Why?  Are you nuts?
Why would any sane person want to swap out a perfectly running non-turbo 300z motor for a turbo?  Why not just sell the non-turbo and get a turbo?

Well, I'm rarely accused of being sane, but I would definately recommend to anyone considering this swap to do just that.  IF your motor is dead and/or you have a perfect condition turbo motor to slip in with all the required parts, it's worth it.  Otherwise, it's likely to be an expensive operation...

The Z
The car is an 87 300ZX non turbo in pretty good condition.  It's got about 105k miles, is maroon and has never been in a major accident.  I've never been inclined to leave well enough alone and I wanted to try out some autocrossing and road racing, so I did a few mods to the car before the swap -

• Stainless steel brake lines
• Portersfield R4S carbon-kevlar brake pads
• Motorsport (Addco?) sway bars front & rear
• Grex strut brace
• ARE 16x7s front, 16x8s rear, currently with Dunlop D40Ms 225/50zr16s up front and Bridgestone RE71 245/45ZR16s in the rear
• 86 Turbo rims with BFG R1 225/50 16s for autocrossing, although I'll need new tires in an event or two
• K&N filter
• Custom mandrel bent 3" cat-back exhaust
• Eibach progressive rate springs
• Tokico Illumina 5-way adjustable shocks & struts

Something was needed...I listened to the voice of reason for a couple of weeks this past August and tried to sell the car.  Of course I asked too much and only recieved two calls.  I had talked several times about swapping the motor or adding a turbo to the na engine, but hadn't done much...since I couldn't sell it and didn't want to lower the price (I was asking $5400), I said the hell with it.

Preparation
Since I don't own a home and am apartment bound, I got extremely lucky when a friend of mine volunteered his mom's garage to do the swap.  I never would have attempted it without full use of the garage & my friends tools and knowledge - many, many, many thanks to Scott Hung (it was his mom's garage) and Bill Holler for their many hours working on the car, extensive knowledge, patience with my dithering on what to do next and use of their tool collections.  Without their assistence I never would have attempted it.  Special thanks to Byron (84T on the Z board) for all of his help via email!  The computer and pressure regulator control module never would have gone in correctly without his patient assistance!

In getting ready for the swap, you'll need to snag the following parts off of a turbo car -

Front crossmember - The drivers side motor mount location is moved foward to clear the turbo.  Also, when you purchase the crossmember, get the bolts that the steering rack mounts to.  I don't know if it was because my crossmember came from a different year, or if turbos are different, but I couldn't re-use my bolts.  In the pic, the turbo crossmember is on the bottom and the non-turbo is on top. 
• Computer - try and get a turbo computer from the same year car as yours.  There are differences from year to year, and you won't spend as much time as I have figuring out what's up when it doesn't start :)
• Complete motor - again, try and get something that isn't going to require a rebuild.  Much of our time and my money was spent rebuilding the motor.  Be sure and get EVERYTHING with the motor - all the brackets, accessories, etc.  Make sure the turbo spins freely, and wiggle the wheel to make sure there's no play.  Also check the exhaust manifolds for cracks!
• Turbo downpipe - get it.
• Downpipe to cat pipe - the pipe that goes between the cat and downpipe is different, so you'll need to grab that as well.
• Timing belt, water pump, etc - do it while the motor is out!  It's a snap!
• Plug indexing washers - not sure if it's worth it, but it's easy to do and pretty cheap.  Moroso makes washers for around $20 list (Get the flat washers, not the countersunk set).  Much easier to do with the motor out, especially if you pull the upper intake off.
• Wiring harness - get the whole thing if convenient, easy & cheap, otherwise just cut out the part that hooks up the AAC/FICD valves on the drivers side of the intake and the piece that goes to the tranny, detonation sensor, and oil temp/pressure sensors (it plugs into the harness in front of the battery, so you shouldn't have to cut anything).  Cut the plugs off that the short plugs into as well to make life easier when you splice stuff in.  Also grab the connector that goes to the computer, leaving plenty of wire going to it.  If you don't swap the wiring harness, you can carefully remove one of the crimped connectors to plug the det sensor into your new computer.  Last, if your alternator is on the drivers side, you'll have to run some wires for that as well.
• Boost gauge - get a good aftermarket gauge.  If you get a 2 5/8" gauge (I used an autometer) you can even plug it into the stock location.
• New exhaust manifold studs - we broke several getting them out and had to send the heads out and get them removed via an EDM machine.  Yes, we did try and remove them by tapping them out and I don't want to talk about that.
• Driveshaft - If you're swapping the tranny, grab the turbo driveshaft when you get the tranny.

