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I am going to check out those speakers for the front. Thanks.
Hey Jim, just a word to the wise, MB Quart speakers essentially went downhill after 2005. Bought, sold and eventually just hollowed out when the German production ended around that time. If you can find some earlier product (Q line, Premium, Discus like I have) at a good price, just make sure it was produced in Germany. One caveat: true MB Quarts are bright on the high-end and my ears like that- it really cuts through any road noise in the Z.
I thought this one over and I am going to stay kind of basic on the speakers and sound system with this car for now. I am going to resist the temptation to go "big" on this. LOL I just got some Focal ISS component speakers with a separate tweeter and I will stick with the amp he has in there for now. I will sound deaden it when I am in there doing the speaker work. I really want the tweeter up at ear level. The current front speakers are two way, so the tweeter is down in the door . Not ideal. They sound "muddy" to me. Certainly not crisp. Anything I do will be better.
I am putting the rest of the interior back in place behind the seats today or tomorrow depending on the arrival of the part. Next week the guy is coming by to replace the tint on the rear windows and hatch. I have my last two Nismo springs in the mail to me, so at some point I am going to install those and see what effect they have on the car. The one other thing I still need to do is buy and get mounted the track tires on the OEM V1 Rims I have stacked up in the garage. There are always more things to "improve", but starting to pause a bit as the car is in pretty good shape and I am ready to AutoX it soon I hope.
Got the front splash guards on and got the replacement interior speaker piece installed. Also put in new rear speakers and sound deadening. I have a few Engine dress up parts. As you can see I have the carbon fiber piece and some emblems just sitting on there to see what it looks like. My son does not like it and prefers the OEM one. As a matter of fact he is not a carbon fiber fan at all. I don't really feel strongly about it myself either way. Think it can look nice here and there, but not too much of it. It got us talking in the garage and staring at the car figuring out what if anything we want to do next. He likes the ideal of getting the headlights done so they can do a soft band of light around the bottom of them and maybe a Halo color ring for fun. He also wants to replace the "Z" logo on the side of the car with something different. We were also discussing that the car is still pretty much stock enough to run AutoX in our class, but any more things like (Nismo Springs and rear sway bar) will most definitely put us in another class. Which at this point is not something we are going to worry about.
The real thing we got to talking about is adding more horsepower to the car, but without going crazy. So, the most straighforward question is how much HP can you get out of this motor before putting a turbo or blower on it? If I said I want to pull another 25 - 50 hp normally aspirated is that possible? It seems it is pretty difficult to extract much more out of the engine NA? If we started down that route, I would go run a dyno on it and see where we are starting from.
Last edited by Jim Stephens; 04-30-2020 at 02:34 PM.
Jim- the truth of NA tuning is that Nissan did a pretty good job with the VQ35DE.Changing the intake, header, exhaust and tuning might gain you a MAX of 12-15 HP. Even adding 100 octane unleaded race fuel and a race tune like we do in D2D racing will only gain a few more HP, but with a broader power band. Getting a baseline dyno is important, but 30-50 HP gains are unrealistic without a full engine build, or FI application. Just telling the truth...
Jim- the truth of NA tuning is that Nissan did a pretty good job with the VQ35DE.Changing the intake, header, exhaust and tuning might gain you a MAX of 12-15 HP. Even adding 100 octane unleaded race fuel and a race tune like we do in D2D racing will only gain a few more HP, but with a broader power band. Getting a baseline dyno is important, but 30-50 HP gains are unrealistic without a full engine build, or FI application. Just telling the truth...
Thanks for the straight forward answer. Yes, I kinda thought that might be the case, but just wanted to confirm it one way or another. I might consider a blower somewhere down the road(not anytime soon) and something very mild to get me in the 350hp range. I have read that you can safely get up to about 400hp with the stock motor.
Just to give you a point of reference. I have an '05 with a Motordyne Shockwave TDX2 exhaust, Berk HFCs, Z1 angled plenum spacer, 75mm NWP TB, and 3.5" Admin Tuning intake with a velocity stack. It dyno'd at 270 at the wheels after the tune. You could probably get up to 280 with headers and some ART or test pipes, but I didn't want to go test pipes and I didn't feel like pulling the engine for the header install. A tune will certainly liven things up and you may very well like the results of that without dropping money into bolt-ons.
Quick question, what is the risk factor with a dyno? If the car is in great shape and all is good with it, is it not something to be to concerned about? Never have done one, but I grimace every time I watch the video's waiting for the "bang". LOL What do they typically cost?
If you can get out on a group dyno day i have seen 50-100$, self made appts seem to go 100-150 depending on where you go. Running on the dyno should be pretty safe. Normally the big issues come in during tuning and usually a cooling issue. Any good tuner that is running the dyno will be watching to shut it down before its too late.
Quick question, what is the risk factor with a dyno? If the car is in great shape and all is good with it, is it not something to be to concerned about? Never have done one, but I grimace every time I watch the video's waiting for the "bang". LOL What do they typically cost?
