Kenmeri build part 2

When we had last left the Kenmeri I had showed some of the things we had done to clean up the top side of the engine bay.  In this post I will show you a couple of things we found underneath the car that were unacceptable.  First, let me say that just because your downpipes fit an RB26DETT doesn’t mean that they will fit and RB26 in a Kenmeri chassis.  When the car was lowered there was only about 1″ of clearance between the rear flange and the ground and the pipes were basically touching the transmission.  This was obviously not going to work.  After a little cutting and fabrication of the downpipes I was able to get about 3″ of additional ground clearance and now the downpipes actually look like they were made for the car.  Here are the down pipes after modification.

Sorry for the dark picture, but you get the idea.  Next on the list is to figure out why the car kept leaving oil drips all over the floor, because nobody likes a leaky car.  When I first had a look at the oil pan I was a little baffled to say the least.

What we have here is how not to fix your leaky oil pan 101.  Let me give you a little insight as to what is going on here. For those of you that don’t know, the RB26 was only offered in an AWD configuration and the oil pan also houses the front differential.  So when performing the RB26 swap in a RWD car, you need to source the appropriate RWD transmission and oil pan.  When installing the RWD oil pan, the oil pickup is different and needs to be modified and that is basically what we are looking at here,  how not to modify the pan.   First I need to figure out how to remove this pan,  notice how the bolts that attach the oil pan to the motor have been covered in what appears to be JB weld.   This should be fun.

After removing some of the JB weld I found that someone had attempted to fix the leak by first MiG welding the hole, and when that didn’t work, fill the rest of it up with JB Weld.  Obviously that didn’t work either.  After I was able to remove the pan I was able to get a look inside and see what was going on.  Here you can see the hole that had been attempted to be filled.

Time to fix this properly, I was able to cut out the area that needed to be widened,  and fabricate some new metal to make room for the new oil pickup.  Because of the additional width I needed to use  a couple of threaded holes on the bottom of the RB26 that are normally used for the AWD pan.

A little paint and there you have it.   No more drips all over your nice garage floor!

There is plenty more to do on this little Kenmeri before it reaches JDM Legend status, so check back for part 3 when we show how to properly install GTR fenders which is a lot more work than you may think.