you could watch the coolant temps cheap up the faster you went on the hwy, I assume it would be alot worse doing track day speed

With the vented bonnet (just after the radiator and about 1/3 up the bonnet) on my old R33 the wool on the leading edge sat at about a 45° angle as air poured out of it

From looking where your vents are, and their size, I believe you should be fine at speed and air should be evacuated from the engine bay, I think it will be a night and day difference when stuck in traffic though for removing the trapped heat, and not sitting there cooking when parked up after driving around... #convection 

Post wool tuft pics and data for science 

This beastie is one nice and unique rig, enjoy