My DE is burning a ton of oil and honestly I’m just tired of dealing with it. I want to boost my car but obviously a DE isn’t a smart choice with its power limits and reliability issues.

I originally planned to buy a wrecked HR 350Z, swap over all the components, and get the harness converted. Since almost everything from the firewall back is different for the HR, using a parts car would make things a lot easier. The problem is I don’t think I can really do the same with a 370Z if I went VHR since it’s a different car.

From what I’ve seen the tach and coolant temp gauge won’t work with the VHR swap. I also thought about running a VHR bottom end with HR heads, but the issue there is if the engine ever blows up it’s not as easy as just finding another one and dropping it in.

Would I be able to use a G35 or G37 as a parts car for things like the AC lines, power steering, coolant reservoir, radiator, ECU, core support, and other stuff like that?

So for those who’ve done it or looked into it, would you go HR or VHR?

 

best thing would be to just buy at HR 350z and not deal with trying to put something together. Thats just my opinion

 

DE in my opinion

 

I agree with @DarkZ03 I would rather build a DE

 

Why isn't the DE a smart choice to boost?

 

The DE and the HR/VHR are not as compatible as you think … they have completely different BCMs that will not seemlessly adapt. This has been tried 1000 times are basically everyone fails due to the electronics or they get it to work and you have very limited capacity.

Your best bet, esepcially if you want reliability and power will be to get a freshly built engine and turbo it. You can build a $5k to $8k block that will hold 600hp to 800hp. An OEM HR is reliable to 500hp and can be run to 600hp but will crap-out at some time and a VHR is reliable to 600hp and can be taken up to 700hp with a limited life span.

Know that the swapped or built block and turbo kit is the first of the big expenses … plan on spending $15k to $20k between built engine, turbo kit, clutch/flywheel, fueling, ECU/Tuning - costs adds up very quickly.

 

Cause HR kool-aid bruh, lol. People keep wanting to do this and it's silly 🙄

 

At this point, based on the cost to do this swap (correctly), it would be more cost effective, to just buy an 07-08 Z33 or a Z34 if the HR means so much.

There's an obvious reason there are so many dead-end posts on here about swapping an HR in place of a DE.

 

LS would be in that range too

 

There are 2 factors to this, more and more people are doing the swap now but the easiest way is with a donor car, you don't see it here, but prevalent on Reddit.

There's this mentality where they want to boost a stock block and just throw in another if it takes a crap. While I get it, the the initial cost to swap over is enough to build the DE economy style lol.

If you want to do the swap bad engine out thing the obvious choice is DE, but then they say they want more power than the DE can handle. Most of these people have no idea what a 400hp Z feels like.

 

How does a 400hp Z feel like? Inquiring minds want to know

 

I don't personally know, but many here say 500hp is a handful so I believe it. Heel can tell you lol.