Kinkstaah

I was really hoping GTSBoy would find this thread, because all I can confirm 100% (with no taking anything apart, bolt/unbolting centres) is that it'll go into a 34.....TURBO ?

Fit, physically? Yes ABS though? Your guess is as good as mine. The R34 has 2 ABS sensors one on each stub axle, the R33 has one (or none). Can you just... put the sensor into one of the ports on the stub axles? Maybe? Yes? No? Maybe the cable won't reach/needs to be extended? You'd be a guinea pig in that aspect. Could you pull the center and driveshafts out of my diff, put them into a R33 ABS R200 housing? Uh, maybe? Again not sure. Depends on your confidence and how much you care about ABS as far as I know...

I'm not being egotistical at all, I (and others here) are actually trying to help, but some do find amusement in ideas that never come to fruition, and your post (not in Australia, no work done, trying to get info instead of doing it, mention of low budget) are all indicators of something seen many times before. All you're saying is you want information as to clearances, things to look out for, information people who have done swaps wish they had known before, etc. What you're actually getting is that information. The information is: This is an ill thought out, poor decision that will end in expensive tears and probably won't be worth it. Nothing will fit, and it require extreme skill to pull off, extreme skill to the point where if you had that skill, you would not be asking these types of questions. You came here wanting information, you've got it - you just don't like it. That doesn't necessarily make the information given incorrect. Even if you did make it, and had a 850whp clean example, it is clearly undrivable, the chassis won't put that much power down. Could you make a really torquey 300-350kw making like 7 psi? Sure. Is the amount of work worth it for the level of power that a R32 RWD chassis can realistically support? NO. That car looks like it cost 100K to build..... the current owner talks about how he, the fab shop, bought the car off the customer who couldn't afford to finish it... to which I and probably quite a few people watching that part of the video would have gone 'lolz, typical' because it is typical. Last track day I went to had two BF or FG's handing everyone's asses to them as they blasted around with sequential gearboxes and big power, the big heavy falcons and mustangs and commodores don't actually handle as bad as people may lead you to believe if you put effort in to that side of thing, which is much easier. I have a LS in my skyline. If it exploded and the money fell back into my pocket I would likely use that cash to buy a Mustang.

It also kinda... doesn't matter? It is what it is, its more of a curiosity if anything. The reason the flak gets thrown is quite often you see grand ideas never eventuate and people grow tired of threads that don't go anywhere, written by people who were never going to actually do the thing they claimed they were going to do. Oft referred to as 'school holidays' type of things. The videos of the Barra R32 are worth watching if only for the very end where they show some in-car footage, and the experience of attempting to drive it around looks... hmmmm... shit. If you are going to spend 100,000+ on a car, which that R32 likely owes someone.... I mean buy something else. It'd at least be drivable ?

It's a Nismo center. It came with the Nismo box and Nismo paperwork... but all in Japanese!

Also in regards to this, you can't believe what the net says about weighing cars, or what Ford say, or Nissan say, or GM say. Safe to say my converted car did not weigh what I expected it to weigh either. I am not regretting my LS swap from a 2.8L forged RB. Even though it's worse on performance, cost a ton, etc. Gotta remember you can't go back, no one goes back for that reason. Sunk cost fallacy is a thing. I'm not saying don't do it. It's been done. Just be realistic about it. The words "budget" and "Cheap" and "Engine Conversion" could not be further apart. Ever. How many RB30's are there compared to 2J, 1J, LS, Barra Skylines combined? Why do you think people chose to do that? Etc. There are reasons. Weigh them up, decide what you really want to do, get a budget, commit. Then realise you need to triple that budget.

As someone who has done an engine conversion in a skyline, I assure you a Barra is exponentially more expensive than a RB30. Even if you get the Barra for free. An engine conversion is always the most expensive, hardest option. This is why they are rare. Especially in cars with good solid engines from the factory.

Yep. The engine is only a very very small part of the cost. You would be far better off with a RB30, or a stroked RB30, or if really really serious just start with a billet RB30. Only having 2 tyres to deliver power is going to be a problem with any of the engines, all will easily do way more than the job required.

