DZ's Other 88t "build" thread

[DeleriousZ]

Decided to separate this car from the other one's build thread, keep two separate accounts of stuff.

So I found another '88 for sale out in Duchess that had a bad clutch. So I went out and picked it up and trailered it home with help from a buddy.



Quickly started pulling it apart to repair/replace some things.



Car seems to be in decent shape aside from the standard rust issues. Pretty unavoidable with older nissan's, so I'm pretty used to it by now.

Anyway, I thought it was a great score, the car features lots of things that z31 guys get wet over, including:

Much desired factory R200 CLSD complete with finned diff cover
fs5r30a transmission, has been known to hold over 600whp at the dragstrip reliably.
full black interior, usually the red cars have the horrid red interior, but this one doesn't
Turbo front spindles and hubs, great for z32 brake conversions and everything related.

Plans for the near future for this one:

Timing belt job and fix all the little things, and the big things that are necessary to get it road worthy.
Replace completely rusted out front fenders.
Make it a fun, reliable daily that has all the creature comforts for winter including headlight washers, toasty heater and heated mirrors (in a car from the 80's, not bad!)
Minor suspension mods like polyurethane bushings to stiffen up the 25 year old bits.
Exhaust and intake, most likely just a 3" downpipe to e-cutout and mostly stock catback exhaust (sans cat)
Maxima e-fans and maxima 90amp alternator
Make use of the MBC that seems to have come with the car.
Find another TurboXS RFL bov to sit on the elbow I have that will fit on the car. Currently has an elbow with an unknown bung welded into it and capped off sketchily.
Install kick ass hks boost gauge in place of stock gauge location.
Short shifter, probably cheap ebay one. Other one has worked great in the other car
some kind of deck, has the OG stereo in there right now, crazy! too bad it's busted
Winter wheels/tires. most likely some cheap Sunny WOT-18's and Mustang saleen sc wheels in a 17x10 +20 with spacers.

That's pretty much where my current Z was before it went down and I was enjoying it quite a bit.

Future plans include:

hx40/35 hybrid in stock location, supporting mods.
toying with setting up an air to water intercooler, trying to keep things as simple as possible under the hood.
Get a/c working if it doesn't currently.
Stance coilovers (only company that makes coilovers to fit the car)
Nice summer wheels maybe. Perhaps pull the Varrstoens off the current Z when I find another pair of equips.

Been toying with the idea of a swap into the current z, and pulling that engine for this car. Will have to see how the rest of the winter plays out.

[DeleriousZ]

Been busy trying to get Duchess ready for DD duty, done the following stuff:

Steering rack and inner/outer tie rod replacement.
Removed AIV system
Removed Charcoal Canister system
Timing belt and all related parts, basically entire front of the engine replaced.

Going to toss a pod filter on her to lose some hp's, and got some new fenders on the way.

Stock, dirty and ooolddd



The reason the passenger's side of the engine is so GRIMEY.


Leaky cam seal FTL

Was having a bitch of a time getting the crank sprocket off of the crank snout. Nissan doesn't believe in threading the crank sprocket to make removal easy, so it was time to bust out the drill and tap set. Got it to come off eventually!



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Spent quite a bit of time on her on the weekend. Got all of the vacuum lines sorted out on both sides of the engine bay (well, removed everything from the driver's side and re-ran the heater stuff). The vacuum stuff on the passenger's side was completely rock solid so that had to be replaced. Hopefully the heater should work now, don't really want to open up the dash to fix all that.

I grabbed some fans out of a '97 maxima, it took some cutting of the sides to fit in there, but overall they fit and should work great. Need to get them wired in with some relays and a controller.





I also hung the new fenders, they're in much better shape than the old ones, but they're not the right colour unfortunately. Just going to have live with it until I can get some paint on the rest of the front of the car.



In the process of fabbing up a new bracket for the coil and PRW-2 ignitor, should look pretty clean hopefully!

Figured out a pretty silly solution for my BOV problem, going to be quite hilarious if it works out.

[DeleriousZ]

Spent more time in the garage last night, got some more stuff done.

Did up a new bracket to mount the coil and prw-2 igniter, I pulled a bracket off of a Nissan Stanza that uses the same coil and modified it to fit. I was able to retain rubber bushings between the coil and the bracket to dampen vibrations. The igniter is bolted directly to the bracket so it should heatsink pretty nicely.



The PRW-2 has some pretty small holes for bolting it down, and finding m5 bolts that are long enough seems to be a tall order. I used a couple of the old wire style hose clamp bolts and they fit pretty well.

Next I pulled off the metal S pipe to check out the turbo. Good news is that there's very little shaft play and the compressor wheel looks great from what I can see, so there should be lots of life left in the turbo.

I then got rid of the weird bleed style boost controller that was in there, and capped off the port on the compressor housing. I then ran a vacuum line from the wastegate to my old MBC, then from the mbc to the port below the brake booster vacuum line to read manifold signal rather than compressor signal.

