Hello chaps, My brother and I have been building this S14 for the last few years now after Tom decided he really wanted a 200SX. We funded starting this project by selling our previous track car and bought this S14 from a guy on here in late 2006 as a non runner with a blow engine and "some" rust at base-level H-Dev stage 2 spec for £600.
The last track car was a peugoet 306 XSi which was a complete hoot and far far faster than it should have been given it had 130bhp and had done 120k miles! I could get around the nurburgring comfortably in 9 mins BTG, and take about 10-15 secs further out of it when driving the balls off it... the main reason it was so quick was that the handling was so superb with amazing feedback that we could be sure of leaving our toe in when everyone else was having to get out the throttle, and this was the biggest area of the 200's characteristics that we wanted to deal with once we'd got it back on the road... which was rather a long way away as we found!
Soooo... starting with the car in a mate's shed after Tom and our next door neighbour Fabian towed it back from Salisbury:
Started digging in the bit of rust...
...which turned out to be a lot of rust:
It was the same on both sides of the car, and in fact that photo is before I properly got into it! In all I cut rust out that had gone through 7 layers of metal, and then Nev -our friendly local kiwi mechanic- fab'd up replacement structure and outer skins. Nev used to work for a company making replica Lambos and always enjoyed the panel work etc... which is good cos it took a fair few hours of his time to get this job sorted! He gives us a moster bargain rate, and we still ended up with a bill of £1200 for his work which included only about £10 in materials.
Also we had to get the running gear back home for the rebuild to start:
...so it was very useful that the 306 was totally stripped out! Tom drove home and I sat in the boot on top of the gearbox to hold that still, steadying the engine with my hands and a foot on the engine crane to stop it moving around- we live in the countryside so no one bats an eyelid and people careering around doing dodgy things, so no problems there!
The engine had died a horrible death of blocked cam spray bars, lunching the cams as can be seen by the step on the lobe shoulder on the RHS of the pic...
...spreading it around the whole engine nicely....
...and decimating the BE bearings:
BE bearing #3 is still MIA!
You’ve all seen engine build threads before, so don’t need to see our photos of doing exactly the same, so here’s the spec we’ve gone for:
86.5mm CP forged pistons 9.0:1 compression ratio
Eagle forged h beam conrods with ARP 2000 rod bolts.
ACL heavy duty main bearings
ACL heavy duty big end bearings
ACL thrust washers.
Lightened and balanced crankshaft /flywheel/clutch cover plate (FJ Payne Oxford)
ARP head bolt kit.
ARP mains bolt kit.
Higher flow oil pump (modified original) (Angelworks technologies)
HKS metal head gasket 1.2mm (as per Simon Norris’ recommendation)
H-dev recirculation dump valve kit.
Up rated clutch- act extreme organic- H-dev + refaced lightened flywheel.
Phormula ks3 knock sensor.
New Nissan spray bars
Standard inlet and exhaust camshafts. (Second hand cams rockers)
Bosch 255l fuel pump.
555cc Nismo injectors
Blitz Front mount intercooler, with short piping run.
“Haste” uprated radiator and cap.
Denso IK22 spark plugs
Profec B boost controller
Braided turbo water and oil lines
I'll get some photos off Tom's camera to show the suspension and rollcage stages of the build in a little while when he's home from work... that's where it starts to get exciting!
Thanks for looking,
Jonty