Z1 charges minimum $600. 5 for the UpRev license plus shop-time at 120 per. An NA car should be out in 20 minutes, 3 pulls.
I have to say it sounds so much better! Really there was no where to go, but up from what I had. The previous owner had installed xfinity (sp?) speakers, but they were with the built in tweeters(two way), so they were down there by your legs and the tweeters in the upper door area were not being used at all. It sounded muffled. I knew just getting a component based set up and getting the tweeters up near ear level would make a difference and it did!
So, I install them yesterday along with putting in the dynamat in the speakers holes. The tweeters took a bit of work, but no big deal. Used a glue gun to mount them plus the metal bracket holding the orignal tweeter could be re-used. By the way, there is a trick to getting the plastic tweeter cover off. You pop it off carefully on the leading edge(hinge side of the door) and then slide it back and out. There are two plastic tabs that are sliding into the far side of the tweeter housing that will break if you yank it off. I slightly crack those tabs on the first one, but crazy glued them back and it is fine. The second one I did more carefully and it came out fine.
I get done, take the car for a long drive and just enjoy listening to the tunes. I get about 1/2 mile from my house and decide to roll down the windows and they do not go all the way down! Yeah. Crap. Forgot to check that little issue. A bit of that inner voice going in my head going..dumb ***. LOL The windows were hitting the speakers. I had to take the door trim back off today and flip the extensions provided by crutchfield for the speakers to push the speakers "out" from the door and this allowed the room needed for the window to roll down without hitting the speaker. Should have paid closer attention to that, but no harm was done. At this point I can remove a door completely in a matter of minutes. LOL
Last edited by Jim Stephens; 05-04-2020 at 01:14 PM.
One of these days i need to revamp my audio. Honestly the worst sound i have heard in any car, especially since i disconnect my amp that drives my sub. This probably won't hit my to-do list until next year though.
I have been looking and learning about Forced Induction the last few weeks and I have found the perfect merger of my electric boat racing hobby and my new car hobby. Electric turbo charger. This would be interesting and fun to say the least. My electric race boats routinely generate 10hp to 15hp on my bigger boats with LiPoly batteries. Check this crazy thing out. Already I am thinking, hmmm. I have some big *** Electronic Speed Controllers that handle 300 amps and high voltage, I think I could get more out of this blower. LOL
This a video by the maker explaining how it works. The interesting part is he discuses what it does for the 350z at just a bit past the 6 minute mark.
It sounds like really no more horsepower, but a large increase in torque way down at the lower rpm range. Not sure what all this means, I guess you would feel a strong push at the lower rpm range when launching the car up through around 3k or 4k rpm. More grunt right?
The electric turbochargers are interesting. I think even 8 months ago if you brought it up it would be laughed off. It is still a bit gimicky and will likely take quite a while to catch on if they ever do. I would never do it, but for the sake of discussion...
Cleetus tested it on a low reving 2.2 liter and did not see substantial gains until he did two of them in parallel. With a super quick comparing of the the redlines and displacement, to see similar gains you would need 4 of these chargers. 7000/5750 redline ratio and 3.5/2.2 displacement.
This would net you ??100?? hp for most of the curve when on, but rob you of 30-40 hp when is was not activated because you are sucking through them.
You also still run into custom fabricating mounts, piping, wiring, couple hundred lbs of batteries, tuning, and you would still need fueling upgrades because the stock fuel system cannot go too much over stock power. Thats 10k in just the chargers and batteries before tuning and fuel. It is FAR cheaper to make power on a DE with an off the shelf turbo kit or supercharger kit.
Yeah, I am aware it is early days for this type of charger. Seems like it is just the beginning of this, but very interesting and I did not know they even existed. On the cost side ($2,500 for the blower kit) it looks pretty straight forward right? I mean it's the wiring, set it in place of the intake box, and no piping work really and there is no inter-cooler etc. Maybe new fuel injectors(maybe not as it is only about a 20% or so improvement) and a tune. Look at that video where they show it mounted in the Z. Looks fairly simple. The bottom line though is it does not produce any horsepower, but moves the torque curve down to the 1,500 rpm range in the 350z example. Yeah, not there yet, but in a Miata or a smaller displacement motor I think it would work pretty well. Also, as you state, clearly nothing in the ballpark compared to a turbo. Still though, could be a quick way to get maybe a 25 to 45hp boost if it scales up. I think the guy is on to something. With some better financing and more development he might get there for bigger displacement. Think I will try and track down the owner of that Z in the video and get his impression of it.
Also, here is a comment I found from the guy who sells these. TorqAmp 2 months ago
Yes we recommend twin setup on large naturally aspirated engines, above 3 a 3.5L. It's also nice to have twin when you have 2 throttle bodies. We are developing a larger TorqAmp for the V8's with single throttle body. Check our video of the Mustang V8.
Last edited by Jim Stephens; 05-05-2020 at 01:18 PM.
04-29-2020, 06:55 AM
