Nissan sentra turbo kits Project

It’s been a while since we’ve had a review on our nissan sentra turbo kits project. The reason is simple, while we were racing the car at the Super Tuner TV Honda vs. Nissan event the car quit after only 5 laps. It made us want to sell the damn thing right on the spot. Lucky the Mossy Performance trailer made the trip to wheel our dead project home. We tucked the car into the garage and threw the cover on it and as far as we were concerned we didn’t want to look at it for months.

It sat for months and our anger finally turned into curiosity of what actually went wrong. At the race we noticed that we got power with the ignition on but the check engine light was out. This was a sure sign that the ECU was not working. We took the ECU out and popped the lid open and upon careful inspection noticed that a diode on the ECU had burnt out. But what caused the diode to burn up like it did? There’s a relay on the ECU that’s supposed to prevent these kinds of things from happening. Up went the hood and at first everything looked normal. Bending down a bit we noticed a big problem with the distributor cap. Half of it was melted off and part of the wiring harness got toasted along with it! Taking a close look at our manifold design, particularly where the wastegate dump tube comes back down into the downpipe it’s not hard to see why this happened. We were just surprised because up until this point our swain coatings have done a fantastic job of keeping the heat inside the manifold with registered surface temperatures just over 300 degrees after full throttle runs. We’ve even road raced the car all day at a couple of different tracks with no problems. We believe the real difference came from having a good driver behind the wheel pushing the car hard. SE-R Cup Champion Tom Paule agreed to pilot our project for the race in hopes of putting some low lap times against the Honda’s. The constant full throttle blasting possible with race tires certainly raised the manifold temperatures higher than spirited laps road racing. Well, this is how we learn and it was time to get over it or give it up.

Now that all the anger has left, it’s really good that we were able to discover a weakness in our setup without drastically damaging anything. So here’s where we’re at, ready to pick-up the pieces and get our hands dirty again. Rather than trace the whole engine wiring harness for problems we decided to replace it. Our friends at Mossy Nissan hooked us up with the order; thanks Greg!

Taking out the wiring harness required removing the radiator, most of the intercooler piping and the splash shields. To simplify the spaghetti mess we decided to install the new harness as we removed the old one. Starting on the passenger side we worked over to the driver’s side. We had to stop at the driver’s side in the engine compartment because the harness is too big to fit through the opening inside the car. Disconnecting the harness from the inside requires disassembling the entire lower portion of the dash on the driver’s side. It’s really intimidating at first look especially since some of the connections present don’t plug into any sources. Obviously the harness is a universal application for cars with options like an automatic transmission or power windows. We labeled these connections and finished the installation of the rest of the harness.

For the distributor wires that fused together we spliced in new wire soldering and heat shrinking in the new connections. This was done because the ignition and O2 sensor are part of another harness located on the back side of the motor. For preventative measure we wrapped the wires in a product called Thermo Sleeve. It’s supposed to withstand temperatures of two thousand degrees and reflect 90% of radiant heat. This is perfect for our cramped quarters and high temperatures under the hood. It’s ugly and kind of looks like a jiffy pop bag but all we care about is that it does its job.

In our next installment we’re going to re-polish our intercooler pipes and put everything back together. Hopefully when we turn the key it doesn’t activate the windshield wipers! Keep your fingers crossed for us.