Hurmeez

I got completely carried away and didn't realise how late it had gotten. I got to the point where I had to sling the engine and box back in so I stuck a measuring stick in there to satisfy my (and probably your) curiosity. Dropping everything as low as I think I can get away with has gotten me a gap of 30mm between the bottom of the block and the steering rack which is the closest point. It's also given me at least 160mm everywhere above the intake ports to make an intake manifold. There are places with more but that's the minimum height.

@Transom I think I have roughly 100-120mm for an intake but I've taken the engine back out of the car to make the mounts so I can't give an exact number. @yoeddynz I think I left about 50mm between the sump sealing face of the block and the cross member. Again, can't give an exact number until I throw it all back in again. I haven't looked at it with the steering rack in yet so I'll have to check that before I make any proper mounts. I'm planning on keeping the engine front sumped at the moment but I'm worried about oil at the back not making its way forward to the pickup properly if I mount it too low to put a decent back to front slope in the sump. Sorry for a bit of a non-answer to both of you but I'll try to get you some hard numbers soon.

Aaand we're back. After I finished welding in the dowels I drilled them out with a tapping drill before cutting a thread in each. You can really see how off center the holes are from these photos. With that done I moved on to making the flywheel spacer. I wanted to get this out of the way fairly early on because it was the thing that would tell me whether or not the plate was going to work. Up until now, I knew that the plate fitted the engine and gearbox separately but I still wasn't sure whether or not the input shaft and spigot bearing would line up correctly when the two were combined. Once I had the spacer in there though, the input shaft would be able to slide all the way home in the spigot bearing and I'd be able to tell if there was any side loading on the input shaft. So that's what I did. I did the maths with my notebook to figure out exactly how much spacing I need, which turned out to be 16.3mm, in order to get the ring gear and starter motor to line up nicely. The spacer slips snugly over the end of the crank and into the flywheel. I have some longer high tensile flywheel bolts on order to take up the longer distance so I should be able to assemble it once they arrive. I dummy fitted everything without the bolts though and everything lined up really nicely. With the knowledge that it was finally going to work, I could press on and make up the last few turned pieces to complete the plate. These were the plugs for the engine side locating dowel holes. I need to put a countersunk bolt in one and a normal hex headed bolt from the back on the other, so I needed to make up some partial plugs to reduce the diameter of the ends of these holes. This being the threaded one that takes the bolt from the back side, And this being the plug that will be countersunk later on. Both were made slightly oversize and pressed and welded in, as per the previous ones. With those all complete, the only thing I have left to do is countersink the appropriate holes and bolt it all up. However, I had to special order the countersunk bolts and bit and they aren't arriving for a couple of days so I decided to see if I could make it work with the bolts that I do have. Here it is bolted to the block with the couple of bolts that come in from the back side, And here it is with the gearbox bolted in place. So I gently eased the whole assembly down to horizontal and found that the few bolts that were in it were ample to hold everything without any flexing of the plate. So, naturally, I slung it into place. It sure looks sweet nestled down in there. Just to double check, I threw the heads and bonnet on to check clearances. There's a good 20mm at the closest point so I'm happy for now. We'll have to see when it comes to making an intake manifold but I'm sure I can make something fit within the space I will have. The extremely astute among you may have noticed the engine doesn't look perfectly level left to right. That was my cunning solution to the problem I encountered way back in this issue: There was going to be a couple of mounting holes that would overlap slightly but not perfectly, in a way that meant I'd be trying to wind the thread of one bolt into part of the head of another. I ummed and ahhed over this issue for a while, coming up with all sorts of fantastically complicated solutions, until I realised the answer was staring me in the face. Just rotate the engine and gearbox relative to each other by about 5 degrees. Then I would offset the gearbox mount by 2.5 degrees one way and the engine mounts the same the other way and viola! Problem solved. There's nothing wrong with having either on a slight lean, just ask any skyline owner. With that all sorted and while I'm waiting for my bolts to arrive, I'll make a start on some engine mounts and get that part of the deal started. I don't have long left on these long hour work days so hopefully I'll be able to put some more quality time in on the car before long. I can't wait.

