Leaderboard

Picked this up from local hot rod shop for my 240z SBC 350 project about 13 years ago. Circuits: Electric fan relay Fuel pump Radio and amplifier Power windows Summit Racing/parts store etc probably have this fuse box.

Got the sensor figured out. It is idling around 130-140 F. Should be OK. I have to post a video. Sorry but I think this thing sounds bad ass. I have an insert in the exhaust so I dont need earplugs.

Update: after speaking to Cortex and getting some spindle dimensions from them for CAD mockup, looks like I’ll be using their Radial X spindles. Very exciting stuff, I am a bit weary about using aluminum spindles but the car is a track car and last weighed at ~600# over each front wheel so I think I’ll be alright. Thanks! Excited to share my progress with you guys. I’d eventually like to make my work/design open source and see what more talented suspension engineers can do with it. If I didn’t just buy one of these yesterday I’d offer to trade you a complete kit for one of them KN20 heads XD. A bummer indeed, just another bump in the road! Funny you mention Stock Car blade-swaybars. It’s basically all I’ve been looking at for switching over to that design. Plus the parts are pretty cheap & standardized. Thanks everyone.

This is awesome. We haven't had a good engineering project on here in a while, so this is a good to see.

The two areas "1" are a great place to attach tow hooks.

The dyno chart for that was from my old 331 stroker: Stock Roller Block (4.030" bore) Eagle 3.25" stroker crank and rods Mahle 4.030 Pistons Custom Hydraulic roller cam (.571" lift) AFR 185 heads 1.75 Long Tube headers 30# injectors I scattered that engine at Daytona My new engine is a 347. Dart SHP Block (4.125 bore) Scat 3.25" stroke forged crank and H-Beam rods Custom Hydraulic roller cam (.625" lift) AFR 185 heads Long Tube headers 42# injectors I use Megasquirt MSPNP 2 to tune both engines.

Day 1 of installation. almost 12 hour day and got a lot knocked out. Pics below:

With a good 5th gear, overdrive is wonderful... I have the mythical R200 with 3.36 rear gear. The transmission is a T5 with the G-Force Shafts and gears 1 through 4. I run short tires Avon 23 /10.5-15 on all four corners. When I first installed the G-Force gears I was only auto crossing the car, and really only used 2nd gear. When I started doing track days (Daytona and Sebring), I quickly discovered that 5th gear was horrible. With the stock gears, 5th wasn't optimal but wasn't too terrible (3.35, 1.94, 1.44, 1.0, .67). When I changed to the G-Force Gears, 1st gear was improved but 5th gear sucked (2.95, 1.95, 1.33, 1.0, .58) First time at Daytona, I was redlining 4th gear by the time I came off the banking onto the front and rear straights, and the .58 5th gear would drop my rpms and torque too much to be useful. The .58 5th gear was horrible, so I pulled the transmission and took it to Astro Performance in Tavares, Fl and had them install the A5 5th gear (0.81). The difference was night and day. Overdrive went from a total buzz kill to being my Warp Drive... If you get a transmission with a good 5th gear (TKX with .81 5th), then you'll be fine. This is what the gear spread (speed versus rpm) looks like: Here is what a full acceleration run looks like if you assume 0.25 second shifts: The above uses numbers from my old dyno chart and the following inputs: Dyno graph from my old engine (my new engine makes more power and torque):

