NA-T 420g Manual Supra (Engine Build)

[Nathanj1142]

okay, so its 9 months later, the car is done after huge setbacks. I didnt keep this thread updated as I was becoming more and more stressed with the build and I was down every night working on the car, which mentally drained me.

I'll try update as much as i can, however there are many things that i've done and i just cant remember all of it.

So i decided to go with a Link ECU, and i got that from JM Imports where i planned to take the car. So i paid my tuning deposit (50%), and ordered the ECU and MAP sensor through Aarin. (I ended up changing who i went for for tuning in the end)

Got the whifbitz na-t kit finally in the post, was like christmas day! Although, there were some damaged intercooler parts which was quickly sent back to whifbitz and replaced, and the turbo studs were on off angles, presumably due to being drilled and tapped before welding. Although annoying, Paul was happy to accept the return and ship me out a new one with no dramas.

 

Drilled and tapped the sump for the turbo oil return

Ordered a PMC adaptor kit to run the 420g gearbox (E46 M3). Luckily the GS300 2j i bought still had the auto bell housing and flex plates for the starter motor, and as some of you know people need the bell housings for 350z box conversions, so that helped recuperate some funds.

 

More goodies from TCB. decided to get a new OE harmonic damper as I found some cracks in the rubber on both my other ones.

box mounted up with PMC kit.

Then the engine was sat back in it's home with the new bay paint looking awesome! I'd also reattached all the wiring loom and reinstalled the engine bay loom with the fusebox and everything.

We have a constant war with rats at our yard, and they decided to take shelter in the supra. It absolutely stank and i was worried about my wiring loom. I had the full interiour out. Gave the seats a wet vac and washed the carpet. 

AEM gauges mounted up and working.

Custom tach fascias which was a group buy on facebook. Got my clothing brand on the centre dial. 

 

Painted the brake booster with some Honda Nighthawk Black I had left over from the civic. Wanted it to look flashy but you cant really tell now its in the car. Looks great on here tho. Simple rattle can jobby.

Cant remember if i noted it before but went for the whifbitz r35 cop conversion.

Upgraded the clutch master to a wilwood .750 bore master with a adaptor plate. (sorry cant remember who i got it off!! feel free to comment)

custom prop adaptor for the 420g gearbox from autosports engineering in the states.

[Nathanj1142]

I also decided to run both a crank position sensor as i had the GTE oil pump, and the 7m cps. My idea was that i'd have two reference points for the ECU, and its closer to a GTE.
So i ran a shielded 2 core wire to the ecu, following the link instruction booklet which outlined the GTE ecu pinout.
I also rewired the distributor wires to the cam pos sensor, and linked it up so the 'top sensor' was c1 on the ecu. This was then aligned as close as i could to TDC. Also got the welded GTE crank pulley from whifbitz.

 

So, car was ready to start. Everything was ready. (or so i thought). Filled up with millers 10-40w mineral break in oil.

I had fuel, I had spark. The timing light was pulsing. The engine just didnt wanna go.

This went on for a few days, i had the wiring all out of the ecu plug and checked all the trigger signals, and my friend who wasnt there for the previous attempts tried to help.

I cranked it, and he said... "Nathan, that has no compression"

Sure enough, we did a compression test and loan behold, 3 and 4 had 0 compression, 2 and 5 had about 30 psi.

...

Tried redoing timing, clearly not a timing issue. Filled the ports with oil to see if it was bottom end, still no improvement.

HEAD OFF TIME.

 

After a few days we widdled it down to the valves not sealing correctly. May I add that this head was machined, with all the valves and valve seats cleaned up, measured and pressure tested.

Shining a light into the exhaust and intake ports, you could actually see the light under the valves. Tried putting fuel in the head upside down and it did leak through.

Long story short, i took my head back to the machine shop and they pressure tested and said nothing was wrong. They said i didnt clean the head properly so suggested i did that.

I steam cleaned the head thoroughly, i then reground all the valves by hand. Steam cleaned again and used brake cleaner on all the valves, i blew out everything with an airline.