I've had a couple of days off finally and managed to make some good progress. My adapter plate turned up from the laser cutter in Auckland so I've been working on that and making it fit. I have to start the story a while back though. I got my block measured on a DRO mill by a friend (as I had intended to do from the beginning. You may remember the debacle with paying someone to do this a long time ago only to get inaccurate Vernia caliper measurements instead.) and redrew my plate one final time. I called in a favour from an old teacher and got it cut out from acrylic this time at the old school laser cutter. This is what I got back: You'll notice two things right off the bat. Firstly, the huge square cut out of the middle. This was part of the design I put in to make sure the cutter was accurate. It was exactly 100mm x 100mm in the drawing so by measuring it IRL I could tell if one of the axis was out on the cutter and whether that would affect the accuracy of my cut. It was perfectly on size. Secondly, you'll notice the weird center hole. This was part of a cunning plan. The small hole at the very center was designed to pick up on the input shaft and tell me whether the gearbox holes lined up. They did. Then, now that I had confirmed that, I could knock the middle out with a chisel, And check it matched the engine block too. Which it finally bloody did. Thank christ for that! That done, I made my final tweaks and sent the design away to be cut out of 12mm steel. I decided that the extra bit of security I felt I'd get from the extra threads I could cut in the additional 2mm over 10mm plate made the slight weight difference worth it. So, last week the steel turned up so I made an immediate start. Firstly, I tapped the holes at M10 x 1.25 for the gearbox bolts to pick up. By clamping everything to the drill press I was able to ensure that each hole was tapped perfectly square to the face of the plate. I didn't actually use the drill press drive because that's a great way to snap a tap in your workpiece. Instead, I used a big screwdriver in the morse taper slot that the chuck fits into. It worked quite nicely. Next I made the locating dowels that the gearbox picks up. I spun them up on the lathe at about 0.2mm undersize for the holes they slot into. This should make it easier to locate the box without sacrificing the accuracy that I'm after. The end that was to be pressed into the plate was made about the same amount oversize for a good press fit. Then they were pressed home, Note the chamfer on both sides. Next I had to account for a peculiarity in the gearbox design. The locating dowel holes and the bolt holes that go through them on the box aren't actually concentric for some reason. It is a little difficult to see here but if you look closely you can tell that about the 1 o'clock position the step in diameter is smaller than that at the 7 o'clock. Had they been concentric then obviously I would had drilled and tapped the dowels while they were still in the lathe. However, I decided it would be easier to press them into the plate and then make a punch that would slot snugly into the bolt hole and leave a mark on the dowel when everything was put together. Something like this: It isn't completely clear in this photo how far off the centers are either, however, once the dowels had been drilled and tapped it is much more obvious. Before I drilled them out to final tapping size, I filled the double chamfer with weld to make absolutely sure the dowels would never work loose. I'm still getting the hang of the higher amperage TIG welding but I can tell you I enjoy it more than the lower temp stuff I normally do on the panel steel. The forgiving nature of it it far more appealing to me. Then carefully ground and filed the welds back to flush with the rest of the plate and drilled and tapped the dowels but I can't seem to find any photos. In fact, it was about here that I stopped taking photos of the progress for some reason so I'll nip out and grab some more tomorrow night and continue the story then. Untill then...

So the weekend came and went and made me a very happy boy! We left Whangas at around 0730 Saturday morning and got into the wreckers at 1030. I wanted to get in as early as possible to try to get the most amount of daylight possible, as well as beat any other prospecting V6 removalists to my prize. It took us three hours, but we got from this: To this: We spent the next hour or so stripping all the unnecessary ancillaries like AC and power steering pump off before slotting it into the back of the car and coming home. It turned out to be a very good thing we got there as early as we did because as we had it hanging and were stripping it down, some poor bugger came to find a big empty hole where he thought his engine should be. We helped him out with a belt tensioner and other things I already had at home but there were a couple of things he said he'd been planning to grab that we already had our hot little hands on. Yay for planning ahead. Tonight I spent an hour playing around with different bits and pieces to see what I'm dealing with. @yoeddynz, you were dead right about the right head, wrong gasket guess. Ironically, my DE from last year had the opposite, wrong heads, right gasket and intake manifold. Huh. Those sweet, sweet KL31 cams. While I was down there, I also picked up a cam cover from a 2.5L Telstar. I thought it would suit the car a little better and help me say, "it's only the DE bro, honest" before I blow their doors off And here it is fitted I also started to have a look at my flywheel options. I bought an RX-8 flywheel a long time ago before I realised how difficult it would be to adapt it to work on the V6. I pulled it out tonight to see how different the two were, and what the best plan of action would be. As you can see in the photo, the RX-8 flywheel on the right is 35mm larger in diameter than the V6. It's also lighter interestingly so go figure. The two friction disks are the same diameter at I believe 225mm (though that's just from memory), however, the internal splines on the V6 are smaller so it doesn't fit the RX-8 input shaft. The spigot bearing diameters are the same though so I was able to fit the V6 fly to the RX-8 shaft to see how far out the starter was. The answer is "quite". I should have used the flash but never mind. As you can imagine, that 17.5mm difference in radii makes for quite the gap. It would be a hell of a mission to move the starter location so the plan right now is to modify the flywheel. My original plan was to order a custom machined one from the tame machinist down the road (the same guy who milled the aluminium intake I made for the old Pinto), but I think we have come up with a better idea. It should be much easier (read cheaper) to remove the ring gear from the V6 flywheel, then machine a ring that has an undersized internal diameter and heat it to shrink fit over the original ring gear surface of the flywheel. Then, re-machine it to the standard RX-8 flywheel outer diameter before shrink fitting a new RX-8 ring gear over the top. Then I'll have to machine a spacer for the crankshaft but that should be the easy part. I'm wondering whether it would be worth machining down the back side of the flywheel while I'm there to lose a few kilos for that extra zingy V6 feel. How does the plan sound to you guys, both from a safety, and rotating assembly balance standpoint? Let me know your thoughts on the matter.

