2_Liter_Turbo

Yeah, there are a few S14 guys here locally in AZ that run the pathfinder BMC. You have to pound the tower with a hammer to get it to clear, ha ha. Not a ton, but enough to make you cringe a bit.

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gills

good ol' hammer pounding always works! lol

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


So back to the front spindles. Milled and drilled them based off of what I measured. I think the air gap should work just right.

"Probing" that OEM ABS spindle. Picked up the small tooling hole on the back that the factory uses to turn the spindle:



Had to mill down the area where the sensor goes to match the thickness. Had to remove about 0.095".


All done. Thru hole for the sensor is 18mm and is located 50-50.25mm radially from the spindle centerline. Not having the mounting hole there was actually good since the Nissan pattern doesn't match and also uses an M8 instead of an M6. I had a clean slate to transfer the BMW sensor hole:


Air gaps and fitment is just right:





Really can't wait to test this system. The harness for the ABS should be arriving this week. I'll be mounting the module on the rear passenger side seat shelf so there will be bulkhead fittings galore.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Here's my first step to making the brake system more rigid. Quickly fabbed up a master cylinder brace that mounts on the strut tower. And, yes, these things do help. I've measured decent deflection on the S14. Any deflection in your braking system is magnified at your foot by the brake pedal ratio. Taking as much of it out is very beneficial to brake modulation, feel, and effectiveness:

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eagleeyes221

so much good information here in this build thread. im excited to see your results after
Watkins Glen with everything that you have changed

gills

Thanks, my friend. Actually just did a test day at NJMP yesterday. Managed to get the car together and got about 2 hours of sleep, but it was well worth it as we unearthed a few gremlins that would've been shitty to deal with at a race.


But, before we get into more detail with that, playing around with my Core4 Motorsports rear brackets and calipers, anyone crazy enough to run this dual caliper setup?? lol

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gills

Lots to update here, but in the meantime at Watkins Glen this weekend. Here's a live streaming link for the Saturday 9 hour:

https://youtu.be/w2vU9OaCXqU


Unfortunately, we had some teething issues so we're not competitive for today's race. Tomorrow looks to be raining, but it's a new race. Will update thread with ABS and other info next week.

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gills

Also note to everyone, if your pads don't slide nicely into your calipers take them out and grind down the sides of the backing plates a hair. My rear pads got stuck on the rotor on the rear left and dragged on the rotor drastically when warming them up on the formation laps. Such a stupid thing to kill our day.

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da_crew10

Hey-zeus this thing gets better and better. Makes me want to put my car back on the drawing board for a time attack setup like I have been "planning" on for about over a year now!

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513s13

Sorry to hear you had problems Tom. Always a bummer to get shut down for silly stuff. Sometimes we have to learn things the hard way unfortunately.
Interested to see any advances you have made on the ABS since your trials 2 weeks ago. Also can't wait to get the brake bits from you as well as the calipers from Wilwood as they keep sending me a mish mash of colors...

eagleeyes221

how did the new differential setup work out for you at Walkens glen?

gills

Hey sorry for the delay here guys. I will post a proper update this week hopefully. Most definitely need some closure on the ABS as I was chasing an issue in the rear that turned out to be obvious in the end. It worked flawlessly at Watkins Glen which was VERY wet on Sunday and put to the ultimate test.

Speaking of the brakes, here are the new brakes in all their glory from the Watkins Glen event:


Rear brakes....fully bolt on without any clearancing or cutting. Works on OEM, Z32 or aftermarket uprights that keep OEM caliper mounting locations, and has the option to be used with a Z32 ebrake mechanism:



Front brakes...the most versatile bracket on the market can be used with an off the shelf Z33 track model rotor and a Wilwood FSL6R caliperfor the ultimate cost effective performance based BBK, or used with Core4's proprietary full floating rotor hats with 332mm x 32mm rotor rings (17" wheels) or 355mm x 32mm rotor rings for really high power and high grip applications (and 18"+ wheels).