Same story. You can actually see after grinding that the cut on the valves were lop sided.

Now im not sure if this is the engine at fault, or the machine shop not cutting the seats evenly, but they just denied any wrong doing as their tests were all green, and i had so much going on with work and uni i just couldnt be bothered to deal with them anymore.

So i will not be visiting this machine shop again. I may have just had 1 bad experience, and it may not be their fault, so i will not be naming them. If you want the name of the shop for your own engine work then i'd be more than happy to give you it, but i dont like to name and shame as their service other than that was ok.

1st rant over. moving on...

I luckily have another engine that came out of the supra. This engine was good, i never had any issues with it and the headgasket was in great nick (no leak indications etc).

Essentially purchased a new GTE head gasket from TCB and installed this head with a steam clean and manual valve grinding.

Now i had a very good compression reading. Almost 160 psi across all 6 with less than 10psi variance.

I was having troubles with the ecu picking up a signal on the crank sensor, so i ran a seperate two wires outside the car to the ecu and the sensor which eventually worked. It later turned out that i had the shielded wire crushed in the intake manifold when i tightened it down, causing it to short out and basically outputting nothing but noise. before and after pics below

Got that working, now i had recieved a base map from JM imports, and they told me it was ready to run on my setup. Again, the car wouldnt fire. I couldnt get the timing light to work very well, as the coil pack didnt like having a HT lead ran from that to the spark plug.

Then found that every coil pack was firing when i turned ign on, very weird. I posted in the forums when Mike from SRD started to help.

To cut a long story short, Mike remote connected to my PC and helped me diagnose a few things, he changed up my base map and said turn the key..

She ran! mint and all!

Mike setup my oil pressure and wideband inputs so that all worked. This gave me a great confidence boost as i was starting to give up.

Still liked to backfire when the ignition was turned on, this was a very loud bang and something was clearly wrong. I later put it down to the injectors leaking fuel, however it was looked over for now.

....

Custom prop adaptor for the diff, Engineered and Designed by Target Engineering in Hull.

 

Decided to respray the bumper (AGAIN) as it was covered in stone chips. This time i did it myself, it wasnt great as i didnt prep it very well, but the full car is long overdue a respray so this was just using up my leftover paint.

 

Mate refurbed the headlights for me

 

 

Then got the custom propshaft, after getting the wrong flange fitted, from D and F in leeds. Great set of lads there, 100% reccomend to anyone. The flange was due to a miscommunication but they refitted a new one free of charge.

I then tried to dial in my ign timing myself, which i managed to do with a few more remote sessions with mike. For some reason, the car kept reaching very high coolant temps. It just didnt want to stay at a steady temp. this eventually led to the heater matrix which had cracked or something, soaking the inside of the car. Brilliant.

I was fed up with the car, as this was going on for months. It ran, but i was chasing stable coolant temps. I bled the cooling system about 5 times. I was afraid it was the headgasket.

Eventually, we thought maybe it was due to the car not quite running right as the timing wasnt fully dialled in, and running a bit hot, and the fact that my heater matrix had popped (i have looped that part of the system for now) it had lost some of its water capacity which the stock rad couldnt effectively cool.

We tried jerry rigging my mates s14 ally rad up, with some electric fans which helped immensely. Finally the car could idle without getting to hot.

So, i tried just electric fans on the stock supra rad, which still didnt work amazingly, so i bit the bullet and got a aluminium rad from ebay. I know this wasnt the best thing to do, however i had run out of funds at this point, and i wanted to try and get the car on the road this year before the dreaded gritters came out to play.

 

 

 

Edited September 15, 2021 by Nathanj1142 (see edit history)

[Annabella]

Cool read, you're having some fun! Sounded good when started

[Nathanj1142]

Now, i was ready to drive the car. Finally. Clutch bled up, car finally holding temp, timed up. Time to test the gearbox...Engine on, ready to pull outside. Car wouldnt go in gear. 

Jacked the rear up, car went in gear (with a slight crunch). Clutch bleeding issue most likely. Pressure bled, Vacuum bled. Nothing worked.

