The Next Project
 

Those of you who have attended Lloyd's annual barbecue in Carnation have seen some of my projects, and perhaps seen my 1984 RX-7 with the street ported 12a. I ran out of garage space, so this fall I sold my V8 powered RX-7, without doubt the nicest car I have owned, and also my rotary powered Porsche. That leaves me with one sports car, and I have long contemplated doing a major custom body modification of that car. Recently one of my gearhead friends showed ma an ad from the Foreign Engine Exchange for a complete front clip from an early 90s Nissan Skyline for $1600, with trans, intercooler, wire harness, instruments, virtually everything. This is a RB20DET, 2.0 straight six turbocharged, rated at 212 hp. After some extensive searching on the internet, we could find no evidence this motor has ever been installed in a 1st gen RX-7. If I am going to do some very unique body work, I might as well go the whole way and do a unique engine swap.

I advertised my street ported 12a with RB header, trans, light flywheel, etc for $1500 found a buyer immediately. We pulled the engine out yesterday and today went to look at the Skyline front clip and a few other engines. Well, this seems like a very tight fit in my engine compartment, being a little longer and even a bit wider that the Ford V8, probably weighs about the same.

I will post more photos as this project progresses.

You sold the rotary Porsche! Sad day. Good luck with the new swap, I dont think Ive ever seen an inline 6 in a FB.

Break out the plasma, this should be interesting. lol Guessing some of the firewall will be going away?.

On a side note I didn't know you had a rotary powered Porsche, how cool was that. Looking forward to seeing the progress of this one best of luck.

Also a whole front clip for 1600 seems incredibly cheap, do they have more.

Skyline front clip
 

Foreign Engines Inc in Lynnwood had four of these RB20DET front clips, and apparently did not sell one for about a year, so they started lowering the price. When it got down to $1600 they suddenly sold two last weekend, and I bought the third one yesterday. They had one left, also complete except for the instrument cluster.

We will not be butchering the firewall, and it appears we may even be able to use the Skyline radiator, possibly even the clutch fan. It will be a tight fit, and will move the CG forward some. I may move the battery to the rear for balance. We do not know yet if a hood bulge will be required. There are lots of possibilities here, may not be much left of the FB mechanicals when we are done. I have all the parts to do the 2nd gen big brake conversion, which I did back in 2003 on the V8 car. As you may know, I described this brake conversion in detail with photos on this forum at the time, then some kits magically appeared on the market - probably just a coincidence------

The Porsche is described in detail on my Cardomain page.

Oh didn't know you made the first t2 brake kit, I bought one for my former turbo fb, worked great.

It Fits!
 

Bought this engine package a week ago today. Now we know it fits, and we can find no serious problems with the mechanical installation. We will make a modified crossmember and do a little trimming on the radiator core support. The oil pan will not be modified. In one photo you can see the swaybar is joggled forward and downward to clear the engine. This is the Skyline swaybar, and the tips will have to be cut and rewelded, otherwise it just bolts in. We will probably tilt the engine slightly to the right (i.e., reduce the lean, which is normally to the left) to get a little more clearance from the steering. We have left about one inch clearance from the firewall so we can reach the bell housing bolts. Notice that this puts the shifter in exactly the right place.

Before removing the engine from the front clip, we hooked up a fuel pump and a battery, it started instantly, idles smoothly, revs into the boost range and everything seems to work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d6e6...1&feature=plcp

Nice job guy's!

Lookin good!

More Progress
 

If you look at the photo in my first post, you can see the intake manifold has the throttle in the middle, with the feed tube coming across the top of the engine, forward and down to the intercooler, which is jammed into the left front corner below the headlight. I am not building a show car here, just a daily driver, but I don't want it to look like it was designed by a bunch of amateurs, so we are trying to clean things up a bit. Sean cut away most of the upper intake as shown here, and I asked what he was going to close it up with - he had no idea! He found a Porsche 944 intake in our collection of junk, and used some pieces of it to finish off the intake - with the throttle angled to bring the air up from the intercooler which we mounted in the nose. Notice he mounted the blowoff valve on the intake side of the intercooler. The cold start valve and a lot of vacuum and water hoses are tucked into the bottom side of the intake, just to make things less cluttered.

The front cross tube sat right where the radiator is installed, so we put a tube forward of there, dropped down to protect the radiator, and providing a mount point for the radiator supports. A smaller tube supports the intercooler. Mark Gehr came over yesterday and sorted out the Skyline engine wiring, integrated it into the RX-7 wiring. Of course I could have done it myself in a month or two - he did it in one day - the guy is brilliant.

I am ordering a Walbro fuel pump, a Dakota tachometer adapter, and a custom made aluminum driveshaft - well, there are some things we just can't fabricate in my shop.

That is savage!!!

Beautiful fab work Ben and Sean! Motor almost looks stock....almost. It's missing something and it has too much of something else...lol!

You never cease to amaze me Ben.

It runs and drives
 

Well, I have been driving it for a few days, and I can say it definitely has more power and torque than the street ported 12a I took out. More on that subject later.

