Vk304

Working on the intake problem has been a challenge, to start I would have kept the original one but it's just not possible.

It too tall and I would have to modify the seat and seatbelt anchoring, not keen on that at all, so my second option was buy a aftermarket short runner one, but this van is going to be using all factory ecu turbo etc. I would lose a lot of torque across the low-mid range rpm, besides that may not fit either due to the engines proximity to the 'firewall' . 

Well I can weld aluminium, so I'd make an intake to suit my needs .

Keeping the runners as long as I could fit was the goal

Aaand more previous f-ups come to haunt me, the driveshaft was 25mm too short , note the white marker on it, a cert fail, it was like this in the other van too and its symptoms were vibrating under load and a yoke that showed signs of wear due to excess play, and so now I had to fix this... new driveshaft?

Nice and level, next up it was time to mock up the gearbox, I wasn't crawling under the van with that filthy thing so couple cans of degreaser and a water blast it came out better than I thought it would.

Put it on without clutch or anything.

All I had to do was slot the mount Holes a little and it fit right up for now...

So I decided to start with moving the engine forward, and down, I tried to use the s15 mounts but they were big and chunky and were going to hit the turbo if I moved the engine where i wanted it... 

Thinking that if I got some smaller diameter mounts and the tallest possible to get close to the 70mm or so the sr mounts were I'd have something close to working, there were other considerations such as not lowering the engine too much and risk the sump becoming one with the road, or hitting the crossmember and the angle it would be when resting under the engine cover lip. In other words it was faking tight.

I had a look at the mount shop website and found some BMW mounts that were the right diameter, but a bit short maybe ... nothing some spacers wouldn't fix, but turns out I diddnt need spacers and after hacking some prototype engine mounts together it fits good .

A lot of problems . .. .

The van I got was not the same, it's a different engine bay ,I had to remove the intake and cut the van :/--temporarily I swear! just to seat the engine, well the mounts were on a bad angle, the engine was on a bad angle just to fit... no go ,too bad , back to drawing board! 

Then It got technical pretty quick, i wanted to find out if the wheelbase and the mounts (engine/box) would be the same as in the donor van... but after looking at the crossmembers, and the differences. No. 

Also found the subframe had 25mm spacers to lower the engine to make it fit under the covers (sr is a lot taller than the a15 or 2litre that they had) --note in the picture they have inserts welded in the spacer, so it can't crush when you tighten the bolts, a cert requirement--- as well as quality bolts with washers and spring washers, the right size for the bolt! 

Simple fix right? Swap the donor Van's crossmember with the new van..

So I put the spacers and the other crossmember in ( my goal was to keep the seats- covers- seatbelts all factory so the cert guy can't give me grief about any of that! ) 

Well after swapping some bushings around so it had nice bushings and cleaning the grease off, I put it in the van ready to accept the engine....

Ended up selling the seats, turns out they were s13 silvia seats and were in good shape, so they got shipped to the south island to go into a Silvia that needed original seats

Yea 3sge would have been a nice motor for a van 

I've had a couple bongos before but I diddnt even  know what a c22 van was untill now, only ever seen the bongos and serena's and econovan hiace (pre 90 and 90s) no c20 or c22, so it's cool to have one 

It probably is, I just found it funny so I got the first one and now it's just turned into this, probably not the safest choice no , I've seen a few rotary ones , probably worse of a deathtrap

Pulled out of the crimp quite easily, but still dont know why someone wouldn't just solder the pump wires to the housing as I did.. the wires were long enough ....

Some dooodgy wiring on the positive pump wire

I looked for something easy to do while I had some time, and figured I'd throw in the silvia fuel pump, removing the old pickup assembly and almost put the modified one in when I noticed a potentially dangerous situation...

This left the other van without a diff, but that's fine just dropped it on the wheels to become a lawn ornament

I took them both to work, cut the mounts off both and really just took the 2 leaf brackets and welded them on the bigger ex-coil spring one (with some measuring), swapped out some better parts to the big one, better brake drums, cylinders, a handbrake cable .. painted it and put it in . Diddnt really take much work to do . 

Now I had done some research, and turns out the donor van had a h190 diff with coil springs and was quite tough, whereas this new van only had a h165, a lot weaker, so I went to go swap them out ... however the new one was a leaf spring..

By this time i had removed the sr20det and serena drivetrain from the donor van and i figured out it had quite a few good parts to it.

I figured well, its probably the exact same chassis and wheelbase with similar engine, year, manual, so i went to pick it up, test drive fine, so we paid the guy and left for home.

It was quite loud and rattly, but got some petrol and went to go uphill, well, it diddnt like going up hill, or on anything other than going down hills.

gutless!  But still drove so drove it until the front light disappeared on the right side...  

A head light had blown and the indicator/park light assembly was flopping around in the wind , at the same time a cop follows me.. well he just passed and i pulled over and took the light off and chucked in the van. got home safe .