Stay tuned for the guys at Speed Academy (Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/spdacademy) to install these kits on their kouki S14 K-swapped project car.

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gsxeclipsed

So, excited for the review from the guys at Speed Academy! I am also looking forward to buying a set for my car once I find a new shell to build!

Keep up the great work and thank you for the continued innovation!

gills

THANK YOU. That means a great deal to me.

I will update this thread soon with my developments.

In the meantime, here’s a live stream link of another endurance racing S14 team with a VQ37VHR swap racing in the World Racing League at Road America in Wisconsin. Car is detuned to fit in a class, but man the 37 sounds so much better than a 35DE! They are running Core4 version 1 rear brakes. Their first race with the car:

https://youtu.be/nbkYdG8a6rk

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gills

OK, so where to being.

While the engine was getting a minor refresh, we decided to use HR head gaskets to open up the coolant channel at the back of the DE cylinder banks, which are typically closed off. This should allow for more uniform heat transfer and minimized hot spots at the back of the cylinder banks.

Area opened up circled in red:


Closer look:



Also digging deeper with an exhaust leak, found there was a crack at the collector of the passenger side 370Z header:


Cleaned up and welded. Hopefully it holds up:



Also got some fresh exhaust wrap on them. The existing stuff basically disintegrated off:



Engine back in the car with some new freshness:




Here's the finished up BMC firewall brace. This worked out pretty well with a definite reduction in firewall flex using the eye test. This can be made more effective if you pickup mounting points that are further apart. As is, you can actually see the strut tower contort a bit when applying the brakes.



'meh' welds:




Finally the MK60 E46 M3 ABS system. I think we are 1 of 2 S-chassis in the world that have this ABS system implemented. We ended up mounting the module and all necessary components on a panel I made up on the passenger side rear seat deck. The engine compartment is way too busy as is and I already have enough weight hanging over the front axle. The obvious con being a large run of lines.

The hard-lines are nickel copper alloy and all flares are 37 degree AN flares with tube sleeves and tube nuts. Then quite a few AN bulkhead fittings. I'm using banjo-to-AN fittings at the master cylinder. Since the master was a non-ABS, the middle port had to be plugged. For this I also used a banjo-to-AN fitting and then just capped it off with an AN cap (pic below). Working great.

ABS module and lateral/yaw sensor mounted on the plate to the right of it:


(**EDIT - added some completed pictures**) Here's in process line routing without seats in the car. Looks better than this now:



System needs two 15amp fuses and one 5amp. The 5amp can be switched to reset the system while on the move.



2 supply lines from MC, and 1 return to the front left caliper:


Master Cylinder:




SO, once everything was installed and I started testing. There were rear wheel speed sensors faults being thrown. There were really slight drop offs in wheel speed when logging them that was enough to fault the system:




Thinking that possibly it was an air gap issue, I tried reducing the air gap by milling the diff cover. Nothing. I removed the steel sleeve that protrudes from the diff cover that the sensor resides in thinking that maybe there was some interference. This circled in red:



To this:




And still the same issue.

At that point, I didn't have anymore time before our test day on 4/1 to sort it out. The ABS worked very intermittently and then would basically throw an error after the first time ABS was activated and then would stop working. The good news is that when the ABS throws a fault, the brake system behaves as it did without it. I managed to top my personal best at the track and we got within 0.2 seconds of our best ever at the track with 18 hour old Hankook RS4's, where our previous best was set with NT-01's.


Obligatory test day pic with new Core4 BBK's:


(OH, and the diff. Definitely an improvement. Noticeably easier to move and roll around the paddock and garage. Still plenty of capability to kick the ass end out under power as well. Did I notice less of a tendency for the car to want to track straight when off the throttle? Perhaps a little, but not as much of a change as I was expecting. It did make less noise though if there was ever any rear lock up and in general. But, more on the diff later in my next post about the Watkins Glen event. )


So, with basically less than a week from the Watkins Glen event, resolving the ABS was priority number one. So while troubleshooting, I had somewhat of an epiphany. Although it was difficult to do while installed on the car, I noticed the signal would get better if I moved the sensor around and held it in a different position. I then simply looked at a picture of how an E46 M3 rear speed sensor actually mounts on an M3.


