Nissan 370Z Forum - GT-R R35 Plenum Test Fitment on my VQ37HR

Right, little update from Chris, after we've been chatting yesterday.

Quote:

"About 3 years or so I looked at the forums and after having decided to keep my car NA I looked into all possiblities to make more HP - did exhaust, 300cpi cats, manifolds, gen3 intake, NST pulleys. I didnt want to alter the engine internals like pistons etc. cause I track my car on all german and european raceways during the year and thats about the only purpose I have it for - no daily driver. This year I will compete in the first time attack series here in germany so the ultimate primary is reliablity!

When I first saw pics of that 1000HP build from GTM where they test fitted the GTR manifold I was in love. So I thought as everything else for this car is already avail and so many people pray for the GTR conversion I said to myself this would be a project I can be recognized for in the Z world - and having awesome friendship to a automotive parts designer I accepted the challenge and didnt want to stop until the goal is reached, my car running with that manifold.

Well, I wasnt aware what I decided to do the easiest part was buying a usied GTR manifold - then things went seriously. So many problems to solve - but as I have annouced already to make it happen I couldnt stop for my own piece of mind. First we discovered that the heads of the GTR have a totally different flange pattern, so a reuse of either the GTR lower nor the 370Z lower was possible. We had to create a hybrid with Z head flanges and GTR upper plenum flanges. Next problem was that the Z incorporates the injectors in the lower manifold so its not a simple cut&welding job but real CAD construction.

I wanted a design I can put together here at my shop so I dont need to have a cast iron - problem with cast iron is that the initial costs are really high and you have to order so many units at once that the financial effort is huge, and you cannot simply modify the design and evolve the part as once you have the cast iron negative you are doomed to produce with that to get your initial money back.

So I wanted a welded solution - we designed the lower flanges and the upper flanges - but the flange design is extremely difficult as you need to make a transition from the head ports to the upper plenum ports and connect both with round tubes. The CAD design in the end was one of the easy parts - cost me quite some money as this is nothing someone does for free but there was a result we could work with and the drawings looked awesome

The really PITA now was to have it acutally made - as our complex design asked for a 5-axis CNC machine which either not many shops own or those who do asked obscene prices, and I wanted just ONE - as a prototype for my car to test and fit and race before I would be eager to offer it to any one

Therefore I delayed the production for many months - at this point I had invested about $5000 in research and parts and construction already with nothing else than a drawing and CAD files for some CNC shop. You can imagine that my motivation has decreased at this point - having invested quite some money and no chance to transfer to the real world as just the prototype will cost another 10K+.

But over the months I continued to speak to CNC shops all over Germany and finally found one which made the 3 flanges (actually thats it, three f***ing flanges, some straight piping and a lot of welding) for under 5K.

I saved some money over the months and finally decided that I wanted to finish the project no matter what.

I ordered the 3 flanges, ordered the pipes, ordered a new aluminum welding machine and finally removed my stock intake manifold and started the build. I made my adapter and fitted it to my car.

http://seology.com/350z/2014-06-06_07-59-14.jpeg

Due to the welding I had to hand polish and grind every runner up and down to make the transition from oval lower to round to upper spheric perfectly smooth.

http://seology.com/350z/2014-06-06_07-59-52.jpeg

When the upper plenum was mounted we found out that the throttle bodies need to be relocated - happily I had the stillen gen3 already so I simply cut the pipes going into the front fascia and made it fit. The water cooling for tb was also removed - you could reuse it but for looks throw it away.

Here you see the welding of my prototype ON the car to make it a perfect fit - took 2 days and a lot of argon gas.

http://seology.com/350z/2014-06-06_08-00-49.jpeg

http://seology.com/350z/2014-06-06_08-01-17.jpeg

First I thought we need a different fuel rail but as I wanted to keep the design simple as possible and so that everybody would be able to install it to his car we found a way to keep the stock fuel system. Well of course you can use other rails but thats only an option not a need.

http://seology.com/350z/2014-06-06_08-02-06.jpeg

http://seology.com/350z/2014-06-06_08-02-31.jpeg

http://seology.com/350z/2014-06-06_08-02-55.jpeg

http://seology.com/350z/2014-06-06_08-03-14.jpeg

Above you see the finished prototype unit with rails and injectors installed. See that grinding in the runners - perfectly smoothed by my own hands during hours and hours.

http://seology.com/350z/2014-06-06_08-04-09.jpeg

Finished - no CEL codes, all sensors, pipes, hose, etc. are connected, idles completely stock, no ECU mod necessary, simply install, fire up and drive.

As I track the car 99% of the time I also wanted to find a solution for the strut bar - we tried to make the manifold as low as possible but no chance to reuse the factory strut
thats why the GT-R has none over the engine also, same problem.

http://seology.com/350z/2014-06-06_08-05-06.jpeg

So here is what the engine bay currently looks:

http://seology.com/350z/2014-06-06_08-05-55.jpeg

What we found while playing around with uprev and our inhouse dyno is that we have good gains across the torque band - power is also increased slightly in the low and mid range but for the top range we would need to alter the VVEL to really use the higher air flow which is not possible with OSIRIS currently, but for your Greddy Twin Turbo setup it should be awesome!

Adrian if you really want one of those I would be happy to reactivate the machinery and figure out a price. If you want feel free to share everything we discussed at the forums - of course it would make things easier if I order to CNC more parts at a time."

This is the chat I had with Chris yesterday. I will make sure I get some price estimates and some dyno sheets from him and post them here as soon as possible.

To make this happen, I would need a list of how many people are seriously interested in buying this, providing the price is fine. I would make a wild guess, cheaper than the GTM version. I will stay in touch with Chris and keep you guys updated here.

Please express your interest by putting your name in the list bellow:

1. octet
2.
3.
4.
5.

Adrian