I tested the "revving in neutral" thing on the freeway last night. In neutral rolling at highway speeds, 7AT will rev well past the 5k mark (I didn't try to hit the 7.5 limiter though). So the 5k limit on 7AT must be triggered by being in park, or being at low/zero speed, one of the two.

Also, today I removed my spare and subwoofer (radio actually sounds ok without it, to me), and removed the XM and Voice/Bluetooth modules. I left all the carpeting and plastic in afterwards. No pics, sorry :) My car is Touring w/o Nav, which is "Bose without Navigation" in the Service Manual. The removed peices are 7, 8, and 9 on this diagram:

http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...ice-manual.png

The stock head unit responded fine to the changes. The voice buttons on the steering wheel and the SAT button on the radio now just do nothing, there are no wierd errors or anything.


I can slightly feel that the backend got relatively lighter from this, but it's not too bad, since my bag of tools and emergency equipment (which I had behind the passenger seat before) was pretty hefty and made up for some of the lost weight.

The spot I removed those units from looks like a great place for either battery relocation or to install a Magden performance computer. Although on the other hand, mounting them further to the rear (sub/spare) area will help with weight distribution more.

http://www.the370z.com/%5BIMG%5Dhttp....png%5B/IMG%5D

So the compartment (or rectangular whole, from what I can tell from the images) that these units came out of is basically the size and depth of a common battery, huh?

Also, I was unaware of Magden performance computers, so i looked them up. the website looks nice, but not much info, and it seems a lot of features are Coming soon. I am interested in something of this sort, and was looking at Cypher. Do you have any experience with Magdens? Sounds like you need to provide your own screen, they seem to transmit in a variety of signal protocols, so you could just use a random flatscreen, but I am interested in how the information is presented.

Thanks,

It's not a comparment, it's more of a side-to-side channel through the car, just behind and below the big grey bar you see behind your seats. The Bose Amplifier is also mounted in this channel. Lots of stuff could be fit there, and if I get a Magden (or something similar) I may mount it there. A battery would fit fine too, but I really think I'll end up putting the battery further back just to help with balance.

Are you talking about Cipher from UpRev? When they finally release their 370Z stuff, I'm planning to set up a laptop with Cipher+Osiris from them for tuning and detailed datalogging, BCM access, etc, etc. The Magden unit is more for use while driving, so I can keep a better eye on some of the ECU stats that we don't have (good) gauges for stock, and set limit alerts, etc. AFAIK the magden already works pretty well from what I've read on forums, etc. They're still releasing new software updates as they go though, to enable more features.

As for screens, Magden recommends and sells a 7" Lilliput touchscreen that works with their unit. For touch input, it needs to be USB (basically mouse/trackball/tablet emulation). What I'd really like to be able to figure out, is how to get a single touch screen with a decent GPS and the magden hooked up, both using the touch interface (switch between the two). Really, I could do that with the recommended Lilliput display and a VGA/USB switch, except I haven't found any decent headless GPS units that have USB touchscreen input... Someday I'll do some googling and get this sorted out.

If you mount stuff against that beam, I'd suggest installing it on the aft side of the beam... braking always produces the most g's... that's how I installed my battery
http://i656.photobucket.com/albums/u...b/IMG_5296.jpg

I had a pioneer avic that had touchscreen gps and it had a remote a/v (composite) input... but there's no way i know of to get the touchscreen signals sent remote to another unit.... i just don't see that as a likely consumer electronics solution - you're prob going to have to do something custom... or go with something like the avic and figure out another way to manage your inputs... e.g., remote mouse

Yep, that's what i was talking about. I am considering having a small laptop permanently hooked to the car, maybe tucked in somewhere, with a remote screen mounted so that I could have the desired parameters a fingertip touch away.

You know, with a little code writing one could create their own interface to display GPS data. I was working on something similar a while back, using GPS and accelerometer data. It would be up to Magden to allow us to interface their data into our own graphics. Wouldn't that be cool? Totally something I am willing to explore if you're interested. If we do go that route, by the way, there are some amazing GPS receivers we could use, some that work off of reflective signals so they work even indoors. One I recall was tested inside a mall, and worked all the way through. Precision goes down, but still very acceptable. This same GPS worked very well when it's antenna was located underneath the driver's seat!

Anyways, sounds like an awesome project.

Well, I happen to be a coder, too, but honestly it sounds like a lot of work, and I don't think Magden's box is very open to modding anyways.

If you want to go that route, it would probably be easier to install a generic Car-PC and use open GPS and OBD-II software with, as you said, a really good GPS receiver. However, I'm not sure if you'll find any generic open hardware interfaces to write software against for high-speed data acquisition that talks our Nissans' CAN protocol. The low-speed generic OBD-II updates are too slow for some gauges (like RPM warnings).