Notice the orientation. The mounting bolt is inline with the direction of rotation of the wheel/tone ring.


Just to refresh your memory, here's the Nissan diff cover which mounts the sensors 90 degrees from the rotation of the tone rings:



Now this seems pretty obvious, but I assumed this was how the E46 sensors were mounted also. When I realized the 90 degree difference and brought it up to company that makes the custom harnesses for these, they said "they believe it shouldn't matter." Since it wasn't a concrete answer my gut knew that this was the issue. I never thought orientation would matter for these things, but it does!

SO, because there's not really material on the diff cover to just rotate these and have material to drill and tap, I welded some material and milled it flat (I'm getting pretty damn good at removing diffs now!). I did this very quickly with whatever material I could find so it looks a little shitty:



Buttoned it all back up, hooked up the scanner and let it run in gear for about 15 minutes. ZERO FAULTS. Game on for Watkins Glen!! Here's what the speed signals are supposed to look like:

Butter smooth:



In hindsight, perhaps it would've been better to just use the Z33 rear wheel speed sensors. The only customization required is that they need to be shimmed away from the tone ring since they would interfere as is. The depth of the E46 M3 sensor happens to be perfect. Again, pick your poison.



Watkins Glen event is finished I will post the results of that soon. But, our next race is this weekend (5/17) at New Jersey Motorsports Park.

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gills

Added more pics of ABS install in previous post

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Ruff Ryder 6

Hey gills, thanks for documenting this so well. I see you put a lot of effort into mounting up all the sensors. What about for those that have the factory ABS spindles and diff covers? I know you mentioned using the Z33 sensors in the rear. Are all the BMW sensors active sensors and required for use with that system? I have S14 ABS spindles in the front and a Z32 rear cover with sensors in the rear. I’d love it if I could just purchase the ABS unit and controller and wire it up with Nissan sensors without having to go through the machining work you did. (Not a machinist and don’t have the same access to tools as you do). The Z33 front sensors are mounted different than S14 and they may be active sensors as well.

gills

I'm almost certain that all modern ABS systems (early 2000's+) use active sensors. Or, any that have DSC or some kind of stability control which is everything these days. Z33 sensors are confirmed to work with the BMW system. The German company ATE seems to supply many/most of these ABS/DSC/TC modules and controllers for OEM's so it's no surprise there's a lot of cross compatibility. You cannot use older style sensors like from S-chassis and Z32.

So you have a head start already since you have ABS spindles. No need to go through what I did with much machining. If you use the E46 sensor, you just need to come up with a solution for the mounting hole. The hole the sensor itself goes through is perfect (18mm I believe). The E46 sensor uses an M6 vs an M8 bolt to mount, and the hole is closer to the centerline of the sensor vs the Nissan configuration.

Other than that, it's actually shocking at how well this sensor works in the S14 upright in terms of it's length and air gap to the tone ring.

I *believe* the issue with using Z33 sensors up front is that they read the tone ring at the very tip of the sensor end, vs the side of the tip on the E46. I.e.- the sensor is mounted in the radial direction from the spindle/tone ring where the E46 one is mounted axially with respect to the spindle (installs through the backside of the upright). In my quick searches, the E46 front sensor is one of the only active sensors that reads in this orientation, perhaps due to MacStrut style suspension.


The rear it'll be easier to use Z33 sensors since they are oriented correctly already and mounting holes line up perfectly.
You need to find diff output shafts that were for an ABS car and have tone rings on them. Then you'll likely need to shim the Z33 sensors away from the tone ring as they protrude more and will hit it as I mentioned. If I knew that these sensors needed to be "clocked" a certain way before hand, I would've went with the Z33 ones.

