My mate and I embarked on this project after he picked up an original condition 98k km deceased estate VH SLX and asked me what driveline we should fit to it. He was talking 2JZ but I had recently bought a VH45DE Nissan V8 and auto for a few hundred bucks from an importer that was shutting up shop so we set about shoehorning that in instead. Not an easy task as it is a ridiculously large engine.
The engine fit in ok but there was no room for extractors so log manifolds leading to a single turbo was agreed on. We had to lose the aircon and power steering as well due to lack of space. The starter required some custom work to make one that would clear the manual steering rack. The owner, Face, made one out of several with the main parts being an N14 pulsar snout and solenoid with the VH45 motor mated to it. This was needed to move the solenoid up against the block to clear the rack.
Once the engine was in and mounted on std holden rubbers we moved on to the header fab. We braced the turbo in place and made some simple logs(that was all the can fit) and a crossover pipe from the passenger side.
Next up was an inlet manifold. The std unit is a bizarre looking thing that would have been poking through the bonnet so I chopped the bottom plates off it and made a dodgy plenum. Huge amount of work and not very happy with it but will do the job just the same.
Should go ok. This is the second half of my post, I split it because of all the pics but forget about the moderation.
The exhaust is an off the shelf 3" catback with a custom dump pipe running past the strut in the inner guard.
A year or so has passed by now and we are up to the ecu side of things. I got an E1280S adaptronic a while back for a really good price through the local dealer(they were first release test versions).
A couple of weeks ago I wired the E1280 to the VH45 and immediately ran into problems with the ecu shutting down randomly and generally not behaving itself. Of course the engine also wouldn't start. It's probably just a minor fault with the ecu but instead of sending it back I chose to have an epic rant and replace it with another ecu. This was after a weekend and week of nights struggling to get sense from it.
Orignal plan was to use an LS1 PCM, which I would still like to do, but a drunken fagbook conversation with a mate landed me his M600 for cheap. Cool, so I chopped the loom at the edge of the engine and terminated the loom with two deutsch connectors, at the same time pairing the injector and ignitor outputs.
Went to configure the M600 only to find that Motec won't allow an M600 to run an 8 cylinder. By this time I am stabbing my eyes out with sharpened ecu's of various make.
Rang Motec and told the tech guy of my quandry. He said let me have a think about it so I sent him some details of the engine, triggering etc.
He came back to me the next day and said you can run a V8 with an M400/600 but it has to be run as a 4 cylinder 2 stroke to get the correct amount of firing events. Cool.
The catch is you can't use a cam mounted trigger for this mode, it needs a crank mounted engine position sensor.
Oh well, we've come this far on the SS Failboat, may as well keep going.
I rang Face and got him to check out a late falcon harmonic balancer, he had one in stock at his parts shop. An AU balancer has a 36-1 reluctor wheel pressed into the balancer. Off he went to his mate at the wreckers and returned with a pair of 36-1 reluctors.
Meanwhile I had pulled the balancer off and machined the third row of pulleys off to give a flat face to mount the reluctor.
The reluctor was almost exactly the right size to press into the nissan balancer but would have been too close to the pulley face, which had voids cut into it which would have interfered with the signal, so I turned one of the reluctors down in the lathe to make a spacer for the second reluctor.
Still need to make a proper solid mount for the sensor and I also would like to use a hall geartooth sensor to avoid all the interference **** that goes with reluctors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4ZPQHM10fg
So it goes now and we are back in the swing of it. Is getting a VN/VL hybrid LSD diff, gearbox controller and built RE403A auto fitted then some tuning and sorting.
Nice conversion, something a bit different too. While some poeple may say you wrecked a low k original car I personally like seeing people start projects with something decent
Did some tuning on this the last couple of nights after work.
Ended up with 392hp atw at 5200rpm on 14psi boost.
Haven't driven it on road yet but it should be pretty slippery given the power curve.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x3bDJipZE0
Very impressive, I personally think the plenum looks sweet, nice writeup too lol, engine conversions do make people angry sometimes
Some original photos have not been recovered yet.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NZ EVLHSV
[View Post]
Nice conversion, something a bit different too. While some poeple may say you wrecked a low k original car I personally like seeing people start projects with something decent
So true. If you start with ****, you generally end up with ****.
Stuck this back on the dyno this week to see how it would go in the colder weather(last run was 32degree day). Did 421hp atw. Reeled off numbers repeatedly without a hint of ping or misfire.
---------- Post added 23-07-11 at 16:19 ----------
Also been having a bit of trouble with air ingress/locks in the cooling system because the top hose outlet is a lot higher than the radiator and also had a blank cap on it that was possibly leaking air in on cooldown. He plated the cap off as it was redundant anyway but there was still a lot of air trapped in the heater.
We figured we better rectify it before it caused a failure so we got a just jap bleeder tank(the thing they use on RB26's) for it.
I welded two more bleed fittings to it and changed the lower outlet to 5/8.
The lower outlet goes to a fitting in the bottom hose hard pipe. The std radiator cap is gutted and the overflow goes to the tank.
The top hose outlet has a fitted tapped into it that also goes to the tank.
There was a joiner/reducer out of the turbo that goes to the heater which was also quite high so we drilled and tapped the centre of it and added another 8mm fitting that bleed to the tank.
The fourth bleed is from the valley from an existing fitting that used to heat the std throttle body.
We gave the cooling system a good flush out and bled it and it seems to have done the job.