I'm really looking for something more turnkey this time around (well at least, more turnkey than writing my own software).

The more I think about it though, I rarely use GPS. I have a small Garmin Nuvi unit I occasionally stick on the window, I may just stay with whipping that out when necessary and just hook up the Magden unit to the LCD alone and avoid a lot of complexity.

Yep, that last paragraph is definitely true, and the easiest solution. I know nothing of the Nissan CAN protocol or OBD-II, although I am sure the latter could be learned online. The former might be tricky.

That would be an awesome piece of hardware (with software) to have in the car, though, huh? A screen to tell you all kinds of parameters being read from the car, and to provide GPS data. Throw in a 3-axis accelerometer and you can do your own acceleration, braking, skid pad, speed traps, etc. testing, all in one. I imagine there might be a decent market for that.

Hmmm, off to look for Nissan's CAN protocol. The guys at UpRev figured it out, I wonder how. Do you have more info on it?

Well CAN is an industry standard of some kind (Car Area Network), but apparently mfgs have their own proprietary extensions or something of that sort. I don't know all the details, I never looked at all of this in depth. But apparently, being able to use CAN and/or mfg-specific protocols or extensions is what allows units like the Magden one to read data at high update rates. Baseline OBD-II communications only send updates at 3Hz intervals (3 updates per second), and that's assuming you're only monitoring a single value. With 5+ values being read to feed your digital gauges, basic OBD-II would be too slow to be useful for some gauges.

As noted in the oil change thread, mileage is ramping up quickly. Crossed the 3600 mark this morning trying to get back to my place through all the flooding around here.

And if anyone was still worried about driving in rainy weather with the Stillen Gen 3 intakes... check out these pics. I snapped these with my cellphone as I was driving last night. I didn't even get shots of the worst of it. At times the rain was blowing straight sideways. This was at about 5:30pm, should have been bright and sunny outside at the time. The section of highway I took these on is now closed due to flooding as of this morning:

http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...2280-rain3.jpg
http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...2279-rain2.jpg
http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...2278-rain1.jpg

I can definitively confirm now that there are no rain issues with the Stillen Gen 3 intakes :)

OMG, wstar it is horrible the past two days. If the wind was not so bad the rain would have been ok, but the wind just poured buckets onto my car as I drove home, glad I do not have my Z just yet. ;)

What part of town are those pictures?

Those pics were taken on Beltway 8, southbound on the west side between richmond and 59, on the way over to pick up my dinner date. Took two hours to get home from Clear Lake this morning just from re-routing around all the flooded streets. All of 8 was closed between about westheimer and 59.

Yeah I saw that, I just have to get to I-10 and I am in the clear, still took me an hour (normally 20 minutes). So many roads are flooded or they are just shutting them down anyways. Glad to hear the Z was fine through this weather, calms my nerves. How was driving though in the Z, any spinning of the tires or anything?

I've found my Z to be a fantastic machine in wet conditions, actually (not just today, but also during earlier, lighter rains). I generally leave VDC on in wet conditions, I think it's a real plus (especially if you have to hit a deep puddle with one side of the car somewhat unexpectedly at a little more speed than you planned ;)), so keep that in mind.

As far as low-speed driving and cornering go, I'm really quite impressed with the RE050's from the sport package. I expected I'd be ice-skating on them in wet conditions, but they hold up admirably. I drop my speed a little bit to match conditions, but overall I'm still tearing it up on the wet pavement pretty well.

What's really impressive is the highway performance though. I suspect that may be more due to our aerodynamics, downforce, and those little mini-spoilers in front of the front tires (in the sport setup) than the tires themselves. In conditions yesterday where other people were running their wipers full blast and driving 60 in a 70 with white knuckles from gripping the wheel in fear, I was running 90-110-ish in the open stretches with no stability problems (and no wipers thanks to Rain-X. The faster you go, the better it works ;)).

Just an update on Magden's stuff. I'm not planning to order one for another month or so (I've gotta keep my car toy spending *somewhat* within reason here), but I emailed their tech guys about it today just to ask about some basic compatibility stuff. My main question was about ECU compatibility and data update rates, premised on the assumption that our ECU is substantially similar to the 2008 G37 ECU, and this was the response from Magden I wanted to share:

g37 forum link... + there are other threads
ECU/Chip mods & managment systems - MyG37

Had a near-miss last night. I downshifted to 2 to push the rear a bit before braking into a hard right 90 into a parking lot entrance (it's a fun technique, what do you call that? Power-assisted braking slide?). Conditions were wet, which I was calculating well for. What I failed to notice was that while the street and the parking lot were both made of wonderfully grippy flat pavement, there was about a 10 foot stretch of the parking lot entranceway that was paved with some stupid cobblestones (nice and slippery).