Not really. I'm a tradesman's assistant doing fitting work. Essentially I'm doing all the same stuff as the 30 year veterans but their experience means they're being paid twice as much.

Yeah being an unqualified school leaver, I'm doing the stupid hours bit but not so much the stupid money bit. Still, it pays for more car parts so I'm happy.

Bingo mate. I'm gonna have to be more careful, you guys are going to work out my secret identity!

So I've been working 70 hour weeks for the last month and a half, meaning not a huge amount of fabrication had been happening for a little while. Rest assured though, there has been progress and I'll do a proper long winded update soon. For now though, I need to ask a couple of favours. Firstly, I did end up acquiring the R31 diff housing and axles. However, as I mentioned previously, I'll need to get it shortened to fit. Can anyone recommend somewhere to get this done? Bearing in mind I live in Whangarei so I'd prefer it to be no further south than Jaffaville. I plan to strip the whole thing down myself to the bare axle and weld on the spring perches once the work is complete so all I need done is the physical shortening of the housing and axles themselves. Any help would be greatly appreciated as per usual. Secondly, by extremely exciting happenstance, I stumbled across a bona fide KL-ZE in a wreckers in Auckland! (Excuse the blurry photos, it was pissing down and I wanted to make like a shepherd.) Since I don't want to let this opportunity slip through my fingers again, I'm planning on going down with a mate on Saturday morning to pull it out and bring it home. If anyone would like to come in, help out, and spin a few yarns at any point during the day, we'll be at the Zebra yard in Wiri for most likely the whole day. Let me know by private message or on here if you have any advice or are able to help out: Here's to less month long blackouts.

Yeah and me

That's weird cause I measured it roughly with a ruler after you said and it looks like the pitch is 1.25 to me. I counted ten threads and it was 12.5 mm on the rule so I would think that means 1.25. In any case, I haven't ordered the bolts yet so no big deal. Thanks for chasing me up though.

Yeah I was having issues with that one too but I came up with what I think is a very cunning work-around. All will be revealed in good time

Brilliant! That's exactly what I needed. As I said, absolute legends

Yeah that was my plan to use the bolts from the back too. Thanks for checking.

A quick update not big enough for the main thread. I'm working 13 ten hour days in a row with one day off for a couple of months so I'm not getting heaps of work done, however, I am getting closer to getting my adapter plate finalised after not worrying about it for a good while. However, I'm hitting a problem. I can't get countersunk bolts to fit the V6 bellhousing from any of my local suppliers and I'm struggling to find any online. @yoeddynz , @Transom, you guys don't happen to remember either where you got yours from, or the size and pitch of the bolts so I can hopefully better my google-fu? You'd be even more legendary if you could. Also exciting developments on the diff situation but I'll leave that for a full update later on .

How much did you actually shorten it by? I'm trying to find the R31s width online but I'm finding anywhere from 1410mm to 1470mm so I'm not completely sure how much it will need cutting.

I suppose that would be an option but I think I may run into an issue with the bearing retainer access holes. I probably could fit another stud in there in between the two but I'd be worried about how close it would be and the strength (or lack thereof) it might have. I don't think you are allowed to weld up the holes because it screws the heat treatment right?

