What would be the cheapest way to increase my Z by 30-50HP?

I have the Borla exhaust and a K&N air filter and I still don't see any difference.

 

there is no current verifiable cheap way to get that much of an increase on a z.

 

30-50 you talking NOS or FI to get that much.

 

oh yeah, NOS would be the ticket. duh.

 

Or you could let a 911 Turbo push you. Shouldn't cost you much.

 

Hey mfrank257, I just noticed you are from Montreal. I love that city. I have driven there from Nashville(about a 23 hr drive) for the past 3 years to attend a music festival called Mutek. Are you familiar with it?

 

If you subscribe to SportCompact magazine, an article has 3 Zs a stock, Nissmo intake/exhaust, and another with R tune. They tested all three cars and it shows that mods didn't make a signficant difference compared to stock. To me it seems that it creates for noise than performance. Best bet is a supercharger or Twin Turbos.

 

It depends on your definition of "cheap." If you were Donald Trump... Cheap would be Twin Turbos. If you were the bag boy at the local quikie mart... Cheap would be some vinyl sticksers (good for about 50 mental horses).

 

your subject scared the crap out of me. Just bought a Z last week and I thought you were saying the 2005's were getting a 30-50hp increase....phew

 

It depends on your definition of "cheap." If you were Donald Trump... Cheap would be Twin Turbos. If you were the bag boy at the local quikie mart... Cheap would be some vinyl sticksers (good for about 50 mental horses).

 

If you only need short bursts of extra power, a nitrous kit would do it. Otherwise you're looking at a supercharger. A basic nitrous wet kit is about ten times cheaper than a Vortech supercharger, but you've got the continuing expense of refilling the bottle.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I'd like to occasionally have a bit more power, but I don't want to spend what is needed to install a supercharger, and certainly not what it would cost for a twin turbo, nor do I want to take the gas mileage hit to run rich enough to be safe with either one. So I've been taking a hard look at nitrous.

A simple kit doesn't do quite what I want. I think that a more sophisticated controller is needed to safely give me a quick boost when I need it while driving on the street, but not spray when I don't. I've been looking at a number of controller options to do that without a lot of manual intervention. I think doing what I want is achieveable for just a touch over $1,000, and staying with no more than a 50 shot, it should be safe on the stock engine.

 

i think cams and headers would be the easiest/cost effective way to gain around 40whp. but you are looking at atleast 2.5k

 

You definitely don't need to spend that much unless you want to. A simple kit should have an arming switch and a WOT switch. With these 2 things, the nitrous is only activated when both the WOT switch is closed by you flooring it, and the arming switch is on because you flipped it. Otherwise, you can floor it all you want without any nitrous or fuel being dumped into the engine.

A 50, 75, or 100 shot will cost just about as much as a new cat-back exhaust.

 

so what are the approximate gains of intake filter, plenum, testpipes, cat back exh & pulley? id like to think i got at least 30hp if not a little more from my mods(see below)...i know i felt the difference, especially with the testpipes & plenum! i know the cat back kits are costly but all the other stuff isnt too bad. all the other items can easily be had for the price of a cat back exhaust system....anyone looking to gain power will have all these mods eventually im sure so start with the best in hp gains & go from there.....im looking into nitrous next, even though i can never satisfy my need for more power

-justin

 

That's not a satisfactory system for me. I want a system which will automatically shut off the nitrous if a lean condition is detected (for example if the fuel solenoid fails). I want a system which automatically purges before delivering a shot. That'll keep the engine from rich bogging when initially starting to spray. I want a system with a window controller that won't spray below about 3000 RPM (too hard on the rods to spray at low RPMs) and that will cut off before hitting the rev limiter (not good to spray when the ECU is trying to shut down the engine). I also want the system to monitor bottle pressure and control the bottle heater to hold it at optimum when I'm driving and have the system armed. With a 50 shot, I do not need dual stage capability, but if I go to a larger shot, I would, so staging needs to be programable too.

All of that is possible with various current off the shelf add ons, but I'd like to have it all integrated into one controller for a clean install.

 

thats sounds sweet, if you locate a kit that offers all that please post about it. id get one!

-justin

 

One box that does it all would be nice but I can see why a company doesn't do that. I have no idea other than the cost.

I say go with a nice set of headers and nice exhuast cams and a CAI intake, and test pipes. maybe even clean up the heads and put a new intake on it. It all depends what you want to spend and what you want your reliability to do. remember that a bottle is cheap but filling that thing up once a week is $30.

 

Isn't there a jacobs mastermind system or something like that, that can computer control the nitrous? You might want to read up on that it's a very safe system that can be used for nitous. I belive it automaticly retards the timing when activated and advances it when deactivated.

 

I gotcha, I was just describing a basic kit that doesn't pose too much risk to a motor. For all the stuff you're doing, I sure hope you run more than 50 HP. If you get a controller that thorough, I would suggest something more like 150. Launch on a 50 shot and have another 100 in stage 2 hit around 3,500.