The car made the 90 attitude-wise of course thanks to the slide, but then kept on drifting sideways once the tires hit those evil cobblestones, and I missed slamming the side of the car into a curb and big stone centerpiece with the name of the shopping center on it by about 3-6 inches before it caught traction and started moving forward again. It probably would've been a light tap instead of a near miss if it weren't for VDC saving my *** on the slippery, uneven cobblestone surface.

So remember, VDC+Rain = good. Being an idiot and pushing the car like that heading into a parking lot = kinda silly and not worth it ;)

And to whatever moron thought it was a very fashionable idea to put a section of slippery, uneven road surface right at parking lot entrance people will be cornering into, I hate you :p

haha careful man, bumps like that can bend suspension pieces slightly which you cant notice, but they start throwing off everything when u want to align the car etc.

Be careful with that beast!!!!

I cant wait until I get my Z and I can make a journal. These things rock.:rock:

Changed my oil to 300V this evening. I was able to do the change without lifting the car or using ramps, as predicted.

The only snag I ran into is that the magnetic drain plug I ordered had the wrong threads (too coarse, the stock drain plug has finer threads). I didn't end up ordering the Kics one semtex did, but I used the same thread specs when ordering from another place. Either those thread specs are wrong (someone else would have noticed by now I think) or they shipped me the wrong part. So the stock plug went back in for now with a new crush washer. I'm using a FilterMag on the filter anyways, so the magnetic plug isn't that big a deal.

I'm going to take the mag drain plug with the bad threads to Home Depot tomorrow and test it on some nuts there to verify what size they sent me, that should illuminate this issue.

The Nissan Ester Oil that was in the car is bottled up for Blackstone, we'll see what they say about it.

Various pics:

Supplies:

http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...drain-plug.jpg

The view from above while the oil was draining:

http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...view-above.jpg

Tried to get a shot of the clearance between the drain pan and the oil pan, but the lighting is pretty bad under there. This was shot while trying to hold a flashlight on it. This was a generic low-profile-looking round black drain pan I found at Wal-Mart, they probably stock the same ones nation-wide:

http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...ramps-used.jpg

And this is a shot of the inner and outer surfaces of the FilterMag. It's got a bunch of Neodymium magnets set up in rows on a curved plastic surface. You just snap it onto the outside of your oil filter and leave there for the duration, and slide it off and move it to the new filter at each change. Later I'm going to cut open the filter I just took off (which was using the FilterMag) and see how much metal shavings were laying in there from the magnets:

http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...outer-edge.jpg

http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...um-magnets.jpg

Oh and back on the subject of Motul...

Yes, it smells great, you really do want to drink it. The metal cans are retarded. The outside is flimsy and they're completely filled with no real air inside (I guess to preserve the oil better). I made a mess opening and pouring the first one, but I learned quickly and the other cans went fine. Set it down on a flat level surface, don't squeeze the outside, and remove that inner plastic seal very slowly and carefully :)

When I test drove the car on the new oil, it really did feel like the engine was happier and smoother. Then again, given how small the effect could possibly be, and knowing what I know about human psychology, most likely that was all in my head as I prayed for some visible benefit from an oil that's priced like liquid gold.

I would argue I always feel a difference...but like you said, it may be in my head...but I swear it feels smoother!

Well maybe it really is smoother, it certainly felt better. Just no way to really measure that objectively.

The other update is that I'm pretty confident now that the last exhaust gasket replacements I need will be here Friday (thanks to Stillen, DDM, and Berk for working with me on getting them here), so hopefully I'll have my exhaust leaks all sealed up on Saturday, and I can burn in the new gaskets, retorque again on Sunday, and then get some new video clips of the final sound.

Nice work. Yeah, that Motul 300V is pretty expensive. Wouldn't it be nice if we could get a group buy on that stuff? I'd order it by the case if I could get a decent discount.

Update on the drain plug, after reviewing my order confirmation emails, the part numbers, and the mfg website, it's obvious I actually ordered the wrong one. I must have mis-clicked somewhere. I meant to order M12x1.25, but ended up ordering M12x1.5. Oh well they're $10. I ordered the correct one for next time, and now I've got more magnets to play with :)

Hey wstar,

What vendor are you buying your magnetic plug from?