Could hear the clutch fork moving, but just wasnt disengaging.

So gearbox off time. Probably put the friction plate in backwards or something daft. Baring in mind this was about 6 months after i got the NEW gearbox fitted up after the old one had the cracked mounting point.

3 nights we spent trying to get that box off. We was violently shaking, using pry bars, It wouldn't budge after about 5mm. I really didn't want to pull the engine again. There were no clearance issues with the transmission tunnel or anything.

*CRINGE*
Eventually we had to get a hand winch wrapped around the rear subframe, and the gearbox, followed by a lot of shaking.

Turns out the input shaft was twisted, like rifling on a barrel, very slightly. This meant the friction plate couldn't slide along the input shaft when the clutch was depressed.
Tried messaging the seller but as expected i was ignored. I have posted his name in another thread on here.

 

Contacted Everything M3s to see if i could get a input shaft, as these boxes are like v160s! NO SPARE PARTS!

He said no, however i can use the bell housing from my manual box on an smg box that he will fit up for me for around £300. Everything included. Awesome!
I then fortunately decided to separate the bell housing myself so i did have to lug the full box down south, where i found even more horrors. The input shaft was missing more teeth, and the bearing in the bell housing had bust. This essentially meant i'd need a full new box as finding one of these bearings would have been a pain.

Everything M3s advised i get a SMG box converted to manual, and me being impatient went for it. they did all the work on a lovely 45k mile smg box. sorted. Managed to sell the bell housing to a BDC pro 1 drifter who pulled the bearing from his blown transmission, fitted to my bell housing, then ran on an smg box.

box back in, tested it... worked fine, jobs a gooden.

Then finally could drive up and down the road. Mike connected again, we did some runs, but the connection at my unit is awful. He said i could drive it like that and get some logs for him to fine tune but i wasn't really comfortable with that idea.

This is where i realised that mike had given up a lot of time unpaid (i had offered!) and JM wouldn't help me unless i give them a remote connect fee which i'd probably of ended up wasting due to the over heating and poor connection.
I contacted JM to see if i could get a partial refund of my deposit, as their 'base map' didn't exactly work. as expected they said no, but that's not their fault end of the day.

Mike suggested i could bring it to SRD. That meant i didn't need to worry about the break in as mike could do it all, meanwhile fixing up any loose ends out of my knowledge range (ie: speedo and rev gauge not working). Then finally tuning it with the experience they all have there.

Before i go any further i would 100% recommend SRD Tuning to anyone. I know they have a great reputation already but just another happy customer. 

Tidied up everything then got it trailered down south! 13 hour round trip thanks to the m1

 

Engine break in, and tuning done there, aswell as MOT and a f*ck load of other work that I just forgot about.

Car tuned, bit of smoke on decel (oil burning). think it could be stem seals, turbo is very dry so don't think its seals. Currently enjoying the car before tearing down the engine. Mike has very safe Knock detection parameters on the Link so if the cylinders get to caked with oil it will put the engine in limp before causing to much damage if it gets to that.

Made a lovely 480hp at the wheels  best Dyno graph i have is 475.

I have included a selection of videos from the dyno below, always love a happy ending  . Obviously needed 2step!

power pull on dyno:

Edited September 21, 2021 by Nathanj1142 (see edit history)

[Nathanj1142]

So just to tie up the thread, I have the car back making 480hp at the wheels. It's done for now... and I wanted to pass on my thanks to the guys at SRD who were super friendly, professional and honest. The car is far from 'done', but I can enjoy the rest of the decent weather and tidy up a lot of stuff this winter.

Hoping to paint the car at some point too, but I doubt that will be  this winter.

Thanks for reading, if anyone has any questions feel free to fire me a PM.

Cheers!

Nathan.

[AC93]

Told you it would be worth trailering it to SRD , glad to see it's all running now

[Nathanj1142]

Just now, AC93 said:

Told you it would be worth trailering it to SRD , glad to see it's all running now

them guys know their stuff! Gave me a few pointers too. Nice to have the professional's opinion.