I finally got around to putting in the brace between the chassis rail and the firewall on the passenger's side. I did the driver's side ages ago but for some reason, I always found something else to do until now. I'm happier with this side. It turned out better than the first try. Next, I started working on the rear engine mounts (also known as gearbox mounts). I figured since I don't have my adapter plate yet, I can't make the front engine mounts. Without it I can't be certain of where the engine and gearbox sit relative to each other so any mounts I make with my makeshift MDF plate may not line up properly when it put the steel one in. However, I can make the gearbox mounts because I do know where that will sit relative to the hole in the tunnel. So that was my next move. I used the Turbo Yoda method to hang the gearbox while I built the mount for it. This lets me hang around underneath the box as much as I want without running into something holding it up from the bottom. Also, thanks to the threads, I could raise or lower the box as much as I wanted with plenty of precision to align everything properly. I set the angle of the engine to be the same as the stock crossflow in dad's car. This means I don't have to worry about the driveshaft angles being out on the U-joints. From here on the photos start to get a bit spotty because I just had my head down and completely forgot to take enough photos. Oh well. Anyway, I started but making a mount to pick up the points used to mount the black bit below the output shaft in this photo: (That's not my photo because I forgot) It is some sort of steel block rubber mounted to the trans but not mounted to anything else. Possibly some sort of vibration dampener. Who knows. Anyway, I used it as a template to make a similar plate out of 5 or 6mm steel plate (I forget which), which also has mounting points for an off the shelf mount. Something like this: I reused the press in studs from the original mount but cut the tops off and welded them in with lots and lots of amps on the TIG. Then I made it pretty. I used captive nuts rather than tapping the plate, mostly because we only have a bottom tap in the pitch I want and I couldn't get the bastard to start. So nuts it is. What are the nuts for you ask? They bolt to an off the shelf, out of focus powerglide trans mount like this: It's nice and low profile (and cheap) and will fit really well. Here is the whole assembly in place. Next I started on the car side of the mounts. I wanted to more or less copy the design that the factory used. These are a couple of boxes that are welded to the tunnel with some tapped doubler plates behind the mounting surface. The advantage of doing it this way is that there are no penetrations in the floor, so fewer opportunities for water to enter and start causing rust. Also, bolts sticking through the floor just suck in general. So it started with a cardboard template to get the shape right, then I started to transfer it to some 2mm sheet (the same as the factory mounts). Then I made the doubler plate out of 10mm plate. I managed to get the tap to start this time so I made a real nice job of them. Then I welded them in place. This was great fun because it was the hottest I've ever run the welder and laying the fillets in there just felt fantastic. Finally, I fully welded the seams and bent the flanges over. This is it compared to the original. Pretty good I reckon. Then I tacked them in and completely forgot to take any photos. Yay!! I'm planning on putting the car on a rotisserie to stitch weld the chassis rails so I'll fully weld them then. For now though, I'll just leave them tacked; I really hate welding on my back. Finally after all that, I started on the crossmember itself. Starting with a cardboard template in terrible lighting. Of course. Then I started to transfer it to a piece of box section I picked out which happened to fit the powerglide mount spot on. And then I forgot to take photos while I cut it out and bent it to shape. In any case, take my word for it that I did. And here it how it turned out: You'll notice the gearbox looks a bit crooked. It is actually clocked approximately 2.5 degrees clockwise relative to the car from this perspective, and offset to the passenger's side by about 10mm, all for a very good reason. I'll go into that later on. I still need to cut some of the green off the ends, drill the powerglide mount holes, and finish weld the joins. Other than that, it's pretty good. It's 3mm plate so I don't think it will need gussets between the bottom and the mounting flanges, though I might do it anyway later on. We'll see. In other news, I've been looking into diff upgrade options for a while now and I think I may have come across a very viable deal. I was lookinginto a hilux diff, but they proved to be harder to find than I expected. They also don't seem to have many options for decent crusing ratios, as well as options to easily (read cheaply) convert to four stud, which I really want to keep for my Cheviot Turbos. So instead what I've found is an R31 Skyline diff nearby for $150. I saw that @Rhubarb77 had used one in his turbo Pinto MkII so I know it can be shortened to fit and will obviously hold over 300hp easily (which might be part of future plans). It's four stud already, and I can get a bolt in LSD 3.54:1 center section from the wreckers down the road for another $150 or so. Those are the positives. The negatives are as follows: It has no brakes at the moment, disks or calipers, and the stud pattern is 4x114.8 rather than my mag's 4x108. I have thought that I could put the rears in a mill and slot the holes slightly to fit but I don't know how well that would work. Does anyone else have any experience in this sort of area? Should I pull the trigger and buy the diff or do I have better options? Let me hear your suggestions or comments here: Cheers

Yeah they are Prelude seats. I'm not a massive fan of the weird headrest setup they have but I have a plan for that and they were free, so I can't complain.