Sorry Ben At this point I had to settle down for what I assumed it was gonna be a fkin long wait, because while "Wiring" and 'An Exhaust' are two small categories it wasn't exactly two simple small jobs. However the people doing it had done it before, and it was interesting to see how certain things were approached differently/similarily. Luckily thank f**k the general response was "Oh so we actually only need to do wiring and an exhaust... you know how people are..." This got me a considerable discount, so there you go people... be nice! It was 2 months between me towing the car there, and the first start which in the grand scheme of things, actually pretty excellent. Driver side and Passenger side headers. Rest of the exhaust connecting to my original mid muffler. We later added 2 more cats to this, so as it currently sits on my car.. it has 4 cat converters. Two are 100 cell, two are 400 cell. Back to back tests show... 0 kw difference. They also show 0 AFR difference, because they were/are all removable by vbands with some straight pipe. The system is twin 3inch exhausts that merge just before the diff into the 3.5. I can only assume thats why putting cats before this merge has no real restriction that I would care about... Passenger side ---^ ^--- Driver side. There's a slight notch (not visible here) to give clearance to the steering rack. There was plenty of clearance everywhere and I don't know why I was even worried to begin with. I don't know what (if any) difference having asymmetrical headers even does, but it was a too f**king bad this is the only way it's going to work kind of situation! The wiring side I have no photos of, because it was a case of buying a new (i.e not 20 years old) aftermarket standalone loom and having the guys there wire this in/run this in, which wasn't apparently too difficult at all - all of the Skyline gauges are still in place because they did the very smart thing of simply putting the sensors (dash temp gauge, oil pressure etc) into the LS directly. The only things to get wired in was the Speedo using the Jaycar converter box. Post: Conversion note, this is shit. I later changed this to a Dakota Digital converter box (https://www.dakotadigital.com/) which works WAY, WAY, WAY better, as the Jaycar one is laggy, and it works, but only over 40kmh, requires dip switches to configure, vs Bluetooth on a phone.... This is a bit of a problem when you're talking to a VASS Engineer. We also had fun stuff with my Racelogic traction control system, which was wired into the 8 injectors, only for me to eventually figure out I had bought the 6cyl version.. (why would I have ever needed the 8cyl version, said past Gerg), so any time I was turning this system on the thing would just permamently ground 2 injectors causing some MEGA, MEGA rich misfiring and general drive like shit-ness. Later doing some digging we bypassed 2 of the cylinders entirely, (i.e wire it into only 6) and the system now works great.. so.. SO much better than it did with the RB and Turbo. even if it can only cut fuel to 6, it .. never really needs that kind of intervention and driving around on 2cyl is impossible anyway... so 6/8 is great! Once this was all wired in, I attended with what was (hopefully?) a reasonable base tune with the HPTuners MVPI, a working wideband to remove VATS from the ECU and many, many, many, many f**kin hopes and prayers.. ... and the whole thing started up on the 2nd crank with a battery that was 12 months old. ... exactly one year to the day the engine got pulled ... nothing leaked, nothing smelled, everything behaved car was f**king LOUD though, comically loud. Like "lol you cant drive this 5 meters down the street" LOUD. So some laps of the industrial park had to do. Turns out a turbo is a really, really, really effective muffler. Next step: Varex!

The thing about cams is there's really very little "just better everywhere" cam. Consult SME's at Ls1tech.com or give VCM a call and tell them (honestly) what you plan on doing with the car in entirety and they will be able to sell you a kit

That dyno graph will not be for a 5.7, fyi!

Nistune works perfectly fine for the Neo 6 turbo. It does NOT work for the neo 6 NON turbo ecu. You can literally choose any other ECU if you have a manual car though (I,e link, haltech, etc) but Nistune also works.

Depends on how much work you want to do. The NB is basically a better NA. The NB Turbos are a hidden gem but getting pricey now. The NC's are the fastest base, but you'd need a fair amount of work, or FI or a 2.5L swap to really put them ahead of a NB with a turbo (or factory turbo). For max simplicity though, 86 is (again) the answer. If you want something different buy my Renault considering you can tow it ?. Unfortunately I cannot say buy my gf's turbo MX5 as i will be swiftly murdered.

Jetski is the obvious choice

The thing about this is … hows it drive? If it's anything other than "great!" all this does is point a finger at whatever is not great. To fix anything all is the same 'fix', i.e tearing engine apart and rebuilding. If engine is great, drive until engine not great. Damage to engine doesn't really result in overall low compression like that. Damage to engine realistically is detonation, which results in holes pistons and the car generally running great until said holes exist, in which engine suddenly drive not great. I guess you could have had excessive fuel washing down the bores for a huge amount of time causing uniform rings not sealing or something, in which case engine not great. Drive car, rebuild if engine not great. Maybe take it easy and save $ until you can confirm engine actually still great. It'll break shortly after you decide this anyway. This is the Skyline Experience.

