turbocad's custom fx

thanks man, yeah, I tried to account for the very high expansion rate of the 304SS. the wastegate dump really cycles through these expansions a lot & rapidly too as it goes from being relatively cool with no exhaust flowing through it at all, then when the waste gate does open it rapidly expands as it is heated up & goes through these cycles repeatedly, that can def cause cracking without it. I also don't have any of the primaries touching each other or braced or connected to each other at all too so they all have room for expansion without added stress there too, think they should hold up well even supporting the turbo's.

I had everything tig welded & got it back today. not sure if I should ceramic coat everything now or wait till after I get it running just in case any changes or alterations pop up. doing that after there coated would be a major problem...


I swapped out my brick interior for a black interior tonight too :biggrin: I'm going to miss the classiness of the brick but the black looks nice too. main reason is now eventually I can find or build some nice light weight black leather buckets & get rid of the very heavy stock couch like buckets :tongue:. doing this with a black interior is so much easier. trying to match the brick I'm afraid would have never worked out & the interior would have just looked pieced together in the end. a sporty supportive bucket swap will work nice with the black but not so much with brick I think, so black interior is in & now ready for the right black buckets :biggrin:
 
I guess you don't mind giving up some comfort for the sportiness :wink:. But yes it will definitely save you some weight there.
 
When I took apart my seats I was surprised at how much of the weight is in the frame below the lower cushion. I had the same thought about how much lighter the whole assembly could be if the seatbelt was attached to the chassis instead of the seat...



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I was a mechanic since I was a kid for like the first 13 years & really had a passion for cars my whole life, so I educated myself as much as I could in that field at the time, then I winded up buying a body shop & have been doing that for the past 12 years or so, while still trying to keep up with the latest technology in vehicle mechanics too so I have a lot of well rounded experience with cars in general. plus, I've always been a hot rodder & a modifier at heart so I have a lot of experience too with race car fabrication & just about everything automotive related really. combine that with the fact that almost no one will do things the way I really want them done, so in the end I give myself no choice but to just do it all myself. whatever I don't know or don't have enough experience with I just learn & study & try to educate myself as much as I can to be able to do the job at hand. I've gotten to the point that I really don't want anyone else to ever work on my own car. no one is going to really care about the outcome of the job as much as I myself will.

in general I've gotten to the point that if I can't do it myself then I'd just rather not even do it at all. I'm pretty hard to satisfy I guess... of course there will always be some specialty stuff that I have no choice but to let others do, for example I certainly do not have the equipment to chrome plate something myself or ceramic coat something myself & I'm going to be limited in the specialty equipment necessary for some tasks such as machine shop equipment & stuff, so I will at times have no choice but to deal with others, but I try my hardest to avoid it & will only do so when I have no other choice really.

doc, yeah I guess there is a bit of a trade-off in comfort in going to a lighter & more supportive bucket, but really just about everything is a trade-off in some way. for example you can not improve handling without sacrificing some comfort, you can not improve power significantly without trading off some fuel economy, just about anything we do is going to trade-off something. we all make trade-offs with each mod we do really but it is to gain in areas that are more important to us while sacrificing something that is not as important. I'm sure I can find a seat setup that will still be somewhat comfortable enough while still giving me what I want. the biggest thing I dread is the possibility of having to deal with an upholsterer though... I already know that I will not be 100% happy with it, but this is something that again I just can't do myself... ideally I would be able to find a factory black leather bucket that matches well enough as-is & not have to deal with the nightmare of having to be at an upholsterers mercy to get the job done, not up to that point yet though, but just set up for the future when I am ready to do something with the seats I guess... I'll see how it pans out when I do get to that point...
 
