Hey guys, got a couple of questions:



OK, so I have a 240z with a 13b-re in it, converted to single turbo. In process of putting it all together. To mount it, I am using a 12a front engine cover, I sourced a [beat up oil pan from a crappy seller on rx7club.com] which is only good for testing purposes. With the 12a cover + gsl-se oilpan, the bolt holes all line up correctly, which is great. However, the oil pickup is obviously different



I'm not familiar with the 84/5 gsl-se motor, but can I use the pickup from a 1st gen 13b motor and directly bolt it to the RE? I can't imagine the oil pickup being different from an earlier model? Or do I need to modify my existing pickup?



2. does anyone know where I can get that stupid primary rail spacer clip? Mine seems to have grown legs and disappear... is the part # same as a 13b series 5 motor?



3. Can I adapt a 12a mechanical OMP to the RE block? again, not too familiar with the 1st series motors. The RE has only 2 oil lines, whereas the 13b turbo had 4.. so I don't know how they different. If not, that's not a big deal - I can just run premix like everyone else

You can use the oil pickup tube from a 12A/13B series 1 they are the same. On the front cover if you want 4 oil lines you are going to have to use the gslse front cover. It's the only one with 4 oil lines and has the front mount. The spacer you can get from Mazdatrix look on their site I don't think it's to expensive. Shoot me a PM with a phone number I can probably hook you up with the parts you need.

Mm...the engine bay for a 240z is kinda big for just a 2 rotor https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...DIR#>/wink.png ..see where i am going with this .. lol ...

As for your problem , you could go dry sump and avoid all this . And if later on you wanna go 3 rotor , the dry sump would good too https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...IR#>/smile.png

They are likely the same from a fitment standpoint, but I was sure the 12A pickup tube ID was smaller than the GSL-SE (13B). A glance at the parts catalog should tell if they are the same part or not.

engine room? sure.... i got that



http://www.rotaryz.com/albums/200502...0146.sized.jpg



http://www.rotaryz.com/albums/200502...0145.sized.jpg



Dry sump? No dinero for said tasks. would be nice not to worry about hitting the oilpan, because the engine sits so low

It looks like what I've been thinking is correct: There is exactly enough room between the 240Z crossmember and the firewall to sit the engine down in there low enough that the trans tunnel does not need to be hacked. Beautiful.



How are you mounting the engine? I don't see any kind of mounting there. I surely hope that the tiny little bracket attaching to the front cover's mount is not what you'll be using. When I would dream of swapping a rotary into an S30, it always involved altering the pre'86 style front motor mount bracket to attach to the S30's existing motor mount stands. You always want to have the motor mounts as far apart as possible, to be able to resist torque well while still having enough give to them to deal with vibration.



An alternative would be to mount a beefy torque brace to the top of the engine. This is similar to having two widely spaced motor mounts, except their functions become separated. The front cover mount does 100% of the engine support and only part of the torque resistance, while the torque brace only resists torque. Not as good as two far-spread motor mounts but it still works fairly well, it is the current OEM engine mounting paradigm after all.



It looks like, with the rotary, there is room not only for a strut tower brace that not only triangulates the strut towers to the firewall, but also each strut tower to the opposing framerail! if ever there was a chassis that needed that much stiffening, the 240Z is it.

sweet progress, dand showed me pics of that when it was still orange https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...#>/biggrin.png

THat is pretty damn cool. I thought the hot swap for 240Z was the RB26DETT motor. There is some guy on the hybridZ forum... maybe it was the other one... that has a orange widebody 72 240Z with a SR20DETT motor weighing less than 2000 lbs. I wonder how south of 2000 lbs you can get with a 13RE motor.

I have an FB bracket sitting in the garage. You can't mount it because it's offset, and unfortunately, the offset bracket hits the steering column. You can't mount it to hte stock nubs (which I ground away) because that would put the engine about 10" higher and it won't clear the hood, let alone allow you to run the transmission at the right angle to the drive train. That, and you'd have to cut up the floorboard to allow space for transmission. I'm using the stock tranny bracket from the Z: I just drilled out the bolt hole for the RX7 tranny https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...IR#>/smile.png



The tiny little bracket is there to keep the engine in place so I know where it would sit exactly. I still need to make the reinforced version and put in a torque brace on one side



That's a pretty good idea, but I don't think it would work well with the waterpump housing and single turbo in the way. Maybe if it was angled forward...



Agreed: I'm looking into buying a PDK strut tower brace:

http://www.pdkfabrication.bravepages...Mod%20Bar.jpeg



You must have the wrong car https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...IR#>/smile.png



https://www.datsunracing.com/albums/.../aad.sized.jpg



Mine's always been black since I got it, inside the engine bay too. Original color was orange, but original color was painted over in '90

Ah-verrah-nass.



