The Story: My love for Pulsars + The SR20VE 2.2L Big Bore N/A Build

[jakeb]

Hey Guys

Not sure if anyone here keeps their eye on the Pulsar forums in which case you are likely to be familiar with this build, anyhoo

My affair with Pulsars started some time in 2008, when I was ready to get my P-Plates. A friend on the internet suggested a SSS Pulsar as a first car.. to which I said, what the hell is a Pulsar?

That wasn't even long ago, but unfortunately in WA a virgin SSS is rare to come by. I filled the void by getting an extremely tidy N14 Pulsar Ti 2.0L , which was lowered, had a 2.25" stainless mandrel exhaust with X-Force headers, icy air-con, immaculate interior, not a single scratch or dent and an absolute stunner of a car in all respects. It was only a matter of time before I ended up on the Pulsar forums looking to share my car with others... and thus I went on my first car cruise and had the first decent pictures of the car taken .





Unfortunately, all good things inevitably come to an end, and so did my first Pulsar To this day I can't think of anything more heart-breaking that's happened to me, I still miss it!

One week before Christmas, 2008



And so the story continues in the next post...

[jakeb]

So then I had a month to recover from the injuries of that crash, tore a few ligaments in my hand and I'm lucky I had a seat-belt on... sort of.

Not only had I lost my beloved Pulsar, I was stuck driving around a shitty Excel that would randomly deselect gears . From this period I went looking at different cars... 180SX's, Silvias, 300ZX's, even FTO's... somehow at the end of considering all of those cars I came back with an N14 Pulsar SSS at the end January 2009, and thus admitted to myself that I'm not going to escape Pulsars any time soon

Some pictures of when I got the new (and current) Pulsar:







It had/has pretty shoddy paint unfortunately though:


So yes, that was my new car

It wasn't perfect though... slightly different to the Ti. Some interior pieces were poorly painted in Silver and ended up being replaced, the Air-con didn't work and it didn't have the Dynamatting the old Ti had which really did make a big difference, it had more rattles too. As above, the paint was bad too, it got so bad to the point that the roof was starting to develop surface rust and so I had it fixed up ASAP along with the wing.

All pretty


Aside from having the stereo from the old Ti transplanted over, I stayed quiet on the modding side of things until about April 2009.

Continued in the next post!

[jakeb]

So comes April 2009, my 18th birthday warrants a gratuitously expensive gift from le mother... wheels

Star-Corp GT-C Black 17" w/ Marshall KU17 205/45/R17


Alas, the car still had stock suspension... and much to my dismay the rear spring seats were so large that they fouled the tyres... alot.

I think it was at this time I may have misconstrued "make it fit" with "dedicate your salary to cars".

To rectify the problem, I bought some BC BR Coilovers:


And had them installed, car isn't too low but passes the shoe test


So my car was truly teh sex-bawx now:


Modding then proceeded to settle down a bit as I was going to TAFE and thus living the poor life of a student. I did actually buy a few parts like GTiR calipers and Poncams but could never get around to fitting them.

Continued in the next post...

[Bramble]

Im a huge pulsar fan. Shame about your Ti looked tidy. it looked like you hit a trayback or something.
Edit: sorry i cut off your story :/

[jakeb]

During my TAFE time, while doing IT courses for stuff I already knew to make myself seem more employable, I taught myself a huge amount about how cars work. What I had absolutely no idea about in 2008 now comes to me naturally, it's hard to think I was ever illiterate about cars!

I managed to find regular employment in the form of working for Toll Personnel, doing night-shift at a depot and earning a err.. triple what I made at KFC and Chooks an hour. I think it was late 2009 (October/November) where I ended up on 30+ hour weeks at Toll after passing TAFE, and really began to earn decent money for funding the car.

At the same time I was doing IT Contracting, which sucks ****ing dog nuts. I ditched it after 2 months, worst experience ever and put a lot of kilometres on the Pulsar .

Anyway, the beefy part of the story is about to begin!

Some of you may remember the March 2010 Hail-Storm in Perth which wrote off a huuuuge amount of cars.

I bit the bullet... in the next post

[jakeb]

Shortly after the hail-storms, a post popped up on the Pulsar forums for an EOI on an N14 SSS in Perth with an SR20VE, which had been financially written off in the storm. An SR20VE is what I had been planning for my car so this seemed like a good opportunity!

It was up for $8000, which was moolah I just did not have at the time having just bought two rather expensive computers. I watched as it went by the way-side... and goodies slowly put up for grabs.

Luckily for me, the PGA forums is full of people that don't do anything, and the car went to Pickles for auction with everything still on it but the brakes, ECU and strut brace.

I got the car for $800, and everyone was spewing except for me


This turned into a big buzz, even the towie that delivered the car was excited about it .

The car delivered:




The pictures do the car way too much justice, it was absolutely screwed body wise, and had a big cave in around a chassis rail near the front on the passenger side!

Continued in the next post

[jakeb]

Now for some details of what I did with this car and what it came with that I'm using.

