We get back to the shop around 9pm and unload the truck, get the engine on a stand and clean up. It was a long day lol. Left the shop to drive home at about 11pm. Pics of the engine on the stand are from later in the week, I forgot to take them right away.
I started my parts collection, I’ve been trying to buy a batch each month. It’s been fun taking my time to do some research on each item to make sure it will actually benefit the engine opposed to hammering my keyboard aimlessly buying parts off “trust me bro” playbook. I’m not trying to come of as pretentious, it simply as I get older I like to know the why of things I care about. Too much of my life have I fallen into the trap of just doing something because other people did it that way. It’s fine if you think like that, many people do, the caveat I see is that it’s very superficial knowledge and you don’t really understand what is going on. Which can lead to frustration when things go wrong, your not going to know what to do to fix the problem or why it’s happening.
Cool thing to note, the engine came with some BNIB goodies, Clutch/Lightweight Flywheel, Air filter, Radiator, FMIC Kit, and a used Greddy EBC (not shown). On to some pictures!
HKS Filter, Exedy Stage 1 Clutch, Exedy Lightweight Flywheel
Koyo Radiator – Update 11-11-25 – This radiator is for an s14, wasn’t sure If I could use it, I cant. Sad. It’s 1/2″ taller. So I have it up for sale to replace it with an s13 radiator.
Greddy FMIC Kit (Piping would have been a pain to include in the picure)
Tomei Turbo Manifold – Update 11-10-25 – Decided to go another route with the turbo manifold so i’m currently selling this.
8/20/25
Tomei Oil Pan (I chose the Tomei over the Greddy simply for the fact that it it’s steel and (shouldn’t) crack in the event something hits it). It has trap doors to prevent oil starvation and holds about .63 qts more oil than stock.
Tomei Oil Block-off plate to run a remote filter setup and a oil pressure gauge.
Couple OEM Oil filters
ARP Flywheel Bolts
9/8/25
OEM Water Pump, not necessary to replace right now just a preventative measure i’m taking. Used one will be a backup.
ATI Super Damper – Not gonna Lie, Factions review video on one sold me on it and pairing this with solid motor mounts seemed like a smart play as i’m going to be introducing more vibrations to the engine.
Cusco Solid Motor Mounts – I had these on my KA24DE, had zero issues with them, bought what I know works.
That’s it for now, I have some more parts showing up this week.
Driveshshaft Shop aluminum driveshft, ditching the two piece and freeing up some driveline weight
ISR transmission mount – I decided on this because it was cheap, its just a mount, I didn’t need anything special or to try and track down an OEM one.
Stance Overdrive water pump pulley – Felt like this was a must to get. Anything I can do to keep the SR cool is the goal, this will help eliminate any cavitation issues from the water pump at high RPM.
Some maintenace items I picked up to replace while the engine is out.
Front main seal / Rear Main Seal/ Injector O-rings (Upper, Lower, and Insulator Bushing)/ Intake Gaskets (Collector and Manifold gasket)/ Exhaust and Intake Oil Squirter assemblies. I don’t think it was necessary to replace the oil squirter assemblies but after hearing they can clog up and prevent lubrication I decided to start new instead of trying to clean them out.
Some more maintenance items and some cooling items.
Power Steering/ AC/ Alternator belt (I don’t plan on running AC but it came in the kit).
OEM main fan shroud and lower shroud.
Valve cover gasket and spark plug gasket.
11/25/2025 I decided to do away with the Tomei manifold. Well, I still have it, its just not going on the car. A friend told me about this manifold and I watching videos of how it sounds I was immediately sold. Shoutout to Sinco for having great customer service. Highly recommend them.
11/28/2025:
Started disassembly to clean up the engine and begin installing parts. As for degreaser, I used Simple Green Pro HD cleaner, it’s safe on aluminum and worked pretty darn well to clean it up. While everything is out, I’m going to replace as many coolant hoses as I can to prevent any future issues. I still need to figure out my heater hose situation, but that’s for another day.
12/3/2025 – Got the rest of the engine cleaned up. pulled the crank pulley, installed the new water pump, and oil block adapter. I’m still undecided how/ which remote oil filter setup I want to run. I’ll have to test fit the engine to really get an idea of the layout I want because it needs to be clean an accessible.