So at this point it was really starting to get close, but as the engine bay started to fill up there were other considerations to be made, and things like the lower radiator hose were in awkward positions (relative to where they needed to go in the LS). This now bolts to the car, effectively making sure the coolant hose can't move/rub/touch on anything and wear through and really, really, really ruin future-me's day. As far as we could tell.. there was no reason there was a huge cutout on that side of the gearbox. Now there's no hole there and that is about as pretty as it needed to be. Finally an actual use for that putty weld stuff. Needed a throttle cable obviously as the OEM one does not fit as the throttle has moved a sizable distance from factory. A universal one from EFISolutions did the trick, with a nifty little bracket. The Universal Cable has the right fitting to the back of the R34 Skyline pedal. Win Win. Simple pod filter setup is simple. Simple intake pipe (4in) is now black because ewww that rust was not great. Dangerous, dangerous facebook post that appeared right about the time we were fitting the aforementioned intake. Would it ... fit? How good is SAU's view of spatial awareness here. I have this feeling commodore bays are larger there but the space was unused..... No, I didn't buy it....but you know how these things rattle around in the brain! This little guy to sit in my radiator hose to give me my water temp sensors back. Lovely. Now for the oil temp sender, we'll just put that one in the oil block I referred to ages ago, which has fittings for a sensor, as well as the hoses for the oil cooler. Well f**k! Luckily a shorter one exists, was ordered, showed up about a week later after thinking of any other way to mount it. The only other logical place was where oil pressure was going to go... but I wanted the OEM pressure to work... so... f**k. At this point I was getting keen, as it was about time to put oil, fluids in the car now that they would... stay in. I even had the joy of going to Autobarn and simply buying a belt off a shelf because LS1. I also bought new water temp sensors, and various other LS1 sensors "while I'm there" because LS1. Was I needlessly excited about being able to just randomly buy stuff that fits from a random autobarn? Yes. I grumbled though about the price (it was about $120) and i thought "Man, I would have been happier if this belt was like $90 or something..." Lets just put that belt o- F**k! Someone stupid (me) may have forgotten that I had a 25% underdrive balancer. I also found out that this means I need a shorter than standard belt. Luckily Autobarn actually were happy to return the belt, and order in a belt size that I needed. The best part about that was, the replacement belt was about $30 cheaper. Something that DID fit (and also done in a day, for $300) was the modifications to the tailshaft. And just to finish off, time to plumb the catch can in. Close up of un-necessarily silly fittings. What kind of idiot spends $120 on one fitting for a catch can.....and something like $300 in total for just plumbing in the can.... ? At this point we were basically done! Coming to a very very crunch time, as I had booked in the tow truck and the next stage of operations (exhaust, and 'wiring') were ready to take the car tomorrow night. Doing my best to not be a shit bloke, I had wanted the car to be ready for them to ONLY do "wiring" (which seemed like a near impossible, up in the air, magical task) and making the exhaust, to which we were still super skeptical of "how the fk can this actually fit". I even had pre-bought the HPTuners MPVI2 (am now a huge fan of this and its software, relative to Haltech but it could be because it's interfacing with an OEM ecu so it supports... everything...) and credits to unlock the ecu, tune the car, get it running out of the shop once magicians did magician things.....if it actually.... worked.. when the key was attempted to be turned.. But certainly didn't want to add to their confusion and work. So in doing so we were going through a lot of things, "have we done this up, we've plumbed that in, etc" and quite a few of these: BTW the official drink of LS conversions into R34's is officially one shot of coffee patron and one shot of tequila. It's a really good mix. Anyway, during this triple check of things we found out that we had no fuel pressure regulator. At all. The Commo has a regulator in the tank as it's not a return system. The skyline has one on the engine. All our nice braided and measured lines and we had no FPR , at all, at 9pm thursday night when the car is being picked up Friday arvo. F*** One sick day later, and said day spent frantically checking if anyone in Melbourne had a FPR in stock, that we could have, in our hand, right now later, we had a FPR bought, installed, and ready to go!! It was a little sentimental when it left Mikey's place - This may have all come in a flurry of posts and pictures, but the truth of it is this took 10 months and 6 days between first starting to pull the RB out and the car being towed to its next home, the amount of work and time and especially thinking time was immense. As I alluded to before, simply dropping the box and engine in was the easy part. The thinking about what option for XYZ thing and "Where do you want to route this" or "Time to do some research on XYZ" was by far the biggest timesink/drain in doing something like this. .......and there was still much to be done from this point on!

4 speed autos I don't think lock in the commodores...?