I still have no tach or boost gage, but I am working on those issues. I found an airbox that fits, but I had to modify the intake and outlet openings - came from a Pontiac Gran Prix. The Speedo is off by about 5 mph at 60 - may have to get an adapter.

I am pleased with the new driveshaft, very beefy replaceable U-joints.

The shifter was stretching the Mazda shift boot too much, so we decided the easiest fix was to reduce the lever movement. We made a "short shifter" modification. I had a piece of aluminum plate that was .41 inch thick (who knows why), and my calculations showed that would reduce the movement by about 25%. I made an adapter spacer and Sean lengthened the shift rod by the same amount as shown in the photo below - works perfectly.

The Skyline horns look identical to the RX-7 Horns, but are noticeably louder and have nicer tone.

The lower valance had to be trimmed about one inch at the back to clear the radiator, and then I trimmed and formed it with a heat gun to fit the new front cross member tube. The valance and lower part of the bumper were a bit sandblasted after 14 years, so I repainted them.

Very clean... Video!!!!!
:-p

Awesome work. Got to see your shop first hand, and got to see you at Lloyds. Hope to see this running around town or at the next BBQ.

Nice Swap! Clean!

You are going to love that engine! I swapped one in my s13. Its really a race bred design, despite turbo it can rev quickly and makes more power than the sr, stock or built!

Also noticed The plenum was altered. If that going to flow enough cfm? The part you cut out had a lot of volume inside

Plenum volume vs runner length
 

I am not smart enough about turbocharged motors to know what the effect is, but if you look at the photo above, you can see that Sean cut off the plenum at a point where the runner length was not changed. If you look at photos of some of the other after-market and custom built intakes, many of them have plenums no larger than ours, but with extremely short runners, only about 3 inches or so.

------- http://forums.nicoclub.com/let-s-see...27233-990.html ----

We still have no boost gage or tach, so I have not run it very hard, but the response seems very good at moderate rpms. Still sorting out a few things, doesn't seem to warm up very well, may need a new thermostat.
I have had an interesting assortment of cars since I bought my 47 Cadillac back in my college days, including some fairly high performance cars, but I have never owned a turbocharged car before, so I am being cautious until everything is sorted.

Wow! Thats my next thing to learn afterni get car painting down, welding and fabricating. Must be nice to make your own things. Not only that but i have some inventions i want to get out there for sport car enthusiasts ;)

Great job on the build, its coming along great!

very clean build! always thought of looking into this kinda swap if the 13b in my 7 ever pops haha. can't wait to see a vid of it running.

Finally got to drive it on dry pavement yesterday. It is so smooth, has so much torque and power, and has such a pleasant sound, I should have done this years ago. The Dakota Digital tach adapter works well, now everything essential is done except the boost gage.

I will go ahead with the big brake swap, mainly to get more rubber on the road. It wants to spin the wheels when it comes on boost with even a little moisture on the road. It actually corners and rides pretty well, and I will hold off on buying the fancy shocks until I drive it with the bigger wheels and tires.

I should have done the maintenance stuff before I installed the engine, but access is actually pretty good with the radiator, header panel and bumper removed. We replaced the water pump, thermostat, timing belt, tensioner and idler pulleys. The only hard part was the thermostat, which is hidden under the intake.

I have always hated that cheesy hood prop they use on the 1st gens, so I installed a gas strut - I should have done this twenty years ago! I suppose someone may have done this but I have not seen it.

I also replaced the plastic radiator catch can with a stainless steel one - made from an old teapot. Now I am looking for an interesting metal container to replace the windshield washer tank.

Hopefully your still around, I'm thinking of doing the same swap but I'm curious to what the motor weighs? and how the car corners? These are cheap motors and would swap just as easy if not easier than an S5 T2?

I will have an accurate weight within a few weeks and will post the details. I just recently bought another Skyline front clip, essentially just like the first one, but with only 35,000 miles on it. I am planning to do a serious custom car with this one. We ran it before removing it from the clip, started and idled smoothly. We built a cart for the engine/trans, initially to provide access for cleaning, painting and modifying the engine. Eventually we will equip this cart with power, fuel tank and pump and a place to mount the instruments so we can modify the wiring harness and test run the motor. My friend Egan is shown here cleaning the engine and prepping it for paint. The cam cover is just as removed - it was spotlessly clean inside.

I certainly would not suggest that this swap into a first gen RX-7 is easier than a turbo rotary, although it might be cheaper, assuming you do most of the work your self. However, some serious fabrication is required, and I am fortunate to have a master fabricator working in my shop. Having done this once, we are now focused on how to simplify the installation and mostly how to clean up the engine compartment as much as possible. We are doing more extensive mods to the motor this time, but not for performance, only for cosmetic reasons.

Now that I have been driving the "Skyrex" as I call it, I am convinced that this is the optimum engine for an FB swap. Most of the tuners seem to want something that can make 450 hp and up, which I don't think makes much sense for street use. Nevertheless, their demand has driven up the price of the RB25 and 26 , and the RB20 is still cheap. Mine seems to go up to about 10 to 11 pounds of boost, and all the knowledgeable guys say it should be making about 250 -260 hp at the flywheel. Whatever it is , it is enough to make me smile. More later.