Hi HybridZ, Some of you have already seen my Apex Engineered Track Attack information/discussion thread here, I've decided after reviewing the design of the Apex Engineered front suspension kit, the best solution moving forward is to design my own. In this thread I will be documenting my progress and hopefully gaining knowledge on suspension design from you guys (or from what's left, f**k Facebook groups). To start... Why don't you just use the AE kit? It was $4000, you're just gonna waste $4000??? (Yes) Not enough shock travel, that's pretty much it. Once I received the shocks from Viking I realized immediately that 3.20" of stroke was not going to be enough and thus set out on a fool's errand to find alternative solutions. Viking shocks, from what I've found, have the most shock travel per the physical dimensions of the shock that I've seen so far. They're compact and the adjustment knob is well-designed to take the least amount of space with respect to the rest of the shock body. Very nice, but I will ultimately use either JRi's Mod series DA shocks or Penske's 7800/8300 series DA shocks as now, getting a shock long enough to reach between the strut tower and the LCA is more important. Design (pictured with 17" diameter wheel) The most prominent feature of my SLA design is the UCA pickup being located within the engine bay. The shock tower must be cut and a box structure is welded to the frame rail. This design is based on both the Maier Mod 2 design and Cortex Racing SLA kit seen here: Maier SLA Design Cortex SLA Design The reason I moved the chassis pickup for the UCA inboard was to extend the length of the control arm which should allow for a more compliant spring than the offerings from Apex. Mike Maier inferred the reason for the obscenely high rates was to keep the super short UCA from camming over and ruining the geometry. Fine for a super stiff autocross car but for a road-course car with kerbs, burms, and undulations in the track surface? Unacceptable. With this shock, I'll be looking at around 7-8" of total shock stroke travel. The remaining part of the design lies with the spindle (not shown) and the boxed-structure (also not shown). The boxed-structure was fairly straightforward to design - shout out to @Ben280 for sending me frame rail measurements while my car's been at the body shop. The boxed structure welds to the chassis frame rail located in the engine bay which the cross-shafts then mount to. The spindle is obviously not straight forward, fortunately for me there's plenty of resources on the LocostUSA forums for me to look at as well as Chassis Design and Race Car Vehicle Dynamics by Milliken and Milliken. Once the completed version 1 of the design is done, I’ll begin FEA with a safety factor of 1.15-2.00 at some lateral load to make sure everything should work without buckling. Until then, I have two separate designs, one utilizing Mustang II style cross-shaft mounting structures and one using Maier’s. The main difference being the orientation of the cross-shaft mounting bolts to the boxed-structure with the Mustang II’s bolts facing down, and Maier’s facing sideways. With the bolts facing sideways relative to the longitudinal axis of the chassis, side load is transmitted into the boxed structure through the bolts on their axial axis as opposed to their shear axis. Bolts do not like shear, however the Mustang II design is insanely popular so I suppose I could be overthinking this. Maier Cross Shaft Mounting Design Cortex/Mustang II Cross Shaft Mounting Design Methodology Starting with a 3D scan of the 240z that I re-topologized into ~10000 quads, I modeled an accurate-enough solid body of the fender well and shock tower. From there, I (roughly) modeled the Apex Engineered LCA (will probably try to use the T3 ones I currently have installed on the car as they are boxed structures), the Penske 8300 coilover at ride height, and upper control arm. You may have noticed the bottom of the shock clipping into the LCA, please ignore that, you didn't see that. In regards to swaybars, I will try to get the OEM sway bar design to work with my suspension, however due to the bottom of the shock being mounted on the LCA roughly where the swaybar links, this may be difficult to engineer. I could copy Maier’s LCA design, using a bent-tubular lower arm picture here: Moving forward, it might be easier to design my own boxed structure and try to mount a blade-style sway bar instead. Procurement While there's going to be a lot of custom laser cut metal from SendCutSend, I wanted to keep this kit as OTS as possible. I am not particularly interested in spending buku-bucks on one-off billet parts nor am I keen on dipping my feet into scaled automotive aftermarket product design & manufacturing. That being said, the spindles will likely need to be entirely custom if I can't find an alternative OTS. If I can find an upright on the market that fits my criteria I will definitely go for that, I’m trying to avoid using a Mustang 2 spindle as its shorter than I’d like it to be and completely wastes my steering knuckles and 370z spindles supplied from Apex Engineered (though steering knuckles and spindles are relatively cheap). Next Steps The complete version 1 of this design will be complete soon. Once I've finished my spindle and boxed structures the real work starts, articulating the design through all of its axes of rotation and movement will reveal conditions of binding and the dynamic geometries of the suspension. I started work on this project about a week or two after I placed my order for Apex Engineered SLA kit and have been doing it in my free time which is quite difficult to come by. God willing I shall endure.

Nice placement in your engine bay. It looks like you just ran a positive off the battery terminal (?) to your box and all the accessories are using the chassis for the negative side. It is B+ only. No ground. It connects to the + terminal of the battery. Accessaries draw fused power from the fuse box. Each accessary is grounded to the chassis.

Luigi: I used a $70 "universal" power window kit that can be obtained on Amazon or eBay. A current Amazon vendor is JDMSPEED. This is quite similar to the SPAL that was marketed some years ago. What I found in my research was that several marketers offer the almost, if not, identical units on these shopping sites. As the units are all made in China - perhaps by the same manufacturer - this kind of makes sense. It's like every corner convenience store selling M&Ms. Earlier this year I started collaborating with Dave Irwin (Zs-ondabrain) to update and expand a thread he created in 2006 on the Classic Zcar Club website www.classiczcars.com). I decided to alter the wiring so that just two switches are used and the controls are mounted on the sides of the center console. The article has kind of stalled out as I went on to do other things on my car but I swear I'll get it done and posted there before year's end. In the meanwhile, here's a photo of the drive unit installed in the left door of my car. The drive unit is on the lower left and the "engagement gear" is on the right. It has plenty of power to work the window mechanism but, my goodness, you absolutely must have the window track alignment perfect or it binds up.