Going to head to the junkyard tonight to see if I can nab a temp sensor off an older bmw, they're dual temp for 90/98*c which should work great for high/low speed fan switching. Might see if I can hunt down some high current relays while I'm there if there's time.

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Got a bit more done tonight, loving all this garage time, makes things feel like they're moving along pretty well! I got the intake set up and held down. I'm not sure if I like the fact that it's sitting right behind the radiator fans, so I might have to do something to shield it off. That's the one drawback of going electric fans I guess!





The bottom part uses the stock piece from the original airbox, and the top piece is just a bit of aluminum flatbar I found in the back of the car lol.

And I'm also going to need to find a set of new spark plug wires for it, the ones on the car right now are OG.



If you wish to avoid the blabber and just see sweet pictures, you can follow me on ernstagerm under the same username I use on the rest of the internet.

[DeleriousZ]

Got another couple hours into her tonight, not a whole lot of progress, did the other bank of sparkies, been doing them on and off between other things.

Found out that one bank (passenger's side) was running a BCPR5E plug, and the driver's side was running the standard 6E's. Both sides looked pretty torched, but it was a little worrysome to see. The gap on both sides was pretty huge, I'm amazed at how smoothly the car ran as it was.

Finished buttoning up the intake stuff, got the bov situation sorted as well.

Trying to decide if I want to just suck it up and keep driving the honda until early april, and wait to get the coilovers on before it sees the road, or to sell the honda now and start driving this thing and hope we don't get another deep snow. Kind of really really itching to get back behind the wheel of a Z again. it's been over 7 years since I put any real mileage on a Z.

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Changed out front wheel bearings, seemed to be in decent shape as is, but they were cheap, so cheap insurance sounds good to me.

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Skyline parts update!



Working horn and all, woot!

[DeleriousZ]

She runs!! again.

Had some trouble on first start up. Would run for about 5 seconds then die, with a super heavy fuel smell from the exhaust. Wasn't sure what it was, but after some poking around it turned out to be my silly blowoff valve setup leaking heavily causing it to read lean, then dump fuel to compensate, and then die from too much fuel lol.

Runs nice and smooooth now too, even with the Delrin mounts it doesn't vibrate much at all.

Exhaust is just straight awful. Catted, stock muffler with a few holes in it. Might have to see if I can find some 3" stainless to hack together.

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Installed HKS 60mm PHW boost gauge in place of the stock gauge. Fits pretty well, not quite as well as the other 2 5/8" autometers I have in the other Z tho.



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Picked up some spare spindles to chop up off of an 87 n/a.

Finished wiring in and hooking up boost gauge, seems to work well!

Robbed the BOV off of the purple Z, the other valves I had sitting around weren't going to work for me easily, so RFL bov it is for now.

[DeleriousZ]

So the area where my battery tie down had completely rusted out and ripped off, and I needed to do something to fix it..



Ugly to say the least, but effective, I don't think it's going anywhere now. Welding on 25 year old half rusted away sheet metal is awful by the way.

And I think that's prettymuch up to date. Got all the body pieces back on it and she's ready for the road.... as soon as the snow goes away

[DeleriousZ]

IT'S ALIIIIIIIIIVE.

Drove it around the back alley/block tonight. Feels weird being in a stock height car, even getting into it felt wrong. Seemed to do ok from what I could tell, really need to get it on the road and get some miles on it to see. Going to do the trans/diff fluids tho.

Thinking about cutting apart the old fenders and taking in a sample to get it colour matched for the years of fade, and spraybombing the white fenders, hood and headlight covers to get rid of most of the paint flaws.

Does anyone know where I can go to get spraybomb cans custom made? I know there are paint shops that match paint to samples, but I haven't heard of any here in Calgary.

[eglove]

There's a paint place a couple blocks south from Garagebox. Forget what they are called though. I got paint cans to match the premium white pearl off my tsx and it was perfect.

[B16EJ8]

Advanced Auto Color is the place to go for matching. Talk to Kareem

[SlickA70]

Love it bro, cant wait to see the finished product lol!

[DeleriousZ]

Thanks guys!

Do you know if they put the paint in aerosol cans for you, or just straight cans? I've got a compressor but no gun, and not really any desire to get a gun setup just yet... (or ever)

[5fivespeed]

Aerosol Cans.

Ray

[DeleriousZ]

Awesome, thanks for the info!

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Disassembled the door today to get the key out of the lock cylinder. Couldn't get at it from the outside, so apart came everything, which was a gargantuan pain in the ass for what a simple fix it should have been.

[DeleriousZ]

Wow whoops, so I was totally updating the wrong thread again... dammit lol. Carrying everything over from the other Z's build thread.





Front spindles cut and ready for sand blasting. After that it's welding time.

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Blasted and ready to go!

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Got the spindles mostly welded... this is what it looked like after the cap pass. My caps are always messy, the root pass looked beautiful lol.



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White fenders are now red again! Getting close to driving it!