joshuaho96

My grand plan is to start by blindly replicating the stock ECU map, then going from there. Hopefully it dramatically reduces the amount of dyno time required.

I'd prefer to have the accusump not try to empty itself at lower RPMs just because oil pressure at low RPM is lower. So I'd want to take measurements on the dyno/in neutral of oil pressure vs RPM, then set up the valve to trigger open if oil pressure drops some percentage below expected. I also want to be able to trigger the system from the driver's seat during engine start. Also in specific cases like if I slip the clutch and drop the engine near stall like 400 RPM it would be nice to have the accusump kick in to make up for the oil pump not making that much pressure. I know, but this is me we're talking about. Everything has to have strange constraints and be far more complicated/overthought than it needs to be. I don't want it in the trunk because running lines + having a giant container of oil hanging out back there is inconvenient/not really streetable.

I suspect this is where I'll end up, I'm just not a huge fan of accusump considering you need to use a standalone to make the most of it and it really doesn't last long. It's also yet another thing to fit into a tight engine bay but at least it can be laid horizontally.

Surprisingly they restarted production on those things seemingly and Nissan USA will sell you one for ~240 USD MSRP. Most online sellers will give you a discount over that too. P/N is 21305-21U2A. When I refurbed the oil filter housing it was far more expensive to get new so I sent it off to a government-certified facility for aircraft oil cooler refurb. I figure if it's good enough for the notoriously conservative FAA it should be fine for my car. I might pick one up just to have spares if mine ever starts intermixing fluids.

"Head drain" as discussed is really more a crankcase breather. So instead of dealing with the restriction of piping crankcase gas into your head and trying to get that out into the catch can you're better off going directly from the oil pan (or block? not sure how you'd do that) to the catch can. You want the breather to be high up above the oil level to try and as much air and as little oil as possible. Blocking the PCV means no crankcase vacuum can accumulate at part throttle. Not sure that makes sense in a street car. Someone local to me blocked his PCV valve and vented to atmosphere and hated the result. Oil mist venting into the engine bay + crankcase gases from this engine are pretty bad. If you ever open the HVAC to fresh air intake for any reason you're going to smell it. I've seen crankcase breathers added to the oil pan like so: Whether there's a better place for it on an RB26 I really couldn't say. I have never been able to really look carefully at a block and how it interfaces with everything else to give a better suggestion. Personally I don't want an external tank to package somewhere in the engine bay. That and yet another pump belt hanging off the nose of the crank is just too many headaches IMO. And for a street car a huge oil tank hanging out in the trunk is also no-go. What I'm proposing is what Porsche calls "integrated dry sump". I wouldn't call it that but it's not far off. It can work for maybe 200TW endurance tires on the track but no further than that. I wouldn't object to paying dry sump levels of money for a solution that isn't necessarily as capable but is better suited for low maintenance street use.

AFAIK even modern I6/60 degree V6s still have scavenge pumps running off the oil pump. VR38 has a scavenge section built into the pump, S55/S58 have scavenge pumps as well. Mostly running off things that are pretty well guaranteed to not have air bubbles in the oil return line though I think like the turbo oil drains. The BMW solution sits inside the sump somehow, it would be cool if someone actually capable of machining/mechanical engineering could figure out something similar. I'm guessing that it's easier for a pump to force oil back to sump than to try and forcibly pump mostly air with oil mist up and out of the engine. Apparently in the BMW scavenge pump is primarily used to pull the oil out of the corners of the oil pan and push it into the pickup. It could be overkill though, BMW rated that engine for 1.4g under braking and up to 1.2g lateral g continuous. I don't know if 1.4g is really all that necessary but a modern 200TW endurance track tire is right around 1.2g. It also only has like 6.5 quarts oil capacity so really not a lot of oil compared to some of the extended sump designs I've seen for RBs.

