Installation: Day 08
Today I unofficially ended the naturally aspirated part of the Sentras life! While working on the oil feed and drain for the turbo, I decided to remove the rest of the Hotshot header. Seven years of salted PA roads took their toll on the exhaust system! If it wasn’t for the electric impact gun, I probably would have resorted to a hammer and chisel! Eventually the cat-back is going to have to come out, but that is going to require that I cut the bolts so for now it just dangles under the car.
After that ordeal, I drained the engine oil and removed the oil filter. With the oil filter removed, I unscrewed the factory oil pressure sender (for the factory dummy light) to make way for the Custom Steel oil distribution block. This block provides two 1/8 NPT ports (one for the oil feed and another for an oil pressure gauge) as well as a 1/8 BPST port for the factory oil pressure sender. In order to relocate the oil pressure sender, I had to extend the wire by a few inches. From there it was just a matter for routing the oil feed line and bolting the oil distribution block to the axle.
The rest of the supplies I needed to drill and tap the block for the oil return arrived earlier this week. I still need a factory exhaust gasket, but that will not hold the process up at this point.
Gauges have been a sore spot for some time now. My initial decision was to go with all 45mm Omori gauges. That was simple enough, until I tried to actually find the gauges! It seems that Omori Japan went out of business, but their North American wing was/is going to take over production. Right now inventory is lagging as they try to play catch-up. Another problem I ran into is the fact that Omori NA has not seen a demand for a water temperature gauge, so they will not be making one of those in the foreseeable future. Currently the only 45mm gauges that are available are boost and EGT.
After measuring my center console, I may have enough room to mount 52mm gauges which would allow me to run at least boost and oil pressure (since I’m not interested in EGT at the moment). So I bit the bullet and ordered 52mm boost and oil pressure gauges from J-Spec Tuning. If they don’t fit in the center console, I will seek to mount them in a clean way on the steering column.
J-Spec Tuning is the only place I could find online that seems to have a decent inventory of Omori gauges. I called them a week ago and the guy I spoke to was extremely helpful and polite. Not to mention he was full of information about what was going on with Omori. He mentioned that in June Omori may be releasing a 45mm oil pressure gauge as well. Another point of interest he brought up was the fact that the new Omori gauges will use different sending units. This means you cannot mix and match the old gauges with the new sending units. Keep that in mind if you find a used set of gauges for sale.
So now I await the arrival of the gauges. It looks like it is going to rain the next few days, so chances are I won’t get to tap the block this week. Once I do that, I will post the process I used as promised.