I have recently started 1 of 2 rb25det projects that ive been itching to do for quite a while.
After searching on the net I come up with not a lot, apart from the baby puke green E30 with the pink RB26 lump shown below.
I admire the car but what the hell was he thinking when he chose that colour LoL
So thought id start a build thread with some decent info in order to try and avoid this happening to others who want to carry out the same conversion.
Ive always been a V dub guy from a very young age, but also love E30’s so this conversion is gonna be a bit of e learning kerb for me.
Dont get to go in the garage everyday but I’m going to try and keep the updates coming as quick as i can so please bear with me.
Here are the cars in question,
i bought this one off a pikey (LoL) two years ago for £160 and it has been sitting in my yard ever since.
very straight shell with minimal rust
The silver one was purchased in north Cyprus (where my family is originally from) for 500 Turkish lira, which works out to be around £182
Car as i found it in a field
Now in a bit of storage land that i have, will stay here till i collect some parts for it.
This one was gonna get scrapped which was not gonna happen on my watch,
the bodywork is near mint, previous owner bought a brand new bare shell over from bmw in germany a few years ago, as the original got rolled in an accident
(dont have a clue how he managed that one
)gonna finish the green one first and get cracking on the silver one in the near future.
heres what ive done so far
crap cleared out of garage and car in place.
old engine/box out
donor car for the rb engine,
its a nissan stagea rs four which has the same engine as the skyline. comes from factory with 4wd system and auto box.
i picked this up for £500 off Gaybay because it had a very bad miss fire which turned out to be a fault with the turbo timer, it had only covered 70k and just had a full service, new cam and auxiliary belts and a new water pump. It really was a shame to break this but that's what i bought it for.
if you can afford to buy a complete car or find one cheap enough, i strongly advise you to do so, i never buy engines off the floor as you dont know what kind of life it has had and how well looked after it was during its use.
luckily for me, the engine in the donor car was mint
Engine out of donor car, now fitted with rwd metal sump and manual box
Before trial fitting the engine in the car, i made a sump spacer from of some 20mm thick wood. this will give a nice amount of clearance between the sump and sub frame during the fabrication of the front engine mounting brackets.
With the engine and box in the car, i first lined up the gear selector hole in the gearbox dead central with the hole in the transmission tunnel,
This left a gap between the back of the engine and the bulkhead.
(i stupidly didn't take any pictures of this but will update when im back in the uk)
You can get round this by cutting and modifying the sump so the engine sits further back in addition to recessing the hole in the transmission tunnel approximately 1 a”a further back.
I chose not to do this as i was happy with the position of the engine where it was.
I then got the correct horizontal angle of the engine with an angle finder by placing it on top of the hole for the gear selector shaft which is perfectly horizontal. It took a bit of shuffling but i got it perfectly straight after a short while.
I then started measuring the clearances around the engine and between the engine mounts/chassis legs in order to centralize the engine in the engine bay.
Now that i have the engine and box sitting where i want them, i marked on the chassis legs where the engine mounts will be positioned.
This whole process turned out to be a lot easier than i thought it would be.
this is where the (fun) fabrication begins,
i decided to design the mounting plates so that they can be welded to the chassis legs but be unboltable from the sub frame in case of any future problems where the sub frame has to be removed for any reason.
with the engine and box back out, i cut to pieces of 100mm wide x 10mm thick plate to the length required to reach where the engine mounts are.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that the o/s engine mount sits further forward on the block than the n/s mount.
the two plates were then cut, drilled and bolted to the subframe using the original BMW engine mount holes.
i then cut two more plates which were clamped against the chassis legs to get the angle needed for them to be welded to the first pair of plates that are bolted to the subframe.
plates now tacked together
The engine/box was then refitted in order to tack the final pair of plates in place that the skyline mounts will be bolted to
once this was done for both sides, i welded everything up and added some tabs that will be welded to the underside of the chassis legs.
here are the finished mounting plates
I have drilled a second hole in each of the plates so that they can be bolted to the subframe with two bolts each.
Im planning to drill two holes in the back of either side of the sub frame and weld in some nuts for the second set of bolts.
below are the mounting plates back on the car and bolted to the engine
Next on the list was to fabricate a laser aligning tool that will slide into the back of the gearbox over the output shaft. this will ensure that the gearbox if perfectly aligned with the center point of the diff.
here is whats been done so far
i didnt get to finish this before i left for my hol's, a friend of mine said he will finish it (hopefully
)seen as though im currently in cyprus with not a lot to do, i decided to go hunting for some E30 bits for the silver one.
here's a few pics of what i came across if anyones interested
this old 5 series was mint beyond belief, i was so tempted to buy it just to save it from getting scrapped but the mrs would of killed me LoL
the front panel on the silver E30 is a bit mangled from when it was pulled with a tractor, this was the only major part that i now don't have so i got one cut off a scrapper for 150 lira (£54)
sorted
that;s everything ive done up till today folks, its not a huge amount but its progress at least.
will finish off the gearbox aligning tool when i get back to the uk, once that's done i will be able to fab up a mount in a hour or so.
will update with any progress on the silver one when i can.
