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Thread: Tom and Jonty's track S14 build

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    Tom and Jonty's track S14 build

    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

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    Guest kingj's Avatar
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    1200 quid on welding!!!! your mad!! did he build you a complete new floor planwould have been easier to just buy another shell good luck with the project though dude

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    this looks like it will be good, from the first pics i was going to say it doesnt look that bad underneath, then i looked down and saw the floor hanging off

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    Quote Originally Posted by kingj View Post
    1200 quid on welding!!!! your mad!! did he build you a complete new floor planwould have been easier to just buy another shell good luck with the project though dude
    yeah you are right, if we had known how big a job it would be we would have started with a fresh shell But neither Tom, Nev or I realised how bad it was until it I spent an afternoon under each side of the car cutting the old rusted metal out. Literally half the length of the sill has been replaced, but it's a really bang on job Nev's done, so we're more than happy.

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    Quote Originally Posted by crouch-21 View Post
    this looks like it will be good, from the first pics i was going to say it doesnt look that bad underneath, then i looked down and saw the floor hanging off
    yeah it's a good thing we only spent £600 on the car!


    Unfortunately Tom's photos of doing the rear subframe seem to have got lost when his old computer shat itself, so we're missing the stage where we bought a spare rear subframe, had it powder coated, fitted driftworks 4 arm kit, polybushed the subframe, got a spare diff rebuilt using a Kaaz 1.5 LSD and mounted on Nismo diff bushes (a good compromise between std and solid ally) and Driftworks LS2 coilovers.

    Oh, as part of the engine build we had a the head rebuilt by angelworks and so I thought I'd put up the flow graph so you can see the improvement that that gives- basically dark blue-->light, green-->red are the changes ...I think it works out as about a 9% flow improvement over the whole inlet/exhaust cycle, which should translate into a roughly similar power gain.



    I'll get another update sorted in a few mins to show the cage...
    Last edited by tomo1; 10-11-2009 at 15:08.

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    ...but before I do the cage update here's a shot of the 306:


    Despite it looking like I am carrying a swan in the passenger seat that is actually an optical illusion caused by my friend Mike's helmet and waving hand!!

    That car was on rails and if we didn't have the 200sx then it would now have supercharged Gti6 engine and about 350bhp... this 200sx better be worth it when we get it on track next- we've done a shakedown before getting the cage fitted:


    This threw up a few problems- We have a tired actuator which we think was the route cause of some boost controller problems and resulted in the power dropping away throughout the day, also lots and lots of heat soak, rear brakes overheating as we had only std pads in there... which let to the big problem of the day of us not having the hub-face of the wheels being masked before powder coating- I thought this was because of the surface finish would not give a good mating surface, but they went on fine so we didn't have any worries, not realising that the temperature of the overheating brakes would cause the powdercoat to melt, and the rear wheels to become loose on track!!! ...que 3 hours of scraping with a stanley knife blade to get us back on track for the end of the afternoon

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    another from the trackday

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    Right then... onto the cage:

    got to start somewhere when designing it yourself!


    And also throw a bit of FEA at it as well- I went through loads and loads of variations and load cases, but these are the key ones for comparison. For the deflection it's the bottom line in the top left corner... it's in mm, but it's just a relative comparison, nothing more.

    We went for the roof and rear screen 'X' in the end...


    basic 6 point cage


    Basic 6 point with Kidney bars


    Basic 6 point with Kidney bars and roof diagonal


    "Double X"


    "Double V"


    Roof and rear screen X with kidney bars
    Last edited by tomo1; 04-02-2010 at 22:30.

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    Quick as a flash, Jason at FGR Motorsport (Airfield Road, Santa Pod, info: fgr@fgrmotorsport.co.uk ) whipped up a cage after lunch one day...


    (ok maybe it was at his workshop for a few weeks whilst I came over and pestered him to do work, then chatted bollocks to him and cunningly waited around until dinner was ready, blagged a plateful, then left after distracting him from doing any work)





    Detail of rear turret mount plate


    New Steering column mount... I changed it from where Jason positioned it, and then once I drove it home realised he had it best it's a little low at the moment and obscures 30mph on the speedo . Once we have a quick release boss and the seat mounted even lower and further back it'll be better. We are also looking to get a quick steering rack and design our own pedal box.... So I am just trying to keep Tom happy that we don't need to do anything just yet... WIP I think


    A-Pillar gusset... I was up for welding a plate front and rear and TIGing it the whole way down... Jason and Ant/Chunk across the way reckonned it would tear itself apart through being too stiff or something, so I had to conceed.

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    Bit of primer:






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    Inside the rear of the car after painting:


    Note the rear bias valve- it's actually easier to use with the right hand across the body rather than left, but I am guessing I won't be changing the level too much whilst driving apart from putting it to the rear in the wet:


    We're using R33 alloys as they look pretty trick, are easy to get hold of, and most importantly of all are the correct size to take BTCC slicks- you can get them for about £100-120 a set for scrubbed ones and saves a load of cash compared to R888 or AO48s etc... plus of course they grip like shit to a blanket!!


    And for a final shot for the moment you can see the finished painted cage with a Plastics for Performance hard-coated rear screen installed; Tom says it needed a bit of tweaking to get in, but looks factory which is what we are after... the weight saving is only of the order of 4kg unfortunately (5kg instead of 9kg) so not as much as I would have hoped.

