Nissan 200SX Club - South Africa

i own a s13 and hubby s14 and theres a bit a competition between the two, power and looks
so far power - i win..... hands down
looks - he wins

he knows about cars very well, and i trust him with me life,but just not with my car and i wanna know if i can have the cams cut on my engine to make it sound more vicious than it already does, he said no.
can someone give me an honest answer and more importantly substantiate?

the s14 never wins in a looks competition with the s13!

the s14 looks like a camry. boring!

you can have the cams cut - but its not always the best route for reliability.

better would be to get a set of cams made specifically for your engine, or to get a set of billet cams, and then give them a custom grind.

but welding up your current cams and then regrinding them is usually a no no!

would it sound as vicious? and would it effect th power my car put out now?
any idea who does it and how much it would cost?

Howdy,

Cutting cams on a turbo wont give you much of the lumpy idle (I assume thats what you mean by "vicious") as thats caused by valve overlap on an N/A car, you DONT want overlap on a turbo'd car, otherwise you just boost air out the exhaust pipe...

A quick how-to on cams:
Longer lift/Duration on an Inlet cam will yield more "peak" torque higher up the rev range. (more air in = more bang)
Longer lift/Duration on an Exhaust cam will yield more KW higher up the rev range (engine "breathes" better at higher RPM)
Adding an inlet and exhaust cam at the same time will give higher peak KW and Torque and shift the graph higher up the RPM range.

Thats in a nutshell, there are a ton of other factors that will influence the gains (Vtec, Extra runners, Engine "Harmonics" blah blah) but thats the basics...

PS. Your hubby's S14 will have VCT (Variable Cam Timing) on the inlet cam, He will gain mega power on a nice set of cams with the supporting mods....

Ooo Camry hay!!!!!!!!!!!!!! again!!!!!

kitty wrote:would it sound as vicious? and would it effect th power my car put out now?
any idea who does it and how much it would cost?

If ICE is your thing a branded zorst like Vlade's sounds awesome. In fact at the last event of all the oval cars some of the more striking ones just sounded like they had a really good 1.

My CDA also has a label that reads 'not for highway use', apparently that refers to sound restrictions in some states.

Changing the zorst also improves the looks and probably less risk and effort than CAMS. If you have a stock or dodgy zorst then you might even score some power increase.