Hurmeez

I've been thinking about a double plenum double throttle body setup made up of two stock manifolds cut down and modified to curve off outwards over each valve cover. I think that might be an interesting idea but ultimately I'll probably be more likely to do something more similar to your setup to begin with. I also really like this sort of setup http://www.absurdflow.com/miata/klde/newintake13.JPG but I might be over complicating everything for myself. 

It's funny you mention the 16mm flywheel spacer because that's actually about the same as mine. I didn't realise that was a lot really. I just figured I gotta do what I gotta do. I suppose the other option would be to machine down the mounting face of the gearbox but that's starting to sound expensive. 

I hope you're enjoying the heat over there at the moment. We've been getting some chilly mornings over here on the opposite side of the planet so I'm pretty jealous. 

Sell you one? Don't be stupid! 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Hrmsd2swrdFrLON0P7ciTptTi4wF2z1I/view?usp=sharing

That's the final drawing I came up with, including modifications I found it needed from fitting mine up. It now has a cutout to clear the thermostat housing as well as a couple of other cosmetic things. You'll still have to machine your own locating lugs and the flywheel will be an obstacle that I'll show how I overcome soon, but the bulk of the work is done with this file. Finally you'll need some countersunk screws to replace the thermostat housing bolts and you'll have to bore out the holes with an appropriate countersink bit to match the screws. That means you can leave it in the stock location and still clear the gearbox. 

Everything that follows is just to try and make this show up in a google search for someone looking for this kind of thing.

mazda KLZE KLDE RX-8 adapter plate K8 KF KJ KL V6 bellhousing rx8 

Thanks Alex! Mean's a lot coming from the guy that made me want to do mine in the first place. 

Thanks mate. I'm gonna mount the actual engine and throw her down on her feet this weekend for a proper look. I can't wait 

Before I got to cutting up my cross member, I wanted to remedy the bolt holes for the lower control arms. They had been welded up and re-drilled what looked like a couple of times; one side actually had two holes for some reason. My first course of action was to weld up the current holes so I had a solid base to start from. 

While I was there, I fully seam welded the upstand to the main cross member to add strength. 

Then I took a template off another unmodified cross member to find the location of the factory LCA bolt hole before moving it up and out by 6mm as per the bible: 

(Available here if you're interested: http://www.doublegmotorsport.com/rsprep/prepindex.html) 

Then I marked it on a group of four 2mm reinforcing plates and pilot drilled them all. Then I filled them full of holes, painted all the hidden parts with weld through primer to try and prevent rusting between the skins, then prepared to roset weld them on. 

I figured that there's no harm in beefing up these parts of the suspension so I might as well while I'm here. 

Once they were welded on I decided to weld around the edges too while I was at it. 

Now I could run a drill through the pilot holes and bingo, one cross member with reinforced LCA mounts and slightly more camber.

As a side note, the geometry doesn't make sense to me. In the book, it says that moving the holes out and up gives more negative camber when the car is raised for rallying. Surely the opposite should be true? If you are raising the cross member relative to the wheel then wouldn't you want to lower the LCA back down to compensate rather than raise it as in this example? And by extension lowering the car means you should raise the hole as I have here? Am I missing something? 

The next job was to cut off the existing engine mount brackets. I decided it was going to be much easier to fabricate new designs than to try to adapt the current ones to fit. 

One Escort cross member minus engine mounts. 

And cleaned up:  

Now I wanted to plate over between the two flanges to give myself a good solid base to build off.

This was the normal process of paper to 2mm steel.   

I only welded every other hole with the idea that I'd weld the new mounts right through this plate and into the existing flange in a triple layer sandwich.

I decided the easiest way to figure out how the mounts would end up looking will be to build them from the engine side first, and then up from the cross member to meet them. So I started with making some plates to fit the engine with paper then steel.     

I left this one oversize because there will be some fouling issues with the oil filter if I don't play my cards right, so I am playing it safe for now and leaving myself plenty of wiggle room. 

Then I spun up some appropriately heavy wall tubing and some temporary bushes to use so I don't damage the real ones while I'm welding. 

They're designed to take MKII Escort rear leaf spring bushes. This is for two reasons. Firstly, I prefer this style of engine mount because even if the bush completely collapses, the engine is still captive (albeit loose and clunky as hell), unlike a spool mount which (though very unlikely) could lead to catastrophic failure. And secondly, I have some of these specific bushes hanging out almost brand new from when the wrong set of bushes were replaced on a WOF job on the old man's car. So they're the best kind of cheap.  

Next job will be to make some upstands to space these new mounts out from the block. That shouldn't take long...

Well, tell a lie actually. First I wanted to sort out the centering of the gear stick in the gearbox hole. 

I'm not sure how I managed to get it so far rearward but I wanted to center it properly because A) it bugged me being off center like that and 2) it actually placed the engine a little further rearward than I wanted. So I modified the cross member to make it work. 

So now it's much better.

The camera angle makes it look funky but trust me it's much better. 

Now it's on to the engine mounts. 

I spoke to my regular bolt suppliers (a fantastic bunch of really genuine guys) and they were unable to get me the countersunk bolts that I needed but they did point me toward a few shops that may be able to help. So after doing a bit of running around there turned out to be no one local that would be able to sort me out. So I came up with a cunning plan. I went back to the regular guys and picked up some countersunk 12mm bolts that were way over length and god knows what pitch. Then I chucked it up and spun down the threads to be a very close fit to the inside diameter of an M12x1.25 die. Having it be a close fit helped to ensure the threads would be nice and square to the shank as I cut them. Once cut, I cut them to length and bob's your uncle. 

So from left to right you have, an original bolt, without threads, thread cut, and cut to length. 

And here they are mocked up in the plate. 

Then I went ahead and set to with my shiny new countersink. Everything went fairly well other than the drill press not being able to go as slow as I'd like and getting a little chatter but other than that not bad. One of the inserts I made to go over the 10 o'clock locating lug fell out when I drilled through the weld with the countersink. 

I was sort of expecting it and I don't reckon it'd be worth the effort to try to make such a small piece of steel fit so I'm just going to run without it. There's still plenty of contact patch for the bolt to take up on so I'm perfectly happy with it. 

With that done I could finally, finally bolt engine to gearbox and sling it into the car properly.  

Remember I first got the engine and gearbox in September of last year so this feels like the end of a project in and of itself. 

Next job, onto engine mounts. 

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.

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.