SR20VE w/ Appropriate Engine Loom
RS5F32V (JDM VLSD Gearbox)
ASP Headers - Ceramic Coated ($2000 worth!)
3" Mild-Steel Mandrel Bent exhaust
Modified cross-member to clear the headers
Clear front-corner indicators

I procrastinated a bit over what to do with the engine. Should I straight swap it? Recondition it? Rebuild it? Uber Rebuild It?

We pulled the engine out, after I had used the car to teach myself how to completely take apart and reassemble a Pulsar (learned a lot!)



The rest of the car I parted it out and made the money back on it, then sent it off to the scrap yard.

My answer was almost just 'recondition' it, as builders in Perth were not confidence inspiring at all. However, a man called Dale from the Pulsar forums who makes his living from building engines and tuning them had recently posted up his own results with his built VE motor, which were nothing short of awesome.

I contacted him and asked if he could build my engine (a big ask as he is in Sydney!). He agree'd, and we set out to rebuild the engine to high-comp 2.0L specs with all Nissan Parts.

As the title might suggest, that's not exactly how things went... but you'll have to wait for the next post tomorrow

[jakeb]

Let's continue!

The planned specs for the rebuild at that point were as below (keep in mind N1 effectively = Nismo):

2023cc Bore (to fit pistons)
SR16VE N1 Pistons 0.20 thou over-size (~ 12.5:1 compression)
SR20VE Cylinder Head - Port and Polish
New bearings everywhere
N1 Headbolts
SR20DET Eagle Rods
SR20VET Metal Headgasket
New Ancillaries

So with that in mind, we went ahead, pictures of the engine tear down confirm that straight-swapping it would have been a very bad move:

Good:


Good:


Bad:


Very Bad:


Average:


Some of the parts (ignore the Torana H/G):



You'll notice parts listed there I didn't mention, don't worry, I'll list them all at the very end

Continued in the next post...

[MrCelica]

Far out! Nice work! Keen tosee more. One hell of a story you've got there!

[renchamp]

Looks like youve done alot of work, cant wait to see how it turns out.

[jakeb]

Now have all the parts, and the engine is in the hands of my builder, we figure this should be done in less than a Month and I'll have the engine in my car and running before Christmas 2010.

Before continuing on, some pictures of the head-work that was done, really good stuff here:

Exhaust ports


Combustion chamber


Good view on of the Intake ports


So the head work is essentially done, and given the motor already had SR16VE N1 camshafts, and a full set of Brian Crower valve-springs, that's about all there was to do!

So came assembly time, the engine was put all back together and clearances gone over one more time... and a problem.

The bottom of all the cylinders had warped out of shape just enough to cause piston-ring sealing issues

This means we couldn't use the N1 pistons, and in-fact would have to essentially change the whole build. My builder gave me two options: get a new block... or go nuts.

I chose nuts... in the next post

[renchamp]

Ohh nuts, this is getting interesting.

[Marty]

great thread mate, really interesting build... you got lucky on that car purchase!

[jakeb]

Little did I know the decision I'd made lead to me creating the first N/A SR20VE of it's kind in Australia.

The shopping list changed, it was time to go all out on this engine. Unfortunately I'm sworn to secrecy on some of the juicier bits of the engine.

- CP SR20VE Pistons - 90mm 13:1 CR
- Darton Ductile-Iron Cylinder Sleeves
- Eagle Rods from before
- Customised Block Bracing & Sump
- BMW M3 Individual Throttle Bodies
- Custom Fuel and Vacuum Rail
- Mazworx 90mm Head-Gasket, grommet seal.
- Custom Camshafts developed specifically for this engine, this is the secret part heh

More details will be explained along side pictures...

Anyway, gathering all these parts took quite a while. A word to the wise, sleeving a block costs A LOT of money and there is no room for error.

So it was decided that we would bore the engine out to 90mm from 86mm (close to) 2.2L from 2.0L

This wouldn't be a build thread without gratuitous pictures:

The CP Pistons:



The Darton Sleeves (VERY heavy):



The only thing I would have changed about this was to get the cylinders pre-bored. The machine shop went through 7 cutting tools (1 usually last about 10 engines) boring these out to 90mm, they wanted to charge me for it too... steep penalty @ $90 each!

Installation and stuff in the next post

[jakeb]

So after spending the better part of 2 months wages on the parts and machining, the block was finally ready. You might have noticed I've lost track of time by this point. If you attempt something similar you'll find yourself avoiding the 'Receipts' folder that grows ever larger too .

First up, pictures of the block bracing. This SR20VE runs a 4CW crank which is better for rev's but not as stable as the 8CW crank in the later model SR20VE's. What's happening here is there is an SR20 standard crank girdle, with customised RB26 main studs holding it all down:



And now the part I creamed over the most... my very own Sleeved 90mm 13:1 CR SR20VE Block:





And with the 90mm Grommet-Seal headgasket:


And just to compare, a before and after!:
Before:

After:


As you can see... this means business now!

More in the next post...