My engine is all up and running! This is why I said 250kw (maybe less due to auto lyf, 230?). If you DO decide to put a cam in, make sure that you get a cam that doesn't get max lift beyond what the heads will flow. Thats effectively my current issue with my motor, the cam gets .600 or so lift, and has a ton of duration, but the LS1 heads (mine are OEM, just skimmed for more compression) make their max flow at something like the below As you can see, it tapers off pretty bad, so bigger cams just trade low down power for higher up power, but the heads can't supply them, the cam can have as much duration and as high lift as you want, but there's very little benefit, unless you really work the heads/intake to actually get air into them. Which you can do... but it's well worth having the information and a plan beforehand before $ gets spent.

Head on over to ls1tech.com they have an entire forum dedicated to dyno guesses and bench racing. The real answer is "What mph does it trap?" so... go do that obviously

... not that I'm aware of! Though I appreciate the heads up, as you can imagine I became very hyper aware of any leaks given a lot of things were very new and/or 'recently installed'.. I did in fact get bitten 'later' in regards to OEM GM Ancillaries. "ehhh lets see how they go..."

I think it's more there's nothing to actually work on unless you're literally an engine builder or an exhaust fabricator. And of course, if you are an engine builder then you'd no doubt have fun working on that N/A lyf to extract more powers from it.

In the spirit of 'braided lines rape wallets' Next cab off the rank was moving the oil cooler, because we noticed that a) Don't need the intercooler holes for anything now... b) Oil block is on the passenger side of the engine, not the driver side c) Lines all the way across the engine would be bad. So we moved the cooler from behind the driver side to the passenger side. For general better'ness, and did not have the washer bottle to contend with anymore. ... we may have had to remove a tow point though. But there's still one left... I also test fitted the (18x9 +30) wheels I bought. I was going to get R34 GTR ones, but they were expensive, 2nd hand, and these ones have a bit of a concave fit to them too. I hated my old rims as they were a complete and utter pain to clean, 15 minutes per wheel vs about 4 seconds per wheel. This is also why these new wheels are black. (remember, mildly annoying = must be destroyed) Maths well on my side, these cleared the brakes without a worry. I also decided to change the cabin filter in the Renault (pls buy it) OH YEAH. Now is when things got a bit more fiddly, because it was more fabrication and "how to make things work and not be utterly disgusting". This is a LS. The Red Circled bit is where the coolant lines run to the heater core. In a commodore these are actually on the driver side chassis rail (so the hoses are small). Almost like it was designed for it. But where are they on a r34 GTT? Right on the opposing side of the engine bay. So we had to run two pretty damn long rubber hoses with a bunch of kinks across the entire frigging motor, notwithstanding the fact that there's a manifold on each side of the motor and not a lot of room at all. "Do you really need a heater?" I mean technically the car would be pretty hot anyway, gearbox right under the centre console, warm transmission tunnel, brand new exhaust running under the driver feet, you know bu- YES I REALLY NEED A HEATER! Luckily my friend and partner in crime was always looking for an excuse to buy a pipe bender. How bendy is too bendy? relax everyone that was just testing. Below was the final result: yessssssssssssssss. I was worried about power steering in general, as it's really hard to find any information about the power steering pump used by Nissan, and the power steering pump used by GM. Could I just connect the lines from the Skyline system into the GM power steering pump? Was it that simple? Was the GM pump stronger? Was the Skyline pump stronger? Is that going to break anything? What about that dreaded "Heavy steering" problem with R34's anyway. If you get that from a sensor not being on, or a vac line missing, what about if you have NO sensors at all, and a fkin Commodore pump. Would it be massively light? WHO KNOWS. What I did do was go to Active Power Steering in Dandenong in Vic with the old power steering line and say "Can you make this with the GM fittings on the end?" The top is what I brought them, the bottom is what I received. They included the sensor for the plug, though didn't know either WTF would happen to my steering afterwards. science! And I can't fault them on any of it, because it worked perfectly and cost very very very little ($250ish). Done in a day. And how is the power steering in the end? It turns out that the result definitely works, power steering exists, and the result is that it is really very heavy, but provides a ton of feedback. Undoubtably it's heavier than both a commodore and a R34 but it is a little lighter than R34 in "broken heavy mode" because I can only assume the pump is more grunty. You'd get in it and drive it and be all "Damn man this is heavy" but it actually suits the thing when driving around, as big notchy shifter, heavy clutch, heavy steering, V8 all really works in conjunction with one another, placebo I know, but it makes the whole thing feel "Heavy Duty" and the steering has absolutely NO play in it or any kind of deadzone at all. So all in all, surprisingly cheap to get done, and works with no real side effect!

210 is a really conservative estimate, given it has OTR, and an Exhaust (which is basically all you can do without a cam) it'll be closer to the 250 mark I reckon. V8's seem slower than they are when you're used to turbo life!