Brilliant. Gotta love bureaucracy don't you?

Now that the tunnel was finalised I could finally get to welding in the seat mounting boxes. You'll recall way back in October of 2016 I folded up some channels and made them fit in place of the old seat boxes. Something like this: I held off welding them in at the time because I thought I would have to get a cert man to come and have a look at them before I could. It turns out a simple email with photos was enough to make him happy but in retrospect, I am very happy I held off. If I had welded them in it would have been a nightmare doing the tunnel modifications. As it was, it was still a bit of a mish but that made it a lot easier. Now though, the profile on the inside end of each box doesn't fit the new tunnel, so I had to modify them to make them fit the new tunnel shape. That done, I wire-brushed and thoroughly cleaned the floor that would be underneath the box, as well as the underside of the box itself, then painted both with a couple of coats of Hammerite. I made sure the steel directly underneath where I was going to weld had no paint on it before I went around the edges with some weld through primer. That done, I got it tacked in place and checked the fit with the seat. Happy with that, I marked and tacked where I wanted each stitch weld to go, then fully welded it in. Meanwhile I had been doing all the same processes to the rear seat mounts too: They shouldn't be going anywhere soon. Then it was a case of repeating everything once more on the other side. I think I'm finally getting the hang of the MIG now too. I made some pretty good looking welds on these bits; one I'm particularly proud of: Pretty shit photo but you get the idea. Then, of course, it would be rude not to bolt the seats in and make broom broom noises. While I was in there I mocked the rear seat up to see how it would fit with the new seats. With both seats at the back of their travels, this is the leg room you get in the back. Doesn't look too bad. Nevermind, it sucks ass. It probably wouldn't be too bad for short trips but bugger driving to Auckland like that. Oh well, I'm not going to be sitting back there so who cares? Also had a bit of a premonition. Look how much crap you can fit in the back! After sitting in it for a while, I couldn't help myself and just had to bolt the door on to hang my arm out the window. Note my false ground level with the bucket and wood. Feels pretty good to get into and out of. Now I can start working on engine mounts or something. It's all feeling a lot closer now.

I always seem to read back over my previous post and find that I mention something about finishing something in the next few days. Then I check the date and realise it was over a month ago. Woops. Not long after I posted the last update I had to take two weeks to turn this: Into this: Some muppet (me) ran out of talent on a wet intersection and made an adjustment to a nearby fence. So I spent a while sorting all that out before finally getting back to what matters. Picking back up on the brace, I used some paper to make templates of the large flat panels that Would be needed to weld it all to the floor. I can't believe it has taken me this long to figure out that using magnets instead of tape in these situations is such a good idea, but, there you go. Then it's the standard procedure of tracing that onto steel and gluing it all together. And offer it up to check the fit. The camera angle makes it look a bit crooked but it's pretty good in reality. I gave all the welds a good clean up then coated it in a couple of good thick layers of Hammerite. I initially intended to use POR15 for this but the local shop has stopped supplying it for whatever reason and the guy said this was just as gooder so I figured it's better than nothing. Here's a comparison shot between the factory brace and my version. Note that I sprayed weld through primer everywhere that it was appropriate in addition to the heavy duty rust preventative. I've had issues in the past with this particular primer making for a spitty farty weld, so I cleaned off all the actual spots where the welds would be. As it turns out, I probably didn't need to but it did make for a lovely weld. Which you can marvel at here: It really was such a nice change to be welding good new steel to steel rather than burning holes in thin factory stuff all the time. And with that, I am finally back to where I was five months ago. Well with a much larger tunnel now but you get what I mean.

Very cool car man. I'm glad you're leaving it as is for now, it looks perfect just the way it is.

Yeah makes sense. The hardest but for me is as soon as it makes any sort of hole it just instantly runs away on you and turns to shit. Then it's all about trying to fill holes in old thin English tin and that's never fun.

The bug is looking sweet man. BTW, not sure how long you've had that link in there but you're a godsend for showing me the photobucket fix chrome extension. It saves so much frustration. Legend.