While we have it on the stand...
We put the new motor on an engine stand and did all the work there.  It came out of an 84 turbo that was built in 9/83, but it had the fuel injector recall and a water cooled turbo.  The exterior of the car was in poor shape from the sun, but the interior was very nice, and the odometer had only 46k on it!  Unfortunately, that wasn't true, as we found out later.  The car had hit something in the front end, but not too badly.  It did have a bad oil leak (crank seal, I believe), so it was pretty dirty.

The wrecking yard (American Auto Import Dismantlers in San Jose (408 275 9261)) was very good about letting us snag all the parts we wanted, but didn't really know anything about the car.  After we got it back and cleaned it up, we figured we'd take off the intake and peek in at the intake ports to see what condition it was in, as well as removing the exhaust manifolds to replace the defective studs.

This entailed removing the turbo, exhaust shields, intake pipes, and the upper & lower intake.  Three exhaust studs broke off getting them out, but the exhuast ports looked fairly clean.  There was very little black stuff to indicate burned oil, and what was there was very dry & flaky.  Once the intake was apart, we could see that they looked fairly good as well, but there was lots of carbon build-up on the pistons and the valves.

After trying unsuccessfully to get the first of the broken studs out (no, I still don't want to talk about it), we decided to pull the heads off and send them to a shop to have them extracted.  While the heads were out, we had the valves reground, valve guides replaced (the machinist guesstimated the motor had ~100k on it, and was leaking a small amount of oil past the guides) and the head resurfaced a small amount.  They also 'corrected' my attempt at tapping out the exhaust stud, and put a heli-coil into that hole.

We also ground all the carbon off of the piston tops (the rings looked good, btw, although the hash marks on some of the cylinder walls were a little worn.  My pocketbook was crying louder than Bill and Scott saying 'while it's torn down let's do it all!', so we didn't do the rings or anything to the block) and cleaned the block as well as we could.
 
Bill wanted to check out the crank, so we removed the oil pan as well.  It looked good to me, so we didn't muck with anything.

The exhaust manifolds had some ugly cracks, so we had the drivers side welded, but the passenger's side was beyond repair.  Scott wanted to try out some hot temp coating, so he bought an air gun and made a little sanding/spray booth and blasted the downpipe and drivers manifold before spraying them.  Was it worth it?  I don't really know yet.  My father in law has some thermocouples he'll let me borrow, so I'll do some temp readings of the engine compartment intake temps and post the results here.

The heads came back and we started to re-assemble stuff.  Everything went fairly smoothly getting it back together, except Courtesy Nissan had sold me the wrong water pump - it was the same shape and fit fine except the shaft and the wheel the pully mounts to were about 1/2" taller.  I got a new water pump and it fit fine.  I still don't know what that other one goes to...it would have been nice to use because the impellors looked larger, and so I think it would move more water.

The front bolt hole for the upper intake was stripped, so we ended up heli-coiling that as well.  No other problems were encountered getting the motor back together...except I forgot to change the CHTS before putting on the timing belt, so I had to take off the belt & cam pulleys to get it installed.

We indexed the plugs, got the exhaust manifolds on and the intake all put together without much of a problem.

 

The Swap
We pulled the old motor out, without a problem and started swapping some of the components that were in better condition on my motor.

We swapped the crossmember and discovered that the bolts that came out of my na crossmember were much too large for the bolt holes in the turbo crossmember (doh!).  We tracked down some grade 10.9 metric bolts (found some good info on hex cap screw strengths if you're interested) and solved that prob.

Next we changed the exhaust tube that goes to the cat.  Although it bolted right up, it moved my custom exhaust around a bit - ended up taking it back to Dando's (great mechanic/performance shop in Fremont, CA who built my exhaust) after the job was done to have them brace the exhaust so it wouldn't rub.

After getting the Centerforce II clutch in place on the new motor, we dropped it in.  We had a bit of trouble getting the motor mounts to line up, but not a big deal.  The real problem came when we tried to slide it back onto the tranny!  After several hours of trying to get it to slide on the input shaft (we didn't grease it), I started a couple of bolts around the bell housing and slowly (and painfully) 'walked' it on.