I too have an excel spreadsheet, infact I put this V8 conversion all in it, including dates, what i bought, and even compared what I thought I'd spend to what I actually did spend. Then it all became a bit superflous because the parts I did spend on weren't really strictly related to "Conversion only" costs.. like say, the previous post. Also got a bit lucky in some aspects, like a pre-made ready to go refreshed cammed motor. Saved some $ there. ........Provided that engine actually started and was built correctly......... Moving on, more bushings! So now we had the rear of the car, and bushings done (many not pictured on the front arms), we decided to tackle plumbing up the engine side. We left the clutch out for now because it's just going to be easier taking engine in/out/in/out/in/out without a clutch to contend with. But the gearbox looks to have bolted up fine and took up space fine, useful for checking clearances to things. Here was our lovely engine bay,complete with old R34 ancillaries just.. hanging out. Gearbox sorta fitting okay! The commodore shift knob options are horrific, so we ended up cutting this and welding on a literal bolt to the end of it with the same pitch that Nissan shift knobs use, so I can re-use my OEM Nissan/Nismo Shift knob. The gates are tighter than a R33 Gearbox is (maybe the ripshifter does this) but it means that the AUTO housing I had around the shifter now fit better after the conversion than it did before. Another win! Please check page 1 for a description of my abomination of wiring. It was always a really sore point, but now that the motor was gone, we could remove what wasn't needed anymore. The way I thought about it was ..... My Haltech PS2000 ran the Engine, standalone. The LS1 Ecu runs the Engine, standalone. No other functions of the car did not work. AC worked, Power steering worked, dash worked, all electronics worked fine before the conversion. Logically then.. we could remove all of the things the PS2000 was wired to. Logically then.. we could run the LS1 in "Engine only" mode, and everything should be just fine, cause the rest of the car's wiring wasn't changed, because it was never in play to begin with. ... in the past my car has had up to 4-5 ECU's running various things. Anyway, all gone now. So we started pulling wires out. Initially we labelled them, and thought about them, and then eventually came to the conclusion above. "I'm sure it's fine" What's this for? I don't know. I knew then, I don't know now, but I took a photo of it for some reason. With literally all the engine wiring in the bin, we had an empty engine bay to start figuring stuff out in, and first cab off the ranks was the fuel system. The engine we got had some nice return EFI fuel rails on it which was great, because the LS1 uses a returnless system, and the rest of a skyline is .. not a returnless system. so thank f**k for that, basically, but we had to plumb it all in. We decided to cut these lines shorter, to angle them up against the firewall as much as possible. We didn't know how the f**k people ran a manifold/exhaust through here but we sure weren't going to be the guys that didn't make every effort to try and make someone's future life easier. People notice that shit! (also I almost melted my car to the ground due to wiring issues and heat in the past. This is fuel... and a manifold, what could go wrong?) Ah yes the first braided line, the one that started it all. The stock ECU can handle flex fuel. I had a flex fuel sensor. I had to mount it somewhere. So this: + This = This It seems I don't have too many photos of the fuel lines, they went through many, many revisions. With the engine in again, I had to think about cooling, as a clutch fan isn't feasible/doesn't exist. Luckily the LS is setup for thermos from the factory as it has them, and luckily, the AU falcon's thermos match up nearly perfectly with a R34 radiator, as well as pushing a LOT of air. "but isn't the LS huge?" A lot of people are still suprised by how small it is in the engine bay. .... so much room for activities! You can't see it in this photo, but you can actually fit your entire arm down behind the motor and grab the bellhousing too, so my e85 sensor was not in peril. Radiator and Thermos in! Sometimes things just fkin work out! sometimes.

It's funny, because as of now the car is done, the only things I'd do to improve it is add widebody (which i own) to fit wider tyres, and maybe get a set of heads for more NA power (which realistically looks like ... maybe? about 30-40rwkw). However this would probably cost about ~15K to complete. If my car spontaneously caught fire or was stolen, I could buy a new Mustang with less than 15K Difference. Did I mention new Mustangs when tuned make about the Same KW as my motor with the heads I referred to above? Did I also mention that Mustangs can fit a 315's on all 4/square setup with the OEM Body? Did I mention that the new 10 speed auto is pretty amazeballs for keeping in said power range? Have a look Here to find "Mustang Performance Pack 2" (which is a slower manual), but has aforementioned tyre fitment. It's 48th on the list. If you CBF, here's a snippet: So.. I am super happy with how it is, as is... but would I recommend what I have done for someone else? lol no. More history to follow 'soon'