By Juan Vargas
I promise, I’m not trying to make this be an annual build update blog, this project should of honestly gone by much quicker but with the whole me getting Kerryann’s old R32 it really put my finances into shared custody between two very irresponsible builds. Never the less, we have progress with the SR20VET. So when I decided to go turbo VVL on the Z32 I didn’t factor how hard it would be to find a good condition head by itself without having to buy an entire P11 engine. Luckily for me 5523 Motorsports came out to the rescue. They had a P11 cylinder head laying around the shop that came out of the old S13 from back in the day. Long story short, 5523 Motorsports was one of the original pioneers of the RWD SR20 VVL swap, luckily for me they are a team I can call good friends.
After discussing the battle plan and purpose of this car we set out to build a head that would be able to keep up with the demands. The recipe for this was Supertech Performance over sized intake valves, exhaust valves and valve guides. P11 Cylinder head, Nissan N1 camshafts for SR16VE N1 and a set of Jim Wolf Technology Springs for VVL. The springs are not something that is readily available for purchase and currently exclusive for my project as a combined effort between the team over at Jim Wolf Technology and 5523 Motorsports. Included was also the 5523 Motorsport port job for the cylinder head, this also included some of the secret squirrel sauce that was used on the MotoIQ land speed car. With the battle plan all figured out I shipped 5523 Motorsports the Supertech goods so he could start on the cylinder head and eventually I started getting these pictures.
Just seeing the rough start of the cylinder head was plenty to get me
excited. During the progress we agreed to retrofit R35 inconel exhaust hardware
on the head to better handle the heat and stress that this engine will produce.
You’ll have to excuse me as being that some of the combustion chamber work is
secret of 5523 Motorsports and so I have to censor some of the pictures due to
the request of the team. With all the machining completed 5523 and I
agreed to send all the moving parts in the valve train to WPC Treatment once
again, the parts that went out this time around was the Rocker Arms, Camshafts,
Rocker Pins, and rocker arm shafts. Here are pictures of the final
assembly process along with a comparison shot of the 1N5 Cylinder head next to
the 65F.
Huge thank you to 5523 Motorsports for the help with the cylinder head, now that the head is completed I can resume this project and assemble the SR20 long block. While this engine won’t be making any noise on the Dynapack this year It is much closer to completion and look forward to wrapping up this engine build here very soon.