Since we had carefully labeled every single vacuum hose and electrical connection before pulling the motor out, it was now a matter of plugging everything in where it goes.  We put the short harness from the turbo on the passenger side, but  I had to modify it as the na tranny I'm using had the switches in opposite order, and the temp sensor connector had broken off.  We also modified the cut up AAC/FICD wiring harness to adapt to the na harness.

After getting everything hooked up, I turned the key to the 'on' position and waited for the fuel pump to stop...then crank...crank...vroom!  It started up and ran pretty good!

Debugging
Well, it was running, but not quite right.  There was noise in the intake (actually still there now...), idled a bit rough, the belts were a bit loose, a strange 'whirring' sound from the front of the motor and the na computer was still in the car.  The whirring sound was from the timing belt - it was on much too tight!  After disassembling everything in the front, we adjusted it and it's been fine since.

The turbo computer I used was from an 84 - this was a big mistake.  I should have used an 87 turbo computer and it would have saved me alot of pain...regardless, just swapping in the 84t computer and hooking up the det sensor didn't work - it wouldn't start when it was cold, but otherwise seemed to run ok after it was warmed up.  After a couple of email discussions with Byron (84T), I discovered the pressure regulator control module is used in the 84, but not in the 87.  The 87 computer takes over the function of sending the signal to the pressure regulator selonoid that the 84 relies on the module for.  A visit to the junkyard and some wire splicing fixed that.

I also rewired the injectors to conform to the way Byron told me the 84 turbo injectors (and the 87 turbo, btw) should be wired.  Didn't make an obvious difference, but it makes me feel better :-)  Also, the computer reported all is well except for the AC which isn't on the car.

When we got the tranny hooked up, the clutch flew to the floor with little or no pressure.  We figured we had let some air into the clutch system, so we bled the slave cylinder and damper.  Then we took a look at how dirty the fluid in the clutch master cylinder was, and just bled out the whole system.

The boost gauge reported a consistent 6+ psi of boost, but it didn't feel very impressive compared to the non-turbo motor.  It turns out it was running pretty rich (14 mpg!), and still is a bit.  I need to get the AFM dialed in, but now the computer is reporting a problem with the AFM so I need to do a bit more debugging.

Results
I haven't done any real performance analysis, but I have installed the boost controller and have it set to 7psi.  It's also running a bit rich still, but is much better (I'm getting about 20mpg now, although my foot has been rather heavy...).  Using my GTech, I've measured 192RWHP and a 1/4 mile of 14.99@95.8mph.  I am not confident that either of these runs were terribly accurate - the quarter mile run wasn't perfectly flat (couple of degrees downhill slant), and I shifted early (about 5k) on the HP run.  The best 0-60 I've recorded is 6.94, but it wasn't a terrific start (although 7.2 was my previous best, so I'm getting better!).

The difference after getting the mixture correct over my na performance is very noticable.  Available power over 3k is considerable, and will hopefully get better as the boost goes up!  I'll be doing some more runs and analysis once everything is tuned properly - having the 3.9 rear end should help, although the 5 speed gear ratios aren't as high as the turbo tranny's in 1st thru 4th.

How much did it cost?  Too much.  The motor was $600, CF II $250, head work $400, misc parts $600 (CHTS, water pump, O2 sensor, gaskets, etc), plus $300-500 on random stuff.

Next
I've been collecting parts for awhile, so some more mods are in the future -

• Spearco IC - it's sitting on my floor, begging to be put in...I need to fab all of the piping tho.
• Rising rate fuel pressure regulator - sitting next to the IC.  Not sure if I'll use it yet tho.
• Turbonetics Deltagate wastegate - in a box somewhere in my closet.  May be paired with a turbo upgrade.
• T4 - in the box with the wastegate.  It needs to be rebuilt and isn't water cooled.  Undecided on this as well.
• HKS blow off valve - sitting with the IC.  This will go in at the same time as the IC.
• Injectors - I've got an extra set of turbo injectors, but I'm not sure if bigger injectors rather than extra injectors is the way to go.
• Replacement pop off valve - ZRock really needs to post those spring rates so I don't have to do any work ;-)
• ???? - ECU upgrades, electronic boost controllers, fuzzy dice?

If you have any questions let me know.
-Ean Houts