dipstick holes

Even though the engine is installed lower in the 240z than it was in the 280z, that doesn't mean it wouldn't have been a very daunting task to attempt to remove the oil pan with the engine still in the old shell. Have you seen how many oil pan bolts there are? After installing the engine into the 280z a few years ago I quickly realized that the dipstick didn't fit into the front (note how I specify location) dipstick hole anymore. Not that most of this post isn't a side rant, but to continue it, when doing this swap one will find, without intensive internet scouring, that you need to switch from a front sump oil pan to a rear sump pan because of the forward location of the cross member. Kudos to Nissan for making everything interchangeable, again, and enabling the youth of America to take an rb2o rear sump pan, when they were available, and bolt her on.

Even if the dipstick could fit, it no longer read oil level from the front area of a rear sump pan. I simply left it off. This was all fine and dandy until my first dyno tune when I spewed oil all over the engine bay after flying above atmospheric pressure. The tuner looked at me, quietly walked over to the side of the shop picking up a random Nissan dipstick. He cut the level reading end off short to fit and shoved it into the dipstick port, continuing on his merry way.

This being the next time I've had the engine out of the car, I decided it was a good time to fix this. After reading about my issue not 10 seconds after trying to put the dipstick in the original front (there's that location again) hole, I found that not only did Nissan make the rear sump pan's interchangeable, but they also provided a port in the rear of the block to use when switching pans and simply filled it with a brass plug from factory. Foresight: knowing someone would want to take their engine and put it into a 2ooo# datsun they made 40 years prior. Amazingness: making it easily possible to do so by providing the parts on another oem application and designing to accommodate the parts on the current motor to make it all happen. Rockstar.

It was a very easy switch with the oil pan off and the engine rotated upside down on the engine stand. Using an appropriately sized Philips head screwdriver I knocked the rear hole's plug from the inside of the oil pan flange, outboard. Even though it never actually works this way, it only took one tap. I was able to pull the dipstick tube out of the front hole by hand and a little prying with a Flathead screwdriver. Both the plug and dipstick tube were simply installed in the other holes, both with some RTV to aid in the sealing process.

I procured a small tube bender for my future fuel line setup and used it to bend the oil dipstick tube a little bit in a few directions. Now it threads next to the stock oil cooler and through 2 of the intake plenum runners. It fits perfectly and the top opening sits just below the runner level with the dipstick itself sticking through just above. As usual pictures weren't taken in exactly the right order per the blog story, but the first pic shows the new dipstick location between the rear runners.

As a side benefit to all this, I was able to remove the large oil pan sensor bolt that I spent so much time sourcing during the original install. I had bought and installed the pan on the engine and the engine in the car so fast that I never checked the inside of it to see if the OEM sensor hole was just that, a hole. As strange as it sounds, looking at the pan from under the car I first assumed the sensor hole was an oil drain line on an rb2o. I knew this sounded unlikely coming off an OEM turbocharged engine, especially from Nissan, but come on, look at it. Either way I plugged it with the a short M16 super fine thread bolt that was impossible to find. It looked ghetto sticking out because of course it was too long, but it did the job, I thought, of containing oil. Where is this rant going? As it turns out, it's not a hole, it's a sensor bung for a sensor (temp?) that doesn't need to be immersed in it's functional fluid. My bad.

Sorry, no pics of the silly bolt installed, just the hole that looked like it needed to be filled with something.

While it was removed, I also checked the pan for any debris and cleaned it out; happily, nothing of note. My pan was also still intact and held fluid even after a few run-in's with speed bumps and the like in the 280z. I wonder if anyone warned it about being even lower in the 240z? I applied an ample amount of Japanese RTV (who knew?) and re-installed without incident.

 Cows in the yard. Large cows. Wandering.