thanks... I've been doing a lot of research towards a tranny... the new gtr tranny is not practical, they use a rear transaxle type setup, sick, but a bit over the top... woulda been sweet with a complete new gtr drivetrain swap but were talking like 35k to get your hands on that complete & major unibody reconstruction to the fx too...if I really had the $$ to play hard that would be a totally sick swap though, godzilla meets fx... it can be done, just crazy $$$

far as trannies go the nissan trucks are all no good, they all pass the front driveshaft to the diff on the drivers side where ours is on the pass side, PLUS there not the same intel awd either, just 4X4... not what I'm looking for. the only thing I've come up with as a possibility is the previous skyline gtr tranny, same alteza intelligent awd setup as the fx for the most part, strong stick shift awd tranny that would almost work... only problem & it's a big one is, the bell housing is not only different, but it is also not removable, meaning the bell housing is part of the tranny case itself... now it may not be impossible to get it to work but it would take major effort. I may pick one up & play but it would not be an easy thing to do at all, & the fact that the motor is already installed in the fx would also make it much harder to try & mock something up there too...

judging from viets advice I think instead of trying to do a fully built AT I would rather spend the $$ to try & pull off a skyline tranny swap... it is not impossible but it also may be out of the range of my own abilities too... from the people I've spoken too trying to build a tranny adaptor is extremely tough & needs the utmost in precision as far as keeping the centerline exactly centered... any discrepancies there at all & it will cause major driveline problems... without having a skyline tranny & physically seeing how it lines up to see if it is workable or not is very tough... buying one could be a great thing or it could wind up just meaning that I'll wind up with nothing more than a cool JDM conversation piece... almost pulled the trigger on a skyline tranny on ebay but I'm refraining from thinking about ordering a skyline tranny because wtf, I haven't even finished this swap yet :tongue:
 
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School of Hard Knox... Love it. Some of the greatest achievers in any discipline are self taught.

How similar are the G35x auto and G35 manual transmissions internally? I remember when I was rebuilding my old VW bug transmission learning about a company that built a 5-speed transmission inside the original 4-speed trans housing. Is it even remotely possible to morph the G35 manual internals with the AWD G35x automatic housing? Theoretically resulting in an manual trans that is AWD and retains the ATESSA-ETS system? I've never even seen the manual trans up close so sorry if this is a ridiculous idea. Just a fleeting thought... :tongue:

Regarding the possibility of lighter seats; How would you address the airbags in the sides? Is there a way to satisfy the warning light without the bag installed or would you put the bag into your new seat?
 
I've been thinking about the possibility of mating the awd transfer case to the tail of the stick tranny, but I'm sure it's no where near a bolt on affair, hard to say if it's even possible or practical. I'd have to start collecting trannies & in the case of the r34 tranny maybe even need a spare HR block to really build something I think... at least this is where my thought train is heading, but I do also plan to try & keep the auto alive too... I'm pretty sure I can for a while at least. with the auto I'm going to map it to just run base waste gate boost at ~5psi, then have it increase progressively from 2nd to 3rd to all out in maybe 4th... it'll be strong but it will not be like a 4wheel burnout drifting monster either... with the stick I can push much harder & really make it more of an animal with less chance of just blowing it up.

honestly if I get it all tuned & running nice I may just be satisfied with keeping it as progressive power & staying automatic too... I'm really not lusting for a stick, to me that's more of a trade off & only done because it's necessary to step up to a higher power level, but I would consider making the trade off I guess, it would be much more of a beast really but if the automatic can live I'd prefer the automatic in many ways too...


seat is hard to say for sure, depends what I wind up with, a factory late model seat would have airbags so I'd just tie them into the infiniti restraint systems, but if the seat had no airbags it is also very simple to account for it by adding a resistor to the airbag circuit to fool the computer into thinking it's seeing what it wants to see & all else would still be fine & still function fine with no error codes or faults, just without the actual seat deployment bags in place... still have a lot to do before I can start to hunt for seats though really so I haven't given a whole lot of thought into actual choices yet... I would love to find a manual black leather appropriate looking factory seat but haven't even looked much to see what might work

---------- Post added at 12:41 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:27 AM ----------

also I installed the HR engine harness into the fx tonight :tongue:, still some wiring left to do but just all in the fx dash now, the harness benchwork is done & just about everything electrical is figured out at this point, now gotta get back to mechanical again, plumbing, intercoolers, fuel, the list goes on... not going to know the real end results of trying to run it on the HR box till I can actualy attempt to start it, getting closer....
 
cant wait to see this sleeper done John. Thanks for documenting your work in such detail for us. Definitely my favorite build thread of all time! :biggrin:
 
Wow John.. Can't belief you are almost done with the electrical.. Hopefully when you plug everything in it will work flawlessly
 
I think that if you moved the seat belt connection from the door side of the seat to the floor, you could remove a ton of weight from the oem seats (roughly half) by rebuilding the lower frame. As it is, in addition to supporting the weight of the passenger, the seat frame is used as a structural member in the restraint system and has to resist the upward force from the seatbelt in the event of an accident... which is a lot.

