Category: Vehicles

3S: Lightweight Hood Struts

Since I switched to a Fiberglass/Carbon Fiber (Hybrid) hood I have needed to use a hood prop to hold the hood up. The stock hood struts have been known to cause the “lightweight” hoods to bend up where the hood strut connects to the hood.

I found this post in February of last year by braincrater who used NRG Innovations Nissan 370Z / 350Z low pressure hood shocks. So in February of 2025 I ordered the NRG HD-300CF hood struts for about $190 shipped. The company alerted me they were special order and they would get them as soon as possible… A few months went by and I reached out and they gave me a new date, a few months went by and the same story. Finally I reached out a few weeks ago and they once again said the company has them listed as June now… they immediately offered a refund if I wanted.

I began the search for those hood struts online to see if anyone had them in stock. I reached out to many companies that listed them as “in stock” but every one of them said they were not and they were a special order.

Ultimately I decided I could figure this out myself and make them cheaper and asked for a refund [which the company sent immediately].

So to start off with the fender bolt thread is M6x1 and I wanted to stick with that thread for the whole install. The hood strut balls seem to be m10 for the most part, and I also decided to stick with that size. The hood fully open between the two points was right around 12″ long, and then closed it appeared to be about 9″. I didn’t find anything exactly that size, but there were plenty of 8-12″ options out there. While I wanted the “least” amount of strength in the gas pistons as I could get away with, I decided to order 30#, 50#, and 60# versions of them as they were fairly cheap.

Ball Studs used to clip the struts on.

M6x1 – 10 mm Ball Studs

Struts I ordered (and stuck with)

12″ Gas Shocks / struts ( 30#, 50#, 60#)

I started out by drilling holes in the hood hinge. The key to this is it puts pressure on the hinge instead of the hood itself. This by itself should prevent the bowing a little bit. I didn’t have a specific measurement for where this would be, but I tried to make it the same with enough “meat” on all sides of the hood.

Hinge that has been drilled out and tapped to M6x1

The M6x1 10m balls that I ordered were a little too long, so I had to cut them down by about 1/4″ but they fit great once I did that.

Ball Stud attached to the hinge.

The strut end where it connects to the fender needed a little bit of modifications so that it could extend beyond it’s typical range. I used a small Dremel to sand out the edge to give it more range of motion. They still clip in properly and I couldn’t pull them out without releasing the clip.

Hood strut needed slight sanding modification to fit properly.

The finished product! A hood that stays up without a hood prop!

All done!

Since I bought several of them here’s my feedback on each weight:
-30lbs – Way too weak, couldn’t hold the hood up at all.
-50lbs -Right about equilibrium for the SEIBON DVII hood. It wouldn’t really “lift” the hood until it was about 80% up. It wouldn’t hold any “work lights” without falling.
-60lbs – Has just enough lifting to hold my “work lights”. Still doesn’t lift the hood until it’s about 60-70% way up.

Overall I decided to stick with the the 60lb ones. Not a bad project that really was easy to do. The NRG ones may have looked nicer (being CF, or having a CF sticker I don’t know) but this was only $30 versus $190… I just wish I did this a year ago…

3S: Drive by wire installation

Watching / learning a lot about how to tune the car on an aftermarket ECU (LinkECU G4X) has been a process and one of the things often mentioned is how DBW is the best way to control idle (compared to stepper motors, etc) and it also reduces potential air leaks. I also realized if I converted to DBW, that would free up several new AUX channels on the ECU for my Coil on Plug install that is coming later this winter…. so I went down the path…

Throttle Body Installation

The Bosch 68mm throttle body is said to be a “direct” fit and just needs to be drilled out… and generally this is the case. The throttle body is already set up for M6 bolts, while the 3S Plenum is M8. So you need to drill this out to about 9mm. I had two drill bits that were close in size, I tried the smaller one 11/32″ (8.73mm) and couldn’t install it still, and ended up using 3/8″ (about 9.5mm) and it worked fine. Once you do that, the next problem I ran into was the stock bolt fitment… they technically fit but I couldn’t fit a socket over them. So I swapped them out for M8x1.25 55mm socket head caps and used some purple thread locker (retainer). The next problem I ran into was the bracket that holds the plenum up ran into the throttle body motor so I had to remove that (which was a pain if you don’t want to remove anything else).