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wakawakalj

This thread is super interesting. I'm building my own S14 with a blown VK56 (because I like to keep it Nissan, and some race series require that your motor manufacturer matches the chassis) that will see track/race duty - hillclimb primarily, though I've recently been seriously considering endurance as well, which means I'll probably need to have the ability to take the blower off.

I'll be putting in a MK60 ABS system - Doug had mentioned he had just done the run lengths for an S14 install in the passenger well, now I see where that unit went. Looks like I might be #3 with this ABS system installed.

Did you install the steering angle sensor and wire it up to the ABS unit? If so, was it a pain to do right?

After seeing your ABS install setup, I'll probably run Z33 sensors on the rear (R33 GTR diff with factory ABS tone rings/sensors) and E46 sensors on the front as I've already got ABS spindles. Thanks for spending so much time solving these problems so I don't have to

When talking about the brakes, you say:

What is significant/different about the B13 non-abs booster vs the S-chassis one? I saw some comments on the NRR forum about it increasing modulation? Does it apply less boosting to the system overall, making it less binary?

I'm going to be running SRT8 four pistons on all corners, 355/350mm 370z track rotors, stainless lines, and currently planning on a 17/16 Z32 master. The booster on the car is currently the stock S14 manual abs one it came from the factory with.

I need to go to the local pick-n-pull to get some nissan parts bin bits (it's nice these cars are all like lego), maybe I'll grab a B13 booster while I'm there.

gills

Thanks for posting!

I don't have the SAS in the car. Not needed for operational ABS, only Dynamic Stability Control (DSC) if you want that capability or if you want to log steering angle. I asked him to route the wires and connector for it because I eventually wanted install the SAS to log my steering angles, but he forgot to do it. A CAN emulator is needed to access and record that data. Steering angle is great info for driver coaching/training.

DSC would also be nice to have for wet races for less skilled drivers.


Way better modulation for threshold braking. The absolute worst being an automatic S14 booster which is a dual diaphragm unit. Just about any big brake setup with racing pads with that particular booster is infuriating to modulate. The S13 manual booster is better, but still touchy brakes. The B13 sentra booster is about 1" smaller diaphragm diameter than the S13 one is and the difference was immediately noticeable.

As for your brake setup, just get my kit instead! OEM pads are usually way more expensive and the one piece rotors are heavy as a mofo.

But in all seriousness, are you putting a pedal box with dual master setup in? PM me if you want to discuss there. You can also email me at [email protected] if you want (I'd prefer that). I'm curious about your setup.

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wakawakalj

Yup, I don't even try to pretend that I'm the best driver out there, or any better than average at best. I like safety margins, especially on a vehicle that will be doing double duty as both a street and a track car.

Done. Check your spam if you don't see something from me directly etc.

moto21

Right now I have a boosterless S14 and no ABS. I have a Stock (iron) 5.3/T56 in the car as well to get seat time and work out all the issues I will have. I also have an LS1 that I'm gonna rebuild with mild modifications, but that is way down the road. I'm starting out in normal track days and time attack events. But my question is will you guys offer a kit for E46 M3 ABS?

wakawakalj

For the mk60 ABS system, you can find the kit info/pricing here: https://3dmmotorsport.com/collection...rness-data-kit

Doug is super knowledgeable and helpful and will set you on the right path I'm sure.

moto21

Thank you very much, this will definitely help in the future!

gills

Yes, who wakawakalj recommended for the harness and all the parts is who I went to. I can help you out also so let me know if you have any questions.




With that said, I know this thread is due for an update. Hope to get to it this week. Stay tuned...

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gills

I also want to mention that if anyone needs any parts whatsoever (anything!), please reach out to me. I now have the ability to sell many different brands of aftermarket parts for all types of cars and trucks.

My website is a work in progress, so just PM me or send an email to [email protected]. Support the little guy!