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I think I found your seats:
2008-Kicherer-Audi-RS6-Seat-1920x1440.jpg

Sorry for the huge image. These are RS6 seats, bucket, comfortable and have similar seatbelt attached to seat type of action. Plus they're already black :)
 
ha, I never responded to those seats but ahh, yeah, thanks, but I think there a little too crazy looking for me, plus there still multi way power & pretty heavy. I want to try to take some weight off. the fx is heavy, but that don't mean it can't perform. hell, the gtr is 3,800 lb's+ & it can perform. my outlook on it is, the lighter I make the fx, the closer to a gtr it will be! :rofl:

after I got the drive train final bolted in & installed I winded up taking the fx home & little by little I've been working on all the rest of the details of this conversion. the headers had a ton of work into them already, then I sent them to a friend to have them tig welded & he did a great job, except he doesn't back purge when he welds headers, & yeah, he got very good penetration, but the problem is that without back purging, when the inside of a weld winds up becoming molten, it is exposed to oxygen & it produces slag... the outside don't get this because it is surrounded in a shroud of argon gas preventing o2 contamination. the right way to avoid this slag at the interior of the welds is to back purge, which is to fill the header up with argon too, simple... unfortunately this was not done.

unfortunately even though in my header research I did learn all about this before having him weld them, I didn't realize how big of a deal it would actually be. had I known I would have built & supplied my own back purge setup to him, or I would have just found someone else who does back purge. now, after the fact, I can see how much crap winded up on the interior of the welds. I even have a snap-on digital bore scope & I can send the camera all the way through the pipes & see the slag at each weld...

the problem with this slag is, aside from the fact that they will cause restrictions in the natural smooth flow of exhaust gasses, more of a problem than that is, when these headers get to 1,300 & 1,400 deg or more & start to actually glow under max boost & max load, any one of these little pieces of slag can possibly break off, it would then shoot right into a turbo impeller that could be spinning 100k rpms or more, wind up ruining a turbo real quick.... then what? replace it & wait for it to happen again? I'd rather deal with this problem before it becomes a bigger problem.

grinding these inner welds down after the header is all welded together is almost impossible, but I am going to attempt to build a flex snake shaft combined with a flex hone & run it through each tube to correct this... I should be able too, already tried a bit with some success but don't have the right size hone yet, the bore scope will help big time in being really sure that it is perfect too.

this is the first time I ever tried to build headers & they winded up being extreme work, but they are also coming out very nice.

one of the problems with clearance for these headers was the water pipes that run on the side of the motor. they originally ran up & right over the original exhaust manifold, but they were completely in the way of my new turbo manifolds so I winded up building a new mini water manifold from scratch to bolt to the side of the block to replace the factory pipe setup. it is a tight fit & has to route right behind the A/C compressor but I finally figured out a way to do it. this stupid little part took a whole lot of trial & playing to get the right solution but I finally came up with a way to do it well. I built it to connect with AN fittings & steel braided line. -6AN for all the turbo water piping, -8AN for the factory bypass tubing & -12AN to the heater core. I'm doing pretty much all the plumbing for this motor in AN line. I always liked AN plumbing, & the best part about it is if installed correctly it lasts forever, don't have to worry about leaks or ever blowing a hose, def the best way to plumb a car.



here is the original water pipe compared to the new manifold I had to make. the steel braided lines will come off my little manifold & go down & under the motor mount bracket then to the back of the motor without any exhaust interference. this is a small part but a real bitch to actually make & took a lot of time & effort all by itself

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and how this pipe sits in relation to the header:

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a few of the header, half way through grinding & polishing.

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few shots showing the direct clear shot from the collector to both turbo & wastegate port. have my bore gage used to illuminate the inside of the collector

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