A&Q about 350Z
Q:
Dear All,
After reading the specs of "The white Mk 1" I am interested to find out more about steel cranks? Can anyone shine some light on this as to Pros, Cons, myth, factual and also where can I get one for the 16v engine.
Any advice is most appreciated.
Thank you.
A:
A factory forged crank that is properly ballanced is fine for most applications, You can confortably rev to 8500 and make 120bhp/litre with this setup. Steel cranks are the last part you uprate usually, once you have forged pistons, steel rods, dry sump, 1pc valves and all the other expensive bits.
A:
recently bought a steel crank from farndon for my OTHER car. the pros of a steel crank is its slightly lighter weight and infinatley stronger. the engine i am building atm is going to rev to 10000rpm+ what he said above about being the last in line for upgrade and probabley the most expensive single part you will put in your engine. as for cons, apart from the price (i just paid £2000) there arnt none.
A:
Some GTI engineering cars (if not all) had steel cranks, and some of them are starting to turn up for sensible money. You might be better to start with a whole car for 2 grand, rather than spend all that on a crank.
A:
I was quoted £1500 for one from Doug Kiddie Engineering - like Farndon, the dogs bits, but only really needed on a VW above 8.5-9K rpm
Of course if you are going to have one made, you can have any stroke you want and this is where it gets fun to play with bore / stroke ratios - normal 2L is 82.5mm bore I think and 92.8mm stroke = 1984cc. For most power, you want the biggest piston you can get in to allow the biggest valves, I think 84mm pistons can be squeezed in a 2L block so if you were restricted to 2000.00cc for racing, 500cc/cyl, you would need a 90.2mm crank - and you could have one if you were having one made. This would rev for britain being more undersquare than std vw but still have torque - but of course if you were rev restricted then perhaps you would be wasting your time....
was under the impression that GTI-E only did this as it was the easiest way to get 2L at the time before 2L blocks came out - total overkill for a normal road engine
A:
Some GTI engineering cars (if not all) had steel cranks
I believe these are the Oettinger cranks. Having seen one, it didn't shout 'steel' at me in appearance, but this is what I was told they were.