I covered up the connector and the whole housing to prevent any metal shavings from getting into it while drilling it out…
Very tight fitment with the stock bolts and the socket on the bench. When trying to install it on the car, it wouldn’t fit…
Custom 3D Printed TPU Gasket installed (linked below).
Brackets which I removed. The one on the back of the valve cover had three bolts, 2 12mm sockets and 1 10mm socket iirc. The steel braided oil lines to the turbos are pretty rigid which made the removal more annoying. If you pulled the plenum off it would have been easier….
Finally installed with the brackets removed.
All buttoned up. The previous silicon coupler fit, but it was tight. I had to increase the size of the t-bolt clamp. The previous one was 67-75mm (iirc) and this is just a tad too big. I have a 73-81mm ordered. I do not plan on replacing the silicon coupler though.

350Z Pedal Installation

I bought the pedal adapter from Outsider Garage over the EvoSpec one as the pedals were much more commonly available and significantly cheaper I think I paid $55 shipped for mine (used) versus most evo ones were close to $200. The pedal adapter was only $45 which was cheaper than I could make / design this myself (as I was going down this path originally).

There is a piece of folded medal on the back of the 350z pedal that needs to be removed, otherwise you only have about 1/2″ – 3/4″ travel on the pedal (probably about 30% it’s total capacity). I removed a good amount, and now the pedal hits the floor. I would argue I have about 80-90% the total throw now, and once you get it into the ECU you calibrate it and so it’s not a big deal. I do wish the angle on the adapter was a little steeper so that pedal stuck out further, but it is what it is. I know outsider garage sells a replacement pedal for this, and maybe that fixes some of my complaints.

The adapter shifts the pedal to the left a bit as it’s more inline with where the stock one was.
You can see it sits a bit lower than the brake pedal, but it’s in a good position (horizontally)
Back of the pedal trimmed down.

Wiring

Wiring was my least favorite task of this whole effort. I really didn’t know where I wanted everything pinned to in the ECU, but I eventually came out with a solution that cleaned it up a little, but didn’t require me to re-wire everything. I had a lot of wires on my expansion “ports” for the ECU previously but I moved them to the main harness and used the expansion port for the DBW as it was designed for that. The throttle body and the pedal both need 2 sensors each ( redundancy ), and the TB needs two (three) AUX ports.

Throttle Body Connector is a Tyco Electronics Micro Quadlok System (TE MQS 6 Way). I originally purchased this from Haltech as it was convenient, but they are expensive and don’t give you any extra pins and I messed up the first one which was annoying. You’d think for $16 they could include an extra pin that only costs them pennies. Anyways it used a lot smaller pitch crimp, I don’t recall which exactly it was, but it was around 1.6 in size based on the “Engineer” crimper I have.

The pedal I bought came with a pigtail that was long enough for me to swap it over to a TE Deutsch DT connector which I use for all the connectors I can. While it’s a bit larger in size, it’s a good strong water proof connector. I am 99% positive the Nissan 350z is a Sumitomo MT branded connector. I have linked it below in the event you need it.

I’m not going into the tuning process at all. That’d be a whole discussion by itself. I will admit I messed up one setting when I first turned it on. I changed everything to the throttle position…. except my “startup offset” which was set to 10, which meant it added 10% throttle to the idle base position… so the car idled at 3k RPM on a cold engine… thankfully that was an easy fix, but I rather not idle at 3k on a cold engine…

This is my overall pinout. At the point of this post, I have completed everything in Part 1. The left column is where it was prior to the install, the yellow highlight is things that are pins that have moved from their stock location. The orange ones are the proposed changes for each “part” of the upgrades this winter. Hopefully Part 2 will be all that I ever have to do for this car [we know it won’t be].
This is my expansion ports on the Link G4X Plug-in ecu. I never really thought I was going down the DBW path and didn’t realize that connector 2 was really made exactly for the DBW setup… so that’s why i had to move most of my sensors to the main harness.

It Runs!

Testing out the pedal and throttle.
Actually running!

Parts List:

Bosch 68mm Electronic Throttle Body – 0 280 750 156
Throttle Body Gasket (Makerworld)
Outsider Garage 350z Pedal Adapter
Nissan 350z Pedal (with pigtail or Sumitomo MT-6S-3)
TE 6 way MQC (OEM P/N: 1-967616-1)
M8x1.25 55mm Socket Head Cap Bolts (4x)
Mishimoto 73-81mm Constant Tension T-Bolt Clamp

Disclaimer: This is just where I bought stuff from based on prices and shipping times. You can probably find cheaper / better parts if you look around more for some of these items.