    I also gave the car a much needed going over with a clay bar as it's been sat around in various workshops for the last 6 months or so:

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    Flamethrower Jez's Avatar
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    Looking good!

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    Really nice work with the cage! I'm liking the colour combo with the inside and outside.

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    Could you reuse the window seals and evrything, or have you bought new ones.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Bjorling View Post
    Could you reuse the window seals and evrything, or have you bought new ones.
    we've bought new ones as the original ones were a bit damaged in removing them due to being bonded in- also the car is 14 years old and has done 120k ish miles, so they weren't in exactly the best condition anyway. I think we have used a universal rear seal, and the front was OE Nissan for about £40 I think

    Thanks for the comments Jez/Dan, we've basically built the platform to tune from now, so we're really now only just getting into the tuning part of the project with the cage as phase 1 and it should get a bit more clever from now onwards.

    Tom is working on our own carbon bonnet as we are not happy with the weight saving offered by Seibon etc and so we will combine that with a cooling duct package that controls the airflow completely in the front of the car, through the rad/FMIC/oil cooler and then out through the bonnet. Like with the cage where I used FEA to come up with an optimised design I'll be digging out a CFD package to ensure we're pretty close with the cooling package as well... I think there will be a lot to gain by understanding the airflows properly instead of doing just what 'looks right'.

    We are planning to do a trackday in 2 weeks time as another shakedown, by which point we are hoping to have an interim GRP bonnet on there with some air inlet ducting, and maybe a very basic cooling duct package.

    Hopefully this time out we will not have the issues as before of high inlet temps (now have heatshielding, and possibly will have some inet ducting), powder coat melting (I scraped it off last time) or overheating rear pads (got yellowstuff in there now as per the front)

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    Guest shaboy's Avatar
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    good read so far think i'm pretty much certain to get a S14 to start racing next year and some good tips and inspiration here (especially about the R33 wheels and btcc tyres )

    has the cage been built to a specific spec (fia/etc)?

    will be keeping an eye in this for future development thats for sure

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    Quote Originally Posted by shaboy View Post
    good read so far think i'm pretty much certain to get a S14 to start racing next year and some good tips and inspiration here (especially about the R33 wheels and btcc tyres )

    has the cage been built to a specific spec (fia/etc)?

    will be keeping an eye in this for future development thats for sure
    The cage is built using T45 tube in 38 x 2.5mm size as spec'd by the FIA Safety Equipment Article 253 although it is preferable to use the alternative 40 x 2.0mm tubing as this is 15% lighter... the problem being that I was quoted about the same price as we paid for this multi-point cage (that goes through to the front struts, has a rear X, roof X and double door bars) for just a simple 6 point cage, and then only in CDS, from people who had the 40mm mandrel (which will cost £600 if you want to supply it). The only tube member that is outside of the FIA spec is the 'kidney bar' which links down between the b-pillar to the transmission tunnel as the article shows only a straight member across the car, so we've taken a bit of a liberty by making it in two sections and angled... when we get around to racing in the future I hope we won't get a stupidly fussy scruitineer as they are really looking for safety problems, and worst case we can cut it out as it's not connected to anything else- but that's a fair few years down the line anyway.

    If I was to design another cage I would probably get it homologated as I can do most of the FEA myself and then get an approval simulation done at MIRA for about £700. I think that would save about 15kg as I could use a variety of tube thicknesses, down to 17g for the entirely non-safety related tubes. At the moment I think we have about 45kg of tube in there, which is pretty similar to the amount of crap we have binned, scraped off, cut out, replaced or otherwise disposed off in the process of building this car. It does feel much, much more taught and responsive now, so I am looking forward to getting it on the track again in a few weeks as it felt pretty good on that shakedown with no chassis stiffening in place

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    ahhhh another track s14, mine is very slowly getting there. Hope to do nippon challenge next season

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    Quote Originally Posted by mattyd View Post
    ahhhh another track s14, mine is very slowly getting there. Hope to do nippon challenge next season
    the car was bought in dec '06, engine rebuilt in aug '07, suspension in winter '08, cage in aug '09... so it's been a long road here too... good luck with getting yours ready for nippon!

    I'm helping a mate out at a body shop to keep me in beer funds at the moment, but there's nothing in today (that an untrained oik like me can manage) so this afternoon I've fitted an HKS actualtor from Apex lug: to the S14 ... the old one was knackered as we thought, so now there's a very marked difference- it seems to spool earlier and pulls nice and strong all the way to the red line. I only had a bit of a check to make sure nothing was going to pop off so haven't set the Profec B up yet and instead wound the gain and set down to the minimum (5% and 0 IIRC) but everything seems spot on. However the boost level on the profec b screen doesn't seem as high as before, so I'll maybe have a tweak in a bit... any excuse to get back in the driver's seat!!

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    a quick update, and then hopefully something more tonight- we've got a spare bonnet fitted and a NACA duct cut into that, a bit of wiring loom tidying, and a load of other small little jobs that's taken us every spare minute over the last two weeks. Today we're off to Abingdon airfield for our second shakedown trackday; hopefully we won't have any big problems and can start to learn the car properly- with the suspension and cage it's very responsive... but also rather scary on bumpy b roads in the wet (the only real driving I've managed to do so far) so I'm looking forward to a big expanse of tarmac so I have room to get it wrong!

    Pics to follow tonight, hopefully of the car still in one piece!!

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