|Picking up a piece of Japanese Performance|
I’m going to start this off by letting you know I’m not going to talk about myself in third person for this whole post. Seems a bit awkward. Hi, my name is Prakash Samuel and I write these blog posts. Now that we’ve taken care of that, lets talk about this S14 SR20DET that I recently acquired.
I daily drive a 1993 Nissan 240sx convertible. I’ve had the car for over 7 years and its been my only daily for 6. For this whole time, its had a KA24DE. I kept the KA mainly because of costs and simplicity, but over the years I learned to really appreciate that engine for what it is. I even fully built a KA for boost at one point, but thats a whole different story. Over the past year, the KA in the car (craigslist special), has really started to wear down. So it left me with two options. Either purchase a regular daily driver or make my 240sx reliable.
So Scott, Mike, our friend Andrew, and I piled into the Grip Royal van and headed to JDM Hookup in St. Louis to see what engines they had in stock. Its not too far of a drive for us, so we made it a weekend trip. When we got to St. Louis, we met up with our friend Steven, who works at JDM Hookup.
We went to Steven’s shop first to look at a few of the car’s he’s working on. He’s pretty comfortable with building drift-cars and working at JDM Hookup with Nocturnal Motorworks right next door has given him the opportunity to become very familiar with all kinds of popular engines and setups. This black 240sx is his drift-car.
He’s re-building the entire rear end of the car as a tubular frame. There is quite a bit of fabrication involved to do this, but Steven seems to be on the right path. The shop had central heat, so we were lounging comfortably inside while the cold wind was blowing outside.
We left Steven’s shop and grabbed some lunch at a local BBQ joint, Sugar Fire. After a trip in a van and a night on a couch, we thoroughly enjoyed it.
After lunch, we made our way to JDM Hookup to browse the selection. I had already decided that I wanted an SR, for simplicity’s sake, but there are a lot to choose from.
Even the office was awesome. The office was decorated with lots of japanese inspired details and it made for a really cool place to just hang out in. Then we went into the garage to look for an SR. Ideally the newer the better, Steven had already pulled a few of the “stockest” SR’s he could find.
This is the motor I went with. Its a late-model Zenki SR20det. This motor was all stock aside from a manual boost controller, which is a very common modification for these. The motor was tagged with “EBAY”, since JDM Hookup puts a lot of their inventory on eBay. As Steven was getting the forklift ready to load this motor up, we couldn’t help but stare at all the hard-to-find parts filling shelves from the ground to the ceiling.
Of course we all had to have our turn sitting in this R32 Skyline GTR.
You may notice that this shipping pallet has more than an SR20 on it. Our friend Andrew was so impressed by the selection of 1JZ-GTE on hand that he finally pulled the trigger and bought one for his IS300. With the pallet loaded, we said goodbye to Steven and our friends next door at Nocturnal Motorworks, and made our way back to the Grip Royal HQ.
As soon as we got back I started tearing into it. The plan isn’t to build it, really just refresh it. This engine needs to be reliable and fun for as long as I drive that car. So I’ve ordered the OEM Nissan Gasket kit from Enjuku Racing, along with lots of other pieces needed for this puzzle.
Be sure to check back for updates on this build along with all of our other builds at Grip Royal!
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