12/10/25 – Early Christmas gift from my wife Kayla showed up, Powered by Max HMIC. I’m going with this over the Greddy kit I have. The PBM HMIC offers faster turbo spool and space saving for other coolers I want to add ( Oil andPower steering). The only caveat for running this kit is that my car is a hatch, so i’ll have to relocate the headlight motors. Luckily there is an aftermarket kit out there provided by a site, englishtune.com. It’s a little added expense I didn’t want to have to do, but i’d be naive to think this is the only one that’s going to happen. Up next I hope to get the turbo manifold on, I was waiting on some high temp thread sealant before I install the new studs.
Studs installed, I still am a little skeptical about this. I don’t care for the fact that the non threaded portion of the stud went so far into the head. I torqued them to 40Nm (29 ft lb) per the manufacture.
Found the exhaust manifold gasket can only go on one way due to a flange on the gasket that would hit the cooling neck.
Also, got the turbo manifold studs installed. These turned out how I thought the studs into the head would look with the middle collar sticking out a bit.
Manifold Installed, i’m going to put some thread sealant on the nuts as I don’t care for the length of std sticking out of the head.
As I went to install the new oil pan I found that the pickup tube is slightly bent. At some point this oil pan must’ve been replaced, the Nissan Orange RTV was oozing past the mating surfaces hinting that it wasn’t an OEM install. Luckily, Z1 motorsports keeps these as a stock item, I was able to get one in a couple days.
1/3/2025 – More parts showed up, slave cylinder (picked up a spare because they were on closeout), thermostat, radiator bushings (upper and lower), oil pan windage tray (as I went to replace the pickup tube I noticed this was bent as well), and oil pan to the trans cover plate, and a Greddy BOV w/ weld on flange.
1/3/2025 – Pickup tube, upper oil sump, windage tray, and oil pan installed. The Tomei oil pan is a very snug fit, if anything is out of line it will hit it. Even after i installed the new pickup and windage tray It needed a little love tap to seat it fully.
1/3/2025 – I decided to replace the oil squirters while the valve cover was off. Was it necessary? Probably not. But this is just me being overly protective. I like the piece of mind knowing that I will not have any oiling issues on the cams as these can have the tendency to clog on higher mileage SR’s.
1/3/2025 – Front main seal, ATI Damper, thermostat, Oversized water pump pulley, intake manifold, accessory brackets and alternator installed.
1/10/2026
Removed the pilot bearing with the “Bread Trick”. Hilarious that this works, took one slice of bread, I just jammed it in, pounded the tool in, and repeated the process until the bearing came out.
Installed the new rear main seal as well. I didn’t have a tool or a big enough socket to install it so I found a old hub flange laying around to use as my install tool.
I test fit the engine to check brake line to turbo manifold clearance and to mock up intercooler piping, power steering cooler location, and the oil cooler location.
For my heat exchangers:
Power steering:
10 Row 13 x 3 x 1 7/8″ Setrab cooler w/ M22 Ports (P# SET-610-7612)
Another good option I was looking at was a 13 Row, 8 3/4″ x 4″ x 1 7/8″ if you want to go a little smaller for more space savings.
Engine Oil Cooler:
19 row 13 x 5 3/4 x 1 7/8″ Setrab Cooler w/ M22 Ports (P# SET-619-7612)
I chose this based off the HP Range in the application sizing chart Pegasus Auto Racing has on there site.
1/22/2026
After test fitting the engine and looking at it, I felt like I’d be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t take the time to clean up things a little more. With that being said, engine is back out to clean some parts.
Sandblasted and re-painted all the brackets on the engine (some not shown).
Then I got to try out my friends vapor honer…..dude….This. Thing. Is. Awesome!
Everything turned out awesome, parts look brand new. I’m really glad I went and cleaned these parts up. I definitely would’ve ran into problems later. The injector bushing seat on Cyl #4 was excessively corroded screaming vacuum leak and just about every coolant neck had a layer of corrosion that needed to be taken care of.
Couple things to note:
It will remove the nickel plating on parts. I don’t personally like the nickel look so I was indifferent with it being gone.
I did have to apply metal protectant after the vapor honing process to protect against future corrosion. My friend recommended using Sharkhide Aerosol, so after vapor honing and drying the parts off I applied the spray.