Hopefully you are converting to all SAE / AN brake fittings. It's a real pain to have a mix of metric and SAE. I routed my brake lines inside the cabin to get the brake lines away from heat. I'm running a Wilwood Tandem Master Cylinder (7/8" bore) and use a proportioning valve installed on the drive shaft tunnel.

Has anyone been following the progress of these engines? The aftermarket is starting to really grow for this engine. "divlac57" is the guy who has been spearheading a lot of this Anyone else watching any of this come about??

It can be confusing when talking about technical areas vs car model areas, but we do have the "Ignition and Electrical" sub-forum here: https://forums.hybridz.org/forum/16-ignition-and-electrical/. Yes, I think it's fairly common to add new circuits/etc to these old cars. I've done it to the last couple of my cars to simplify/improve the electrical capabilities over the stock harness. I've always used off-the-shelf breakers, relays, fuse panels, switches; but there are a bunch of pre-built kits that are available through numerous vendors. I like to use marine hardware if I can find it; as it's typically extra beefy and durable. Good luck with it; and please be sure to post your results once completed!!

Got the front coilovers and the dual master cylinder assembly on today. Still too hot out for working on the car here, I can’t wait until it cools down. A few challenges with each, but got it on right. Was hoping to start tearing down the rear, but I’ll give that a go next weekend.

Always liked the early Zs especially a 240z a this guy came up for sale recently - seeing it in person tomorrow so I'll have a better idea then - apparently being sold because the guy is retiring and getting rid of all his toys Pros: 1. Bodywork done - "12k, 1 year spent at body shop to cut out all rust and install new metal" 2. Modifications: Small block chev. 600 lift Roller cam, Gold roller rockers,202 aluminum heads, MSD ignition&box, H.P electric full pump, 150 shot NOS system (Not used). Purge lighting built 700R Trans&Convertor, B.M. Shifter, I.R.S. 3.9 Gears Custom built half shafts (Good for 600HP), New weather stripping/INT/Roll Bar. 3. Looks on pictures that it's done right - looks like a very clean install Con: 1. Sat for 10 years since 2015, 3000km after the build (Drove the F-type jag he got instead). Apparently just started couple of times a year to keep things "lubed". Recommends all fluids changed, brakes bled etc before driving - so I won't get to test drive it and make sure everything's working properly before I buy it. Looking for recommendations on what to look out for, and key things to prep to get it ready to get back on the road.

I have had a lot of problems with the throttle cable and related parts. a late night job came up with an extremely basic solution for cable hookup at the carb....I made a bracket and got a brass cable stop at Auto Zone, and the gas pedal bottom edge hitting the floor keeping full range from happening were the culprits. FIXED.

Looks good and sounds good. Wouldn’t buy without a test drive though, he’ll start it though right? Hopefully just fluids and new tires and you should be good to go. Good luck!

I used his list plus a angled bearing plate from jegs or summit for like 10 bucks. I couldn't use the location he used. Still a work in progress so Ill post when i get it all welded up. https://forums.hybridz.org/topic/124248-steering-shaft-relocation/

I spend the last few days cleaning the electrical connections and timing the ignition again as it was out of spec. The car runs way better but the AFR gauge still shows 11,5 at idle. I'd like to bring that down (or up depending how you look at it) to 14,7 as the car stinks of gas. The previous owner mentioned that that was the reason it didn't pass inspection (auction company didn't mention that). I tried messing with the idle air mixture screw but that didn't help. When turning clockwise a bunch the car did start to run richer but when turning anti clockwise it didn't get past 11,5 AFR. I did notice the ignition coil is a 1,5 ohm unit with a total resistance of 2 ohm with the external resistor. I believe it needs to be closer to 1 ohm total so I'll probably replace the coil with a 0,5 ohm one.

Hi mate, Low profile alloy air cleaner top with a carbon fibre air cleaner with the collection point in front of the radiator. Flexible rubber joiner between the alloy top hat and the carbon fibre air cleaner. The alloy piece is only about 2.5 inches high. Just another idea for cold air induction. Regards David.

Adam Sylvester at Datsun Rescue or Jenny at Junkyard Jenny's.

