My quest for the Ultimate Street Car - VVTi 1JZ S14

[ILoveMyRHS13]

Hey guys and gals. I've been a member of Zilvia for quite a while now and mostly just lurk anymore. I've decided to make a build thread to try and document my newest build but bear with me, it's my first build thread I've made before so I'm not entirely sure how to go about it.

I've owned 3 S chassis now over the past 11 years. Two S13 hatches, one of which I owned since I was 16 years old; it was my first car.




Long story short, that car was great to me and I really enjoyed it, but it wasn't fun to drive on the street anymore. The lack of interior, the blown up aero only getting worse, and just uncomfortable to drive. I wasn't sure what to do with the car, it would be so much work to get it to the point that I would be happy with. Final Bout Special Stage East was the deciding factor. I ended up blowing an oil cooler line off (while on limiter) and starved the turbo of oil and figured I trashed the motor. I saw this as my opportunity to start over - but I wanted an S14 next time.

At the end of 2016 the yellow car was about gone and I was ready to start looking for the right S14 to buy. I was very picky about what I wanted, a complete virgin to avoid anyone's previous bullshit and have a clean slate. In January I ended up finding the perfect car. 57k original miles, 5 speed, SE, sunroof and completely stock. Only issue was that it was 1000 miles away in Florida.




A week before I was supposed to fly down I broke my leg and was super upset because I wasn't sure how I was going to get down there to drive the car back. Luckily some good friends offer to fly down and drive it back (on my dime of course).



I left the car stock for a few months while I recovered from my injury but focused on the interior first. I transferred my Bride Zeta II and Buddy Club rails over from my S13, as well as my Nardi. Ended up buying a new Vertex shift knob, P2M floor mats and an ebay double din. I also added some interior accent LEDs.



After driving it like that for a little longer I finally got around to the good stuff. I ordered these BC Racing extreme drop coilovers, PBM solid subframe bushings and diff bushings. I still had my Z32 front brakes, S13/Z31/Altima rear brakes, Heat Maker knuckles and LCAs, and PBM rear arms (which I don't have any pictures of the install)


I had some stock 370Z wheels laying around that I threw on to tie me over until I could get something nicer. Also threw on some clear headlight housings.



I got bored of the awful light output of the stock headlights so I decided to try a retro fit so I found some cheap 2016 Corolla LED projectors. I'm not 100% sold on the look so I'll probably sell these and re-do them with some normal projectors.


After all of that I went into prep mode for Final Bout III. I needed to relocate the battery, do a custom short ram intake, and replace the timing chains and tensioners because they were rattling a little bit. Oh, and new wheels and Navan skirts.



I got the timing chains done with no real issue but when I fired it back up for the first time it was leaking oil badly from what looked like the oil pan. So I figured it was the oil pan leaking and took it back off to re-seal it. After firing it up again it was still leaking just as badly. (Keep in mind this was about two weeks before I had to drive 1100 miles to Wisconsin, drift for two days and drive it 1100 miles home because I don't have a truck or trailer.) After doing a little more research into the leak it looked like it was coming from the upper timing cover. After pulling that back off I realized that the RTV I had used to reseal everything was junk; it hadn't cured at all. Without enough time to pull the motor and reseal it again, I decided to say fuck it and dump some stop-leak into the motor as a last ditch effort to make it.



Day one of the long ass drive we decided to split the drive up and stop at a buddy's house in Cincinnati. The car was holding up absolutely great, beside leaking about a quart of oil between every fuel stop.


Again - fuck it, we're already this far. So we made it to Final Bout with zero issue other than the leak, so let's drifting.



Amazingly enough the car made it home with ZERO issue, which absolutely blew me away. I decided it was time to retire the KA and go with what I ultimately wanted to swap into the car - a JZX110 VVTi 1JZ. This past weekend the motor was pulled and that brings us to it's current state.



Over the next few weeks while I search for the right motor I'll be cleaning this bay up, painting it, deleting the ABS, and a few other odds and ends. If you've made it this far, shout out to you; I don't know why I've written this much.

The goal for the car is to make the ultimate street car that I can drive wherever I need/want to. Even load it up and drive it to various drift events across the east coast. I plan on having full working AC, full interior and hopefully even cruise control.

Stay tuned for more updates. I will warn you, this will be a fairly slow thread because I'm not super rich like most of you are.