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Mod cost verses benefit


deank93

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Evening all,

 

This question is quite subjective but I'm going to throw it out there anyway and see if anyone has a view.

 

My car is a mechanically standard 57 plate 313 and I've been doing a bit of reasearch into some modifications, my investigations have led me to the point where I'm now looking at berks HFC, Milltek exhaust, Cosworth panel filters and an uprev.

 

Coming from a turbo background (Pulsar) i always got a lot of 'go' for the money invested which made it all seem worth while, obviously with the zed the gains are limited in comparrison so my question is really to those who may have been in a similar situation to myself but bit the bullet and spend good money on mods similar to those that i am looking at...was it worth it? are you glad you did it and would you do it again?

 

Thanks in advance.

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If you're coming from a turbo background where you got serious gains for your money the only way you'll get that with a zed is Supercharger or TT.

The mods you decribe are a nice choice and done properly you'll see better, smoother response and mid range torque but not much 'extra' in terms of power.

Plenty of info in the FAQs and Mods subforums :thumbs:

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I can only speak for myself and those that i know who have had it done and its a definite yes. The uprev gives the car a lot more low down torque which gives the car a real boost. Only way i can describe it is you get power delivery all the way through the gears. But its not a massive power boost if that is what you are expecting.

 

I liked the sound of the stock exhaust and in all honesty if mine hadnt broken on an activity day i would most probably have kept it. However i replaced stock with a miltek. Its a nice quality sound but after a while i found it was too quiet. To fix that i added the berks hfcs and all i can say is wow. Benefited the next uprev and gave me awesome sound, car now sounds like a real muscle car. You do get a tinny rasp around 4-5k but you get used to it and i know love it.

 

Trouble is to have all that in one go is expensive. Not sure how far away from guildford you live but if you wanted to pop this way i could take you for a spin and you could make a comparison.

 

Sorry didnt get back to you on the pm but only just got back from the hoon and spent most of yesterday sleeping to recover. Regarding the performance tuner near silverstone i cant remember their name - glrnet will know.

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If you want noise add noisy products.

 

If you want actual performance then do driver training (not saying you need it but most will benefit) uprated brakes and suspension will all see you going faster than mods in my opinion.

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I can only speak for myself and those that i know who have had it done and its a definite yes. The uprev gives the car a lot more low down torque which gives the car a real boost. Only way i can describe it is you get power delivery all the way through the gears. But its not a massive power boost if that is what you are expecting.

 

I liked the sound of the stock exhaust and in all honesty if mine hadnt broken on an activity day i would most probably have kept it. However i replaced stock with a miltek. Its a nice quality sound but after a while i found it was too quiet. To fix that i added the berks hfcs and all i can say is wow. Benefited the next uprev and gave me awesome sound, car now sounds like a real muscle car. You do get a tinny rasp around 4-5k but you get used to it and i know love it.

 

Trouble is to have all that in one go is expensive. Not sure how far away from guildford you live but if you wanted to pop this way i could take you for a spin and you could make a comparison.

 

Sorry didnt get back to you on the pm but only just got back from the hoon and spent most of yesterday sleeping to recover. Regarding the performance tuner near silverstone i cant remember their name - glrnet will know.

 

 

I think I'm going to go for it, my reservations have come from when i got the car at the start of the year and I promised myself that i wouldn't go down the modding route again....25k later i learn't that with my pulsar :teeth: I'm not expecting a turbo like boost, far from it, and although I've read lots of posts with people having good things to say I just wanted to ask the question and double, double check I'm doing the right thing...my wife would disagree if she found out but i like living on the edge!

 

No worries about not coming back, I've managed to get an ok price sorted and am going to go with that.

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If you want noise add noisy products.

 

If you want actual performance then do driver training (not saying you need it but most will benefit) uprated brakes and suspension will all see you going faster than mods in my opinion.

 

 

I think I'm kind of somewhere in the middle, i want it a bit quicker than standard but i have no plans for track days at the moment and am only using it on the road around town so the standard stoppers and springs will do me fine and I want a bit more noise just for the hell of making a big ass 3.5 litre V6 sound a bit meatier but I'm not looking a anything silly chav loud.

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cosworth panel filter- proven to give 2bhp less than standars nissan paper filter in back to back dyno runs.

 

There is lots of talk about extra this, that and the other about uprevs. I belive most of the perceived extra low down power is just due to the way the throttle body opening angle is changed compared to the throttle pedal position .

 

Ive been in many straight line drags on german autobahns with mapped Z's and non mapped Z's and there has been nothing in it.

 

 

Sorry to **** on peoples chips but they are my findings.

 

I belive the best mods are suspension, brakes and tyres, along with practice at being a better driver.