@jhm. I appreciate that, Ive been putting out feelers on a few Z car forums trying to locate one, I know its sort of an obscure and delicate piece but its worth a shot anyway

For the track attack upper control arm plate the carriage bolts are a must because of their plate design, it completely covers the bolts, so no way to tighten. But some of the others are iffy. The two I broke, didn’t need to be carriage bolts, but it would have tight if they weren’t, and the tension rod bracket was probably needed for clearance to the bushing. Their brackets could have been designed to use regular bolts if they made them a little bigger, but that’s what they went with. Over all I’m pretty happy with it and how’s it’s coming together, but there are still some improvements they could make for easier installation.

Had a busy weekend working on my girlfriends car (brakes, oil, alternator, water pump and timing belts) but yesterday I had some time left to work on the Z. The car was running rich so I ordered a cheap AFR gauge to measure the air-fuel ratio of the car. I installed the gauge in the engine bay for now with the power wires just clamped to the battery as I can’t drive the car till I get my inspection done. I read some threads about the EFI Z’s running rich or running rough in general so I cleaned the contacts on all the electrical plugs and readjusted the throttle position sensor. The contacts of the AFM and the cold start valve where actually pretty corroded but cleaned up nicely. For good measure I also decided to change the spark plugs and do a compression test. O boy was I glad I did that. The spark plug in the number 1 cylinder turned out to be a different one without a manufacturer name. It was also heavily cracked and the spark plug wire wasn’t even attached! (am I glad I ordered new once). The compression was pretty consistent from what I could tell but my battery and probably also the alternator are dying, only to be caped alive by my battery charger. The engine cracks very slow with the sparkplugs in (even only one) and when dialing back the idle the engine can’t keep a consistent rpm. It even died after a while. I the end I just jumped the battery with my girlfriends car witch helped a lot. After the cleaning the car also ran much better with an AFR of 11.2 and after warming up for a bit it changed to about 13. When revving the car to about 4000rpm the AFR changed to about 15. I’m not very familiar with AFR ratios but 13 at idle (after warmup) seems pretty good to me and hopefully lets me pass inspection. But for that I still need to wait for some backorder parts from Z-Services.

Wow, cool stuff. That's a real bummer about the AE kit, considering the investment; but I guess this approach gives you the freedom to go wild and do whatever you want! I like your idea of an adjustable blade-style sway bar...this has been on my to-do list for a couple years, and just haven't gotten around to it. You may want to consider the NASCAR-style mounting, above the engine. Makes the adjustment linkages and hardware a lot easier to engineer and fabricate. Good luck with it!! 👍👍

At long last I finally got my engine bay fuel lines replumbed. Working around the brake lines in a confined space was an adventure, but things look so much cleaner now. It's to the point I need to pull and paint my valve cover, and start dressing things up. It's been interesting watching my fuel temps. I'm definitely going to spend some time seeing how that affects my tune. I have a bit more dialing in to do on pump gas, then I'll swap to E85 and start cranking up the timing. I also got fed up with seeing my voltage go nuts once my alternator was heat soaked, so I decided to finally upgrade from the 280zx 60a to a Powermaster 7294 100a alternator. I went the route of cutting 1.5" off the front of the factory mount, drilling it most of the way for a 10mm bolt, and tapping the backside so I don't have to use a nut. I was already using a turnbuckle for the adjustment, so I'm running the stock belt. I still see a bit of a voltage drop below 800rpm, so I found a 2.125" pulley I'll swap on when it's not 100* out.

Not dumb at all, though I definitely prefer rubber bushings over poly & solid in a street car even if its tracked 1-3 times/year.

Small update, I've moved to a new thread on designing my own front SLA suspension. Regarding the OTS kit from AE, its nice, the tubular front cross member is perhaps the best of its kind on the market. Part of me wishes they used slot-nuts instead of their current configuration but its not a huge deal. Interesting, sorry to hear. I find their rear suspension pretty well designed, the rocker ratio is 1:1 which is not great but nothing you can't fix by making your own. Though for $4000, I feel it should've been disclosed at the very least. Their new packaging system for hardware is great, though their shipping packaging is quite bad. Their customer support offered to replace some parts that were damaged in shipping, need to follow up to check what the ETA on those RMA'd part is. Regards to you giving them feedback, not surprising. I've also tried starting a technical discussion with them that they didn't seem super interested in, understandable they're running a business and are more concerned with keeping the doors open than answering questions from a guy that already paid them lol. These guys are developing kits for a bunch of Datsun/NIssan chassis, and now the E36 chassis so I doubt they have a lot of time for guys like us.

Jam nut for toe arm came in, dumb that it’s the only hardware that doesn’t come with the kit. New brake lines came in too. I might take this Friday off to finish up the suspension, and hopefully start on brakes.