I'm sure the pre-86 bracket would not work without alteration. But alteration is always the cool part of an engine swap, getting to play with the angle grinders and the bandsaws and the figuring and fangling and then you get to weld it all together. The only real problem I could see is that the lower radiator hose might interfere with the bracket, but on the other hand, the angle might be such that the hose could be routed UNDER the bracket.



I just found a metal shop only a half hour from my home that is willing to let you rummage around in their shop, pick out anything you want, and they will cut up remnants/discards even smaller for you... AND they are only half to a third of the price of my normal go-to. I think I am in love.

lovely car, it it.

12A and GSL-SE pickup tubes are the same.



Nice project. heretic is very correct; stiffen that chassis!

I forgot to add that I have 12 feet of 3x1" square tubing in 16ga to make subframe connectors and reinforce frame rails



There's also an autopower reinforced (2 extra bars welded on) rollbar in the rear



http://www.rotaryz.com/albums/200502...0149.sized.jpg

Jeff, thanks for checking that. I could have sworn I saw the two side-by-side at one point...must be getting old!



Wotary, looks real nice! I've owned three 240's, but they all biodegraded up here in Canada. It is truly a classic design, but unfortunatley rust prevention was a new concept for Datsun in the early 70's.



What's the feeling from the Datsun/Nissan crowd wrt the swap? Do you get the same hassles the non-rotary rx guys get?

I have both. One '84-'85 12A (lighter rotating assembly and an undrilled boss for the 12A turbo oil return in the front cover), and one GSL-SE tube. Exactly the same. https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...IR#>/smile.png I will of course have to check it against an '83 or older tube, but I'm very sure they'll still be the same.



Edit: perhaps heretic will know when the front covers were changed to include the turbo oil return. It was either '83 or '84 when they changed. Come to think of it, it was probably '83 since the rotors were changed as well as the flywheel, 225mm clutch, 'beehive' oil cooler etc.

part numbers for the 81-83 front cover 1480-10-600a, 84-85 12a n231-10-600b, and the gsl-se is n304-10-a60.

Except it seems to have been 1984. If any 1983 models went through with the boss in the front cover, they would have been produced very late in the model year. There are other, somewhat obvious differences between a 1983 and a 1984 engine, depending on its level of assembly.

Hey Wotary, i have that primary rail spacer. I think i sold you some injectors from a fd. Call me at 415-205-0386. You can come and pick up the spacer. I have no use for it.

Well, I'm over on hybridz.org, and the guys there don't frown on anything... I've seen Zs with...



nissan vg30det, vg30dett, vq30de

nissan l28et (turbo inline 6 from a 280zxt)

sr20det

ca18det

rb20/25/26det/tt

turbo buick gn lc2

chevy 4.3/350/355/383 sbc motors, lt1, ls1, ls6

chevy 396/454 bbc

small block ford, 289, 302, 351 cleveland/windsor (i know, one's a bigblock)

mopar 318, 340, 360, 440, 426 hemi

jag v12

bmw inline6, v12

toyota 1jz-gte, 2jz-gte, 7mgt

i think there's a guy attempting a a mitsu 2 liter turbo swap



there's even a guy doing an electric motor swap, and there was a guy with a biodiesel turbo Z. https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...IR#>/smile.png Now, zcar.com guys... they'll complain about anything that's not nissan in Z!



rx7will: yeah, that was me. I bought 850 secondaries off you, but I wound up not using them. I sold them for what I paid for them, I couldn't really make them work in a stock RE rail. I opted to get Marren 1680cc injectors to run as secondaries instead.



I can't pick up the spacer this weekend - i'll be out of town, but my gf lives in the city, so I can swing by next week to grab it if that's cool with you. I'll give you a call when I get back, and thanks again!

Ah, so it really is '84-'85 (for the most part) with a 12A turbo oil return. Cool.

And a lot that complain about off-year swaps.



For example, a friend of mine is a lurker there, and he's quite outspoken about the idea of putting a L28 engine, or worse a TURBO L28, in a 240Z. Likewise with pulling the 4-speed out and replacing it with a 5-speed. He had to search for years for a decent priced early chassis that wasn't a total rustbucket, or a V8 swap, or a L28 swap. Even turned town a free for the taking L28/5speed combo after he got his car.



I can kind of see his point. The Z cars are one of the few, if not the only, Japanese cars with any kind of restoration and originality following. He likens the sacrilege to taking an old 1.5l Ferrari and putting a 70's 3.3l engine in it. Sure it's the same block architecture, but there's just something wrong about it.