I wish someone could figure out how to get a scavenge pump to package into the engine to somehow like this: https://lnengineering.com/products/parts-and-upgrades-for-porsche-boxster-cayman-and-911-engines/m96-engine/ln-brs-m96-m97-tandem-oil-scavenge-pump-bank-1.html I was thinking more something that sits inside the sump forcibly pulling oil on the factory return passages, that and a big crankcase vent on the intake side of the engine is probably the solution.

This is the most plausible one to me, too much pressure/heat differential/heat cycling and it pops. Now that Nissan restarted production of the cooler I'm tempted to buy a spare in case mine ever fails internally.

Yep, hence why you want both the oil/coolant heat exchanger and dedicated fluid to air heat exchangers for both coolant and oil. Coolant heats up faster than oil so during cold start you want to send that heat into the oil. Once you're at operating temp engine oil temps tend to get out of hand due to all the bearings, windage, and engines like the RB26 cool the pistons with oil so now the coolant is the one absorbing heat. Even with a dedicated air to oil cooler the coolant radiator dominates the front area of the engine and you really want all the dissipation capacity you can get. For a really serious track car probably both driver and passenger side under the headlights you want the biggest core that will fit and appropriate ducting to suit. You can shove more into the car but those are the lowest compromise options.

You really don't need to drop operating temps below the 80C that an RB already operates at normally. Thermostats don't change the cooling capacity of the radiator/fan/pump, they just change when that system is used. Worst case for a thermostat that determines what the crack temp should be is if you floor it with the thermostat closed how rapidly it responds and opens up before the engine overheats. In modern cars the ECU uses a heater on the thermostat wax so the moment you floor it despite the engine running at 95C before they can almost instantly pop open the thermostat and drop temperatures down to 80C with almost no overshoot past 100C. Most RBs are already running relatively cold for a "modern" engine so there's no need for such fancy tricks or really any effort to drop coolant temps. Sandwich plates don't relocate the oil filter, so it's slightly different. The relocation block is functionally equivalent for oil coolers, it just allows you to move the oil filter somewhere less annoying than the factory location.

Look for this round thing stuck to your oil filter housing with two coolant hoses coming off of it. Basically every modern remotely high performance engine uses one to help regulate oil temps

Yes, but they're highly respected members of the Facebook GTR community. Every self-respecting member knows that the only way to build these cars is to delete the factory oil warmer for a Taarks block. My opinion is that any oil cooler you attach should have an 80C thermostat on it. The stock ECU tune really, really wants to see 80C water temps. Oil can safely be higher temps than coolant too.

I was told that the oil heat exchanger causes the oil to overheat by some experienced American owners, surely they couldn't be wrong???

I have zero issues with pad noise running MX72 Plus but YMMV. I'm using the stock Brembos so not 100% identical to your Sumitomo setup.

When I let RTV set before doing full torque on my front diff cover it dripped enough to leave drops on the garage floor. That was with finger tight torque to set before tightening to spec. If you torque it too hard you will basically be doing what I did but hopefully less so. Are you doing this in the car? Only reason I can imagine why you are worried about removing the oil pan is that getting it off means dropping the front subframe and somehow supporting 500 pounds of engine without it smashing into your head. One way that looks promising is to very, very carefully use a small drill bit to only drill the rubber. Do not put a lot of pressure into the drill, let the bit do the work for you. Then put a small screw into it that does not contact any critical surface and use that to help you pull it out like this: I recommend using a center punch as well before you drill. If you miss and have it offset don't try and drill anyways, try again and get a clean starting point for the drill bit. You can use a slide hammer on the screw once it's in or a pry tool if you can get the angles right. Do your best to clean out the swarf from the engine once you have it off.

I honestly don't understand what's going on in the RB26. It 100% has a physical TPS idle switch. Seemingly in the R33 at least it does not pay attention to it. I didn't experiment too much but it seemed like it was purely based on a learned voltage. Maybe I'll revisit it but as far as I could tell getting the idle TPS voltage to be about 0.45V was more important than whatever the idle switch trigger point ended up being.