Just curious, what made you go with a draw through setup instead of port injection? That saying I love the clean installation!

Got a few more things on today. This kit has tons of adjustability, just making some initial guesses on caster, bumpsteer, etc. a little bit of a puzzle with the hardware, some things you only needed if keeping stock subframe or other stock parts. I hope to have the rest installed next weekend.

just finished +6000km euro trip, whew it was hot down there. Would have been sweaty in datsun. found this type of momo steering wheels on sale in germany but they didnt ship to finland. ordered leather and suede versions to my friend in berlin and pick them up later.

Original locks can be rekeyed, but I know at least in the US, there are very few locksmiths that still stock the tumblers. If you're lucky you could maybe find an old school locksmith, or if you're very lucky you could find an old kit. If not, you can always file your own tumblers out of some brass sheet. Here's a write-up on the process of rekeying Datsun locks. https://ratsun.net/topic/47412-how-to-dissasemble-datsun-510-ignition-switch-and-rekey/

Pretty cool https://www.seikowatches.com/us-en/products/prospex/special/datsun_limited/

Probably just fine. The polyurethane products were developed as a performance improvement. More precise steering, less wheel movement. The aftermarket will hype and sell whatever they can.

This has already been done a few years ago. Reach out to Jakub at Datsun Europe, he's running a zf8hp50 behind his sick turbo L and has a few adaptor plates left.

This thread is ancient so I'm just posting in case others come along in search of a solution. If you install the MSD 8920 as indicated by the OP and the tach only reads 200 rpm, here is what fixed it for me. At issue, reverse the wires to the tach. Connect B/W wire to red going to the 8920 and connect G/W to 12V switched. After this my tach was happy.

Actually it's rubber in the back, poly in the front. The front bushing takes the force under braking on the Z's, under compression, and is the one that you don't want compressing too much, making the steering squishy. But the poly should not have split. It does take a lot of side forces as the rod moves up and down with the suspension. But usually it causes the rod end to fatigue and break off. Seems like you got a bad batch of polyurethane. Bad chemistry, or a knockoff.

Just got home with the car and finally took it a good run around the block as the registration is suspended at the moment. The seller told me it didn't pass inspection as the car was running rich. I did notice there was a wideband sensor and a crank angle sensor installed but not connected to anything. Maybe it was used to tune the engine? The car isn't perfect but I did get it for a pretty good price. The bodywork isn't all straight, I suspect it had some damage to the rear at some point in time. The hood latch cable has popped out of place so the hood won't open anymore (why did I close it all the way). The passenger door isn't lined up properly, it only closes with force and the bottom rear part of the door sticks out a bit. And the car sweats some oil (pretty much everywhere). But all in all I'm happy at the moment as it has new wheels and tires (got the original wheels with almost new tires with the car) and it drives pretty good even though it's running rich. Clutch and brakes work very good and even all the electrical works. I did notice some nice goodies too. The car has some kind of aftermarket suspension I think and a brand new wooden steering wheel with NRG adapter. It is indeed a 5 speed and has the R200 rear end. I'll look some more into the forum and will probably start a build series documenting the car as I have no documentation what so ever.

Here is a quick way to check the polarity and the high low switch. Use a voltmeter and ground the negative side of the meter to the car ground. Take the positive lead and touch it to the center of the high low switch. You should have positive +12V with the headlight switch turned on. The low beam wire (Red/Yellow) is at the top and the high beam is (Red/White) at the bottom. The positive +12v will toggle between the two when the turn signal switch is toggled. I enclosed the switch and labeled the different terminals. If that is correct check the polarity at the headlight plug. You should have one ground and +12V at low beam and +12v at high beam. One other thought is check the fuse block and make sure the two headlight fuses are good. You will have one for the left and on for the right light. Hope it helps.

MinneZota, I am not sure what you wires you are showing in the picture, so it hard for me to determine what was cut. From the instructions above you do not need to cut any wires or connectors for the swap. You must make the ATO fuse jumper wire and the small jumper wire pictured in the instruction above. By using the two jumper wires you made this allows you to plug them in the existing harness and swap the main red and black wires pictured. This changes the polarity for the LED headlights to work correctly. You can message me I can walk you through it.

More pis of it finished up The bottom plate was beat up a bit and bent from floor jacks. So I took off the old one by drilling out the spot welds. I then drew up the shape and had a new one laser cut. The center plate that is welded to this plate, I re-made it as well, but out of 304 stainless steel. This way I can leave it a brushed stainