Tanaka Racing S13

The S13 we introduced a couple days ago is complete. From last post, we've fabricated mounts for the radiator fans, oil catch can, coolant reservoir, and a whole lot of other little stuff to clean up the engine bay.

Here's a close up of the coolant reservoir

We also made the mounting brackets for the radiator itself.

The car was dyno'd this past week where it made 420hp at 1.2 bar. There's definately more power to be had with a boost controller that's operational, but the goal was a reliable 400hp, so our job is done.

Guess What This Is Going To Be?

The final touches are being done on this part. We'll see how it turns out.

Tanaka Racing S13

A while back I wrote about the SR20 that had the oil pick-up that broke off. Well, that engine was from an S13 belonging to Tanaka Racing. It was originally built as a drift car competing in D1 and Formula D. Now, the owner wants to build it as a track car, but after a couple of track events, the oil pick-up broke off, and that's where the fun ended for Jake Tanaka. . .

Mr. Wakita was the one who tuned the car originally, so Jake and his team decided to bring the car to us. The build order was simple and to the point: build a motor that was bulletproof.

Something that won't end up like this.

The valve train was unscathed, so we were able to reuse the cams, valve springs, cam gears, etc, but the rest of the motor was toast. We started with a motor that was known to be good and bored it 0.5mm over. We installed a set of CP pistons and the aluminum rods that we had custom built. (See previous post on aluminum rods)

These are what they look like compared to the stock rods

And here’s a pic of the shortblock all installed.

As for the head, it originally had an unported head with a complete Tomei valve train. We've ported the head, but keeping the valvetrain the way it was.

Nice and pretty

The only difference between the new and old head is going to be the ports and the valve timing. Here’s the SR20 getting the timing adjusted.

Below is the completed motor

The motor's all put together, and now all that's left is to put the motor in. But not until we clean up all the hoses and wiring.

Here's the water bypass that we made for this SR. On a stock SR20, there are a LOT more hoses that are underneath the intake manifold. This way, there's only lines that bypass the thermostat and go to the IAC valve for more stable idle. All the hoses for heater, throttlebody, etc, etc, have been removed.

And here's the motor installed into the car. I really wish that we had a before and after pic of this car.

Before we installed the motor, we drilled out all of the stock brackets that were not being used, and we repainted the front half of the engine bay. All the brackets that were still needed were remade using aluminum.

As I mentioned, the wiring was redone. In fact, most of the engine harness was completely uncovered; all of the connectors not being used were deleted, and redone.

The car is now completed. With the aluminum rods, forged CP pistons, and the Exedy Twin plate, the car literally revs like a motorcycle. The car is insane. Every car guy should be able to experience this in a lifetime. Very very responsive.

I can't wait to take this car to the dyno.

BTW, the turbo is a HKS GT-RS connected with a custom 3mm thick turbo manifold. This is the type of car that won't get much love by the internet warriors, but it’s the best type of race motor--Responsive, powerful, and bulletproof

Oil Temp and Pressure Sensors

Have you ever bought an aftermarket gauge and struggled trying to figure out where to put the sensor? The problem with these sensors is that all the wires can clutter the engine bay. So here’s what we did…


This is on the silver R32 drag car that we’re working on.

MCR Bumper

You might remember this R34 from a previous post of this pic.

As you can see, the car looked really nice. Nice and stock, but the owner of the car wasn't happy with that. He wanted to take it a step further. This is what the car now looks like now.
It got a MCR front bumper, Z-tune fenders, side skirts, a GIANT SARD GT wing, and some Volks.

Looks so nice.

More on the Honda Radiator

Sorry I haven’t been posting lately, we’ve been really busy. The good news is that I have a whole lot of pics to post up here in the next couple of days.

First in order is the rest of that Honda radiator. With the K20 in the Integra, the radiator designed for the B18 doesn’t quite fit. So we cut the inlet of the radiator and plugged the old inlet.
Here’s the old inlet
And here’s the new one
This is why it wouldn’t have fit.

3 Times a Charm

So I’ve posted a couple pics of the project Miata (or the engine) a while ago. That was the 1st manifold, I believe. Long story short, we’re on the third one.

Here are the three manifolds lined up all pretty like.

One thing I've noticed about people in this industry (myself included) is that many of us don't take our own advice. It might be with the frequency of oil changes, the amount of boost we run, or going cheap on a manifold... whatever. Maybe this is because the labor is free. (not really free, but there's no out of pocket expense) I don't know. But for whatever reason, most mechanics will try a part out on our own car that we'd tell a customer to NEVER under ANY circumstance even think about buying. Well this is what happens when people don’t take their own advice… Twice…

Here's the first manifold. It's a see through...

You can clearly see daylight through the manifold... but wait, there's more!

And another crack. This manifold lasted a little over two months before it gave out.

Here's the "upgraded" version of the last one. There were a couple of extra ribs and gussets that made this manifold a little more promising, but looks can be deceiving. This one lasted a whopping TWO WEEKS!

As you can see in this picture, the revisions designed to stiffen up this manifold didn't quite hold up. I just couldn't keep the day light out and the exhaust in.

After all this, the owner of the car, Take of Tamacy Tuned, deciced to finally take his own advice and go with a cast manifold. He found one on ebay with a T3 flange.

We searched the shop for a turbo that would work, but we came out empty handed. Since 200hp was the goal of the car and we had a SR20 red top turbo laying around the shop, we decided to weld a T25 flange on the manifold and call it a day.

I'll have more pics of the making of the downpipe and what-not as soon as we get to it.

Welding Stuff

This is an Integra radiator. This guy's set-up worked pretty good for him, 'till he put a K20 in it. The K20 fits pretty good, but the radiator and the intake manifold didn't get along. About 1 inch from the intake manifold is the inlet of the radiator. So we chopped off the inlet and added one on the other side.

Here's the picture of the surgery.

R34 Brakes

Ever since Nissan quit making brakes for the GTR, the brakes have been more than adequate from the R33 and up. More than adequate on the street, but you can get them to fade after several hard laps. There are ways to make the brakes hold up better with higher performance pads and what-not, but this guy decided to take it several steps further.

Here’s the comparison of the front brakes.

And here are the rear.

They work pretty good, I guess...

Ported SR Head

We got done porting a SR20 head the other day. Here are a couple pics.

Oil Coolers

A while back, I had a conversation with a customer about oil coolers for his GTR. Just about every manufacturer that offers oil coolers makes at least one kit for the GTR. "which one is best?" he asked.

There are many ways to judge a quality of a product. For an oil cooler, the obvious measuring stick is the cal/H. It's an universal mesurment, and just about every manufacturer lists it in their catalogs. Other considerations are pressure drop, filter relocation, and a thermostat.

But what good is a big efficient cooler if the air just goes around it?

Which brings me to my point, and a universal law, that you get what you pay for. Perhapse the best oil cooler kit for the GTR is the Nismo. Obviously, it's VERY well thought out, comes with all kinds of goodies, and it makes full use of the core with some very nice ducting. Here's the bad news--it's nearly $2000. We don't have any cars with a Nismo Oil Cooler, so this is from the Nismo catalog.

A more affordable option is the HKS kit. This kit, pictured below, is $800 which is actually reasonably cheap. They kept the cost down by going with a sandwich adaptor, not including a filter relocation, but it does come with -12 lines and a thermostat.

And a side view.

I'm not trying to sound like a Nismo or a HKS rep, but both of these are very quality pieces that I'd recomend. There are, undoubtedly, other brands that make quality pieces, and even if it doesn't come with bolt-on ducting, it's not that difficult to fabricate something like that.

There's a feature that I wished all oil coolers had--a drain. It seems like such an obvious concept, but I've yet to find an oil cooler with one, so this is what we did.

Taking the Slop Out of a R34 GT-t Steering.

For most people, there's nothing wrong with the steering feel of the R34 GT-t. That is until you get a chance to drive the R34 GTR. That's what happened to one of our customers. Actually, he's owned several GTRs before he got his hands on this GT-t, and he was not satisfied with the differences between the GTR and GT-t.

Many people think that, aside from the Engine and Drivetrain, the differences of these two cars are only skin deep. If that were true, the price difference between the two cars would be much less. I'm not going to get into the vast differences here, but here's a big difference.


Above is the steering rack taken out of the R34 GT-t


And here's a brand new steering rack from a BNR34.

As you can see, the mounting is very different between the two models. That's part of the reason why the steering feel is so different. This, of course, means it's not a bolt-on type of modification. So here's what we did...

And from a different angle...

It's not just the mounting that's different. Since the whole subframe design is entirely different between the two models, so are the lines. Instead of fabricating lines from scratch, we opted to use/modify the GTR and GT-t lines. A little time on the lathe and a little brazing later, it was all done.

Here's the midified rack and lines installed.

Unfortuantely, we won't find out how well this combo will work untill we get the car running. Still more work to be done...

Another SR20 that had a BAD day

We got a S13 in the shop a while ago that suffered from a rod knock. Naturally, most people would assume a miss-shift or something of the sort. We were slightly puzzled by what we found upon dissassembly...


As you can see in the picture, the oil pick-up (strainer) had broken off at the head! I, myself, had never encountered this problem before, so I talked to a couple of my buddies who deal only with the SR20. Apparantly, it's a pretty common problem with the red top SR20's. Probably brought on by a disgruntaled employee on the assembly line at Nissan. Whatever reason for this, the quick and easy way to fix this issue is to replace it with a newer/revised S14 oil pick-up.

Back to the engine damage. The broken pick-up led to a loss of oil pressure in the engine on the race track. This caused the spun rod bearing pictured below:


The bits of what used to be the bearings got tossed around the block and scrached up both the cylinders and pistons. To make matters worse, the extrerme heat built up in the spun #1 rod bearing actually deformed the rod itself allowing the piston to travel a little further in both directions than Nissan intended...


The silverish area is where the piston was actually making contact with the head.


And made contact with the oil squirter once.

So not a whole lot is salvageable in the bottom end, but what about the head? Well, the piston did kiss the head, so we wouldn't recommend it, but there's actually more bad news...

Although unrelated to the oil starvation issue, another reason not to use this head. This motor has had it...