Most if not all of these pics are phone pictures. A lot of them got destroyed when I went to get pick up some rims and forgot my phone on top of my car at the gas station and came back to find it in pieces. Good times.
Anyway, I bought the car from Tekudrifter on this tristatetuners.com April of '09 as a birthday present to myself. So it's been just under a year and I find myself on my 5th turbo, 3rd turbo setup, 3rd clutch (soon to be 4th), and second front end. This is actually my first build of any kind so its been a blast, and definitely been a learning experience.
When I first bought the car
This pic was in the for sale thread, but there was actually a huge hole in the front bumper the size of a license plate
It also came with SE's, not the steelies shown here
This is where I had a bunch of pictures of my first t25 install, but they were on my phone which got destroyed. So a couple of months later t25 was installed and the car was now like this
These are the rims that I was buying when my phone got owned.
Steering wheel got grease on it and had a tear in it, so I just tore the rest of it off
At this point I was still on my stock clutch, and it couldnt handle the t25, so I looked into the white bunny setup and decided to try it.
Old dirty setup 225mm vs new shiny 240mm d21 flywheel & 300zx setup
Then my first t25 blew bc I over oiled it I think, so I got another and swapped it out
In this picture you can see the hole that I was talking about in the bumper
Boost leak tester I made
Sometime after that I was working on my car, yada yada yada, I was cranking it without a spark plug in (completely forgot), it spit gas out which caught fire and burned up some wires and belts, but I put it out with the garden hose, and I just replaced the belts, fixed the wiring and no problem. The worst damage was because I had my bov facing up, when I put the fire out with the garden hose, I forgot that water would get stuck in there and that bov siezed up and sucked balls afterwards. I ended up getting an ebay pull type bov which leaked horribly.
Soon after that I got some new side skirts
and then a bigger intercooler
Then the t25 blew again, so I purchased one off of zilvia for pretty cheap, but UPS lost it or something, so he sent me some sparco pedals instead
I ended up getting one locally and swapping them out, then I decided that I wanted to fix the hole in the bumper so I picked up a bumper from J.E.T. here on tristate who was kind enough to give it to me for free. Thanks again!
It wasnt the cleanest bumper, but I just needed a bumper to throw on the car so that I could drive it. I cut up the front for the intercooler and zip tied one side on which had no bolt holes.
Then I went top mount with what I believe was the same holset biggamehit first used, except I was using an ebay top mount t3/t4 manifold and I had major clearance issues with the bmc
I tried wrapping the exhaust housing with some heat blanket, but it was touching the bmc to a point where I had to jack up the driver side and put a hockey puck there just to fit it (and it would still touch the bmc). Needless to say, brake fade was a serious problem after any boost
I thought switching from the 18cm housing to a 12cm would net the distance away from the bmc I needed
...but it didnt. It still needed the hockey puck there and was still touching a bit. This is when I roasted my second clutch. It was right before the first snow, and I did a couple of pulls that apparently the clutch couldnt handle and that was the end of that clutch. I ordered another one, and when I found the time, I pulled the tranny, only to find out that I ordered the wrong year 300zx clutch and it wouldnt mate up with the flywheel. I exchanged the clutch but had to wait like 3 weeks for it to come in the mail, so the car was down for that entire time and I didnt touch it. I ended up finally get the carbon metallic clutch which is a full faced clutch and is supposed to hold about 400 ft/lbs of torque so I figured that would be enough for me.
So I basically realized that I needed to get a 9cm housing in order to clear the bmc. I found an he351ve on eBay that was selling cheap. I thought this was the same as the he351 or the hy35, so i picked it up, and realized that the 've' there was pretty important. This thing was huge.
I seriously contemplated changing my entire setup to run this turbo, but in the end, I decided to just sell it. Which turned out to be a good idea, because I soon found an hy35, which is what I originally wanted.
I tried installing the hy35 on the top mount t3/t4 and still had clearance issues. At this point I was seriously fed up and was going to just get a log manifold. I found one on zilvia the next day for like $300 and paid the guy the day after that. Little did I know, he'd actually sold it soon after talking to me to some guy on ka-t.org who sent payment that night. F*^% me, right? So he refunded my money and told me that he could make me another one for an extra hundred or so. I decided that I'd just try to make my own. I was going to use the stock manifold and chop it up but then I decided that I would just take the bottom mount t2 manifold that I was using for my t25, and flip it. The bolt pattern is the same so I did that, braced and reinforced it, swapped out the t2 for a t3 flange and voila, I had a manifold to run my new hy35.
and got her running (temporarily), just to see that turbo spin
I found a pretty good deal on some xxr 962 with brand new tires 17x9 with 255s in the back and 17x8 with 215s in the front
This is the difference between the new 255s for traction and my old bald 215s from my first car (rx7 fc) for drifting
Sold the old ones, and threw the new ones on
Then I bought some s15 headlights and Kevins old s15 front end. Did the mandatory mock up in my living room with my coffee table and some entanmanns boxes holding it up
...was still waiting for s14 hood hinges and rps13 headlight brackets to install.
Meanwhile, I traded my type x front bumper that I never got around to fixing for some power doors and a boost gauge.
Did the install of those a couple days after I got them because I was really tired of manual doors.
I took the side skirts off during this install, and havent had a chance to put them back on yet. The wiring for the windows were ridiculously easy, but I still havent wired up the power assisted locks. I havent really played around with it yet, but if anyone knows how to do the locks, feel free to save me the headache of figuring it out.
Then I got the hood hinges and headlight brackets in the mail, so started on the s15 front end install.
Bye-bye old front end...
...hello S15 front end
I really like these next two pictures for some reason
Thats how the car sits right now.. I still need to do the hood pin install and do a final adjustment of the headlights. All the lights are wired up except for the high beams which seem to be giving me problems. I need to find out whats wrong with them eventually. The high beams on my old headlights were broken, I always thought it was the lights, and never realized it might be the wiring.
So right after that I got the car inspected and took it for a spin only to realize that something mustve gone wrong with the install because the clutch slips as soon as I hit full boost (10 lbs). I'm assuming I either got oil or something on the flywheel while I was waiting so long for this clutch, or its not mating properly because I didnt get the flywheel turned. Either way, I'm going to need to pull the tranny again. I'm considering getting a 6 puck at this point, and giving up on full faced clutches even though I really want it to be as streetable as possible.
I think I'm going to leave this clutch for the time being because I miss driving my car, and I figured I'll work out all the little kinks in the car, and then change the clutch, break it in and get it tuned. Right now I'm running 9 lbs on purple top 370s and an N60 with a chipped ECU tuned for that. I'm eventually going to upgrade injectors and run an N62 and hopefully make about 350, but that obviously isnt going to happen on this clutch, so all in due time.
. I snapped some pictures of the flywheels and clutches I've got stock piled so that you can see the difference in size between stock, white bunny, and white bunny 2.0