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eagleeyes221

hey gills. I wanted to say thank you for doing the write up on the diff. i just got everything all back together on my car over the weekend. I would have never thought that just changing the diff around like that would have such a big impact on the way the car drives. It really is a night and day difference.

gills

That's great! Love to hear that what I shared has helped you.

And, yes, diffs have a huge impact on vehicle dynamics. It is often said that when designing a race car, pick a diff setup first, then setup the rest of the car around it. It's that important.

What diff are you running anyway and what settings did you go from and to?


And sorry I haven't given a complete recap yet of the changes I made. I didn't mention it here, but I actually went to the 1-way ramps at my last race because the diff toward the end of the Watkins Glen event started acting very strange. But, when I opened it up I found out what could've been causing it and it's something that M-Factory hasn't answered me about. I think it's something that is overlooked on M-Factory's part.

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eagleeyes221

I have a Cusco type RS. Went from a 2 way at 100% lock to 1.5 way at 60% lock. I didn't mess around with any of the preload springs as i could pull the diff again to make any changes if needed. I am curious to see what the difference in feel is between a 1.5 way and a 1 way diff is. Thats interesting, im looking forward to the next update now

gills

Yea the M-Factory is basically identical to the RS. And you made the right decision to go to those settings if it's anything but a drift car.

You lose some preload when you lower lock % so if you want to keep the same preload as before, you'd have to add 2-4 more springs. The lock % and preload amount are interdependent.

But, speaking of Cusco, their literature is what made me realize something that M-Factory mentions nowhere and their US office hasn't replied back to me on yet.

So I noticed this notch on the deceleration side of the 1.5 way ramp at the start of all this, but didn't think anything of it at the time (pre-Watkins Glen).




Taking a closer look at how the "cross shaft" mates up against the deceleration face, it made sense as to why this notch has developed. It's sharp edge contact:




So post Watkins Glen it got me thinking because the diff always acted the strangest in deceleration when turning (slower turns). That notch could be affecting function and causing weirdness.

Then when going through Cusco documents, I stumbled upon this diagram that shows the cross shaft is actually reversed with the more angle/curved side against the deceleration ramp on the 1.5way:




There are just pictures and diagrams that show this. There's no actual wording that mentions that this needs to be done. So, I flipped the cross shaft to see what it would look like.

Looks like meant to be if you ask me:

vs this:



Looks pretty obvious. So, I assembled it that way only to realize that the stack height of everything increased because the cross shaft contacts the ramps in slightly different spots when flipped (you can see the spacing of the ramp plates is slightly larger in the pics above). To get it to work this way, I'd have grind down the washers at the very ends of the clutch stack. I bailed and just set it to 1way for the New Jersey race for the time being.

This makes it seem like that perhaps it isn't correct to flip the cross shaft, but I'm convinced that it is based on the few things mentioned above. Cusco even shows it flipped in their diagrams. I'd bet that there wouldn't be an issue with a Cusco RS doing this since the contact points would make it the same stack height when flipped, as that is what they show to do.

Anyway, thought it was worth sharing..

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gills

Just wanted to share some rotor weights and how they compare to the Core4 2-piece front and rear rotors. It's remarkable how much weight savings a 2-piece rotor offers, while offering far better cooling/thermal efficiency.


Front Z32 rotor:


Front Z33 track (brembo) rotor (heavy mofo):


Defsport 2-piece with 12.2 x 1.25 (missing hardware too):


Front Core4 2-piece 13.06 x 1.25:


Rear Z32 rotor:


Rear Core4 2-piece 12.88 x 0.81 w/ modular e-brake drum:

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gills

Sorry there haven’t been any updates. Will post soon.

Cliffs notes, the abs system is excellent. Blew the engine back at the New Jersey race. Rebuilt for summit point raceway double 9 hour happening now.

Tune in to a live broadcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvz24SfN7OA

And our live in-car stream: https://youtu.be/_S1qf9_aC2A

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