Well, it's religion and politics. No use arguing about it. https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...IR#>/smile.png

Yeah, but you know, the difference between a 250gto and a 240z is that I can wander into a junkyard here and find 3-4 cars readily sitting on blocks. To me a car is only a collectable when you can't find them in the junkyards... like a challenger, charger, 'cuda, etc

We recently called up a junkyard looking for a core engine for a customer.



He laughed and said that they haven't been getting anything older than '03.



Extrapolate that with a standard 2 week turnaround time. That is, after a car has been in the lot for two weeks, it is crushed and hauled away.



It's been hell with my searches for rotary core motors as well. The junkyards figure, if it's an RX-7 then the engine is bad and not worth selling. Should see the laughs when I mention that I don't care if it's dead because I rebuild them. Half of the yards I talked to said that they won't even take them in, the other half said that the cars go straight to the crusher, no stop in the yard, just like all the other "old" (more than 5 years old) cars. No sense in wasting lot space on older cars when you can make more money cutting up newer cars for body shops and the like.



I'd like to walk into a junkyard and see 240Z's to scrounge. Probably would buy the whole cars, as a VIN costs about $1500-2000 here. (That is to say, you buy a car with a worthless shell and a dead drivetrain and shot suspension and no interior, so all you've really purchased is a VIN number) Also would like to walk into a junkyard and see cars on blocks, instead of either so deep in muck that you can't open the doors, or stacked 2-3 high, or both. Heck, I'd like to just walk into a junkyard, most junkyards here are of the "you are not allowed to go further than the waiting room, we pull the parts for you, then charge you 40% of what a new part would cost" variety.

go out of town and find the smaller junk yards, they dont' turn cars around at all. I remember seeing 3 rx7s in the small town of Kingston Ontario, canada where I went to for university. I went there to pull parts off a 2nd gen s4 gxl once. I went back 3 years later and it's still the same one sitting there.

[quote name='heretic' date='Mar 11 2005, 05:39 AM']We recently called up a junkyard looking for a core engine for a customer.



He laughed and said that they haven't been getting anything older than '03.



Extrapolate that with a standard 2 week turnaround time. That is, after a car has been in the lot for two weeks, it is crushed and hauled away.



It's been hell with my searches for rotary core motors as well. The junkyards figure, if it's an RX-7 then the engine is bad and not worth selling. Should see the laughs when I mention that I don't care if it's dead because I rebuild them. Half of the yards I talked to said that they won't even take them in, the other half said that the cars go straight to the crusher, no stop in the yard, just like all the other "old" (more than 5 years old) cars. No sense in wasting lot space on older cars when you can make more money cutting up newer cars for body shops and the like.



I'd like to walk into a junkyard and see 240Z's to scrounge. Probably would buy the whole cars, as a VIN costs about $1500-2000 here. (That is to say, you buy a car with a worthless shell and a dead drivetrain and shot suspension and no interior, so all you've really purchased is a VIN number) Also would like to walk into a junkyard and see cars on blocks, instead of either so deep in muck that you can't open the doors, or stacked 2-3 high, or both. Heck, I'd like to just walk into a junkyard, most junkyards here are of the "you are not allowed to go further than the waiting room, we pull the parts for you, then charge you 40% of what a new part would cost" variety.


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That's weird... I'm on the west coast, and any given junkyard has at least 3 fbs and 3 fcs on hand around here... I pulled the engine crossmember off a 13b gsl-se a few weeks ago, and a waterpump housing off an '88 GTU... most still have engines in them.



I just got back from San Diego, and a HUGE thanks to 13BTNOS for hooking me up with needed parts, he even gave me the needed oil pickup! I felt "at home" too, seeing 2 240zs at his house, haha. Thanks again, Mac!

I just got back from San Diego, and a HUGE thanks to 13BTNOS for hooking me up with needed parts, he even gave me the needed oil pickup! I felt "at home" too, seeing 2 240zs at his house, haha. Thanks again, Mac!


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Hey no worries. I'm always glad to help someone out when I can. Hope your project works out for you. Man your gonna have to stop by in a couple of months and you'll get a chance to see that intake put to use. I just got my turbo, microtech, fuel system and a number of other things to get my Datsun 1200 project rolling.

[quote name='13BTNOS' date='Mar 15 2005, 11:47 AM']Hey no worries. I'm always glad to help someone out when I can. Hope your project works out for you. Man your gonna have to stop by in a couple of months and you'll get a chance to see that intake put to use. I just got my turbo, microtech, fuel system and a number of other things to get my Datsun 1200 project rolling.


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awesome! Well, my friend Don, the guy that was with me, is getting hitched in november, I think... so that'd be the next time I come down there unless I happen to be there earlier https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...IR#>/smile.png