The RB26 ECU in particular had some weird behavior, if the TPS switch was set to 0.2V when the ECU first gets power after discharging capacitors then it would decide the idle switch was off at 0.5V even though that was the factory spec. Seemingly the actual idle switch in the TPS is vestigial? Or it somehow can be reset, I never really got to the bottom of what was going on there. Regardless it was interesting to see how the scan tool also had a function to relearn the TPS idle position.

Even a Consult 1 Nissan has a relative compression test function, it's just super jank and you have to do all your own math. You can cut the fuel injection to each cylinder, average the resulting idle RPM in the logs. If one cylinder has relatively low drop when shut down you know something is wrong with it. If there's no misfire or funny business like that then the only conclusion I can think of is low compression. Launch X431 is great stuff btw, probably the only scan tool I've seen other than maybe the real deal Consult that will let you reset throttle position idle switch on the RB26 instead of guessing blindly at how to do it like I did in the past. It is incredibly slow though compared to NDS1 which is disappointing and the logging functions are nowhere near as powerful I think.

Loosening bolts will not break the seal on the RTV unless you smacked it with a lot of force while loose. If you actually go to try and pull it off you will discover it takes quite a lot of effort to break it loose. Start at 6.3 N-m and work up towards 7.3. Watch the RTV carefully to make sure you don't compress it past the original set as too far and you can break the bond loose and squeeze out the aforementioned ribbons. You want to stop before that happens. It will still seal but not as well, it can start seeping oil as oil works its way through the crevices. I would not try to seal new RTV to old RTV. I'm pretty sure it won't work. You don't need to go crazy with the fastener preload, RTV applied correctly is crazy strong and as long as the fasteners don't just back out it will be fine.

If you haven't broken the seal on the RTV then as long as you retorque it close to the original bolt tension it will be ok. If you tighten further it will squeeze the dry RTV out in a ribbon that will probably not seal as well.

If he put DOT5 in those brakes you can flush it by using methylated spirits/denatured alcohol. Fill the master cylinder reservoir, use a cap that holds pressure to pump 15 psi through the system, open up a bleeder and push all the fluid through until you're 100% sure you have nothing but alcohol coming through the lines. Repeat for all bleeders in the system. Then run the ABS pump using a scan tool to make sure there's no brake fluid stuck in the ABS actuators either. Then repeat using DOT3/4/5.1 until you get say 200 mL of clean brake fluid out of each bleeder. The process is going to take forever but should be ok. I recommend using a pressure bleeder because like I said it takes forever and you the owner is probably the only person with the patience to deal with this ordeal. I would be concerned about seal compatibility in the system but what's done is done. Flush it and see if anything fails.

I recommend always quoting whoever you want to ask that question to, I didn't even see this post. My car currently has HKS GTIII-SS turbos on it. I went with those as the smallest possible step up from the stock turbos in size. It's somewhere between a Garrett GT2554R and GT2560R in size.

Pretty sure you're missing some hardware: Glazed pads should almost look like glass. Your picture isn't good enough to tell what's going on there. If there's a good amount of surface roughness and it's not shiny you should be fine. Inspect the caliper after cleaning it up and see if everything is behaving as intended, if you have doubts you can rebuild the calipers: https://www.z1motorsports.com/hardware/centric/nissan-300zx-z32-brake-caliper-rebuild-kits-p-3366.html

The G-sensor is just a replacement for the old factory sensor. MEMS reacts faster and probably more accurately than the old sensor design. To my knowledge all it can do on top of that is fake the sensor response to make the ATTESA system think there is more or less friction coefficient on the road at any given moment to reduce or increase the AWD. People in my area have reported decent improvements to driveability in autocross so it's probably not a waste of money.

The AWD strut towers are apparently shorter. Kind of a shame their only reference available was the AWD part as supposedly the RWD version is easy to convert to AWD by trimming to fit.