Metric oil drain plugs

The website is atrocious to navigate. The correct size is the ones labelled 1040M and 1040SM on that page. The 1040M is a regular magnet and goes for $3.45, the 1040SM is $10.00 and has a neodymium magnet.

Edit: link for Neodymium info, since I've mentioned it twice here and maybe not everyone's into magnets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet

Thanks! What an awesome website, by the way! I feel like I should be partying like it's 1999.

Where did you purchase the Motul 300V?

I didn't see a local vendor stocking it, although I didn't look very hard, so I mail ordered it (and my filters and crush washers) from http://www.mynismo.com

Thanks for that.

Just a question for you... if I select 5W-30, I get "Power Racing" Motul oil, where if I select a different weight of oil, I get "Chrono" or "Power"?

If I do go ahead and purchase the oil, I will obviously get the 5W-30, but I wanted to make sure that the particular "formula" of Motul is solely dependent upon the weight of the oil.

I'm not expert whent it comes to Motul, so bear with me.

Power / Power Racing / Chrono are just names they assign to the different weights of 300V. Each weight has its own name, I suppose what the oil is best designed for in a race engine (the general idea being that super-thin oils will give you a little more power for a quick hot lap like a time trial, whereas a heavier oil will withstand the longer-term heat of a real road race better). I went with 5W-30.

Got the last of my replacement gaskets in today, so the exhaust will get fixed up tomorrow AM. Big thanks to Josh @ Stillen for sorting out some postal mishaps and getting them to me on time :tup:.

Nice - thanks for this.

ditto ! thanks wstar - i ordered mine as well

+rep on the way ! :)

I'm half done with my exhaust gasket inspection/replacement. In other words, I took everything apart but nothing's gone back together yet :)

So far most of the gaskets looked surprisingly good and would have held up fine, I guess the abuse they got wasn't as bad as I thought. The center flange gasket near the crossmember, however, had some issues:

http://www.the370z.com/members/wstar...ded-gasket.jpg

I think some of my exhaust note ugliness might have been coming here from lol.

Well I just finished up getting the gaskets in (I know that seems like an epic long time since the previous post for this job. I took lots of breaks, no sense killing myself on a hot day if nobody's paying me for it) and going for a very light test drive, and the results are f-ing awesome.

Prior to fixing the leak, I thought it sounded pretty damn good, but a little too raspy for my taste in a perfect world, and maybe had a leak to boot. Well, it did have a bad leak, and now it doesn't. The rasp and leak sounding stuff is all gone. The sound volume at low throttle/rpm dropped a bit too, but that's probably a good thing. No more waking up the neighborhood on every cold start.

The sound is insanely great now, imho, and there's no huge raspiness at any RPMs I checked. Specifically, the really ugly one around 2.5-3K rpm is gone. If you've got a similar setup and yours doesn't sound insanely great, maybe you've got a leak too :) I think I would have to move this thread to the NSFW area to describe how sexy it sounds.

Anyways, I'm babying it for now to let those gaskets fully bake in. I don't want to go through this leak mess again. I have a highway trip that I'll take real easy tomorrow (visit mom for mother's day), and then re-torque again when I get home. Then I'll start getting on it hard and get a video clip for you guys.

Congrats on getting it all sorted.

My stock exhaust is starting to sound better at WOT, also could have been that I had all the rear carpets and mats ripped out which enhanced the resonance.

Exhaust is definitely on my list but I'm not bothering with any HP mods until I get the brakes and oil temp under control.

Yeah as I said in the other thread, my oil cooler plans just moved up a notch. I'm kinda undecided on exactly how to do it given all the options we have in play though.

A thermo plate would be nice, if nothing else so I can get the oil warmed up quicker. We do have some pretty cold mornings (especially if I spend the weekend out of town further up in north texas), and it sucks as it is waiting around for the car to warm up (I really don't like getting on the revs at all until the oil gauge gets up off that bottom 140 mark at least, and it will take even longer with an unregulated cooler I suspect. Even then I don't run it hard till it hits 180 if I can help it). Also the core size thing. If some with the smaller Setrab core are thinking about upgrading... I'd rather just do it once right from the start and get a larger core (but still, I'm a fan of the Setrab in general from what I'm seeing and reading).

Then there's placement considerations. I think I want it on the driver's side all alone. Leave the passenger side for the stock and/or upgraded PS cooler, and maybe double-stack an ATF cooler there if it becomes necessary down the road.

I just haven't seen a single kit put together for that yet (thermo plate, lines long enough for driver's side, larger setrab core), and I'm a little bit scared of making my own hoses. I mean, I could probably do it fine, but it's just such a big thing if I made a tiny mistake putting those fittings on the ends.