 

A standard Z is better than alot of Z drivers! ;)

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IMO if you want your car to be quicker then buy a quicker car, you need to spend big bucks on the zed to make a noticeable difference. If you must then spend it on handling you will gain more on the twisties than you will in a straight line.

 

R

 

This should be made sticky.

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IMO if you want your car to be quicker then buy a quicker car, you need to spend big bucks on the zed to make a noticeable difference. If you must then spend it on handling you will gain more on the twisties than you will in a straight line.

 

R

 

This

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Ok so my opinion here is possibly not going to go down well but i'm going to give it anyway

 

Having had a zed i spent a fair bit trying to get more out of it; i used to be an NA purist and never wanted to go down the FI route.

 

what i learnt:

 

1. even with filter, exhaust, hi flows and from hearing alot of other 350z exhaust mods the 350z engine never sound (to me like i would have hoped it would) yes you can get it louder, and deeper etc but it was never what i expected from a big engine. I got a better noise out of 4 pot engines with a good exhaust etc for a lot less cash than i ever did on the Zed. My old mr2 was the bench mark for me and the S2000 after that was pretty damn close. and both sounded a hell of a lot better than the zed for less money.

 

2. the performance gained from alot of money spent was minimal especially when you look at it in BHP per £ spent plus the mods i would have done like manifolds just weren't an option on the zed as the money needed to spend on doing it far out weighed the actual gain.

 

3. If i was to do the Zed thing again i'd go straight down the FI route.

 

4. for the money it costs to go FI on the zed you're better off taking that and using it towards buying a car that has it as standard. from reading on this forum i've learnt you should only buy FI thats either already been fitted by someone else on a car. or buy a car thats come from the factory like that. let someone else take the financial hit. epecially with how quickly big engine cars are dropping in price.

 

5. having now bought a supercharged V8 i can now see the appeal of FI and the fact that to get extra power costs alot less and the gains are so much more. i'm currently at about 370 bhp for about £130 i can get a new SC pulley that will push the car upto 400 bhp and another new lower pulley for about £150 and your looking at around 430 bhp. get it remapped for about £400 and your looking at 450bhp. so for less than £1000 i'd have gained nearly 100 bph. if it had been the zed i'd have been lucky to see 10% of that gain. spend about 3k more and it would see 550 bhp.

 

my point is you buy the zed for what it is and you should enjoy it for exactly that. chasing BHP gains on the zed can lead to disappointment and can taint the ownership of a really good car.

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Ok so my opinion here is possibly not going to go down well but i'm going to give it anyway

 

Having had a zed i spent a fair bit trying to get more out of it; i used to be an NA purist and never wanted to go down the FI route.

 

what i learnt:

 

1. even with filter, exhaust, hi flows and from hearing alot of other 350z exhaust mods the 350z engine never sound (to me like i would have hoped it would) yes you can get it louder, and deeper etc but it was never what i expected from a big engine. I got a better noise out of 4 pot engines with a good exhaust etc for a lot less cash than i ever did on the Zed. My old mr2 was the bench mark for me and the S2000 after that was pretty damn close. and both sounded a hell of a lot better than the zed for less money.

 

2. the performance gained from alot of money spent was minimal especially when you look at it in BHP per £ spent plus the mods i would have done like manifolds just weren't an option on the zed as the money needed to spend on doing it far out weighed the actual gain.

 

3. If i was to do the Zed thing again i'd go straight down the FI route.

 

4. for the money it costs to go FI on the zed you're better off taking that and using it towards buying a car that has it as standard. from reading on this forum i've learnt you should only buy FI thats either already been fitted by someone else on a car. or buy a car thats come from the factory like that. let someone else take the financial hit. epecially with how quickly big engine cars are dropping in price.

 

5. having now bought a supercharged V8 i can now see the appeal of FI and the fact that to get extra power costs alot less and the gains are so much more. i'm currently at about 370 bhp for about £130 i can get a new SC pulley that will push the car upto 400 bhp and another new lower pulley for about £150 and your looking at around 430 bhp. get it remapped for about £400 and your looking at 450bhp. so for less than £1000 i'd have gained nearly 100 bph. if it had been the zed i'd have been lucky to see 10% of that gain. spend about 3k more and it would see 550 bhp.

 

my point is you buy the zed for what it is and you should enjoy it for exactly that. chasing BHP gains on the zed can lead to disappointment and can taint the ownership of a really good car.

 

Some good stuff there, thanks.

 

Part of the reason i went for the Zed was actually the limited options for modification, trust me when i say if i picked up an Evo Tommi Mak or newer model Scooby (both were on my short list) the temptation to do a load of money on modding would have been too much to resist. I'm not looking to chase power figures like i did in my pulsar days just a little more grunt and a bit of volume. Once i go with the berks, exhaust, filter and uprev I think that would be me done because the jump in cost to gain more power would be way more than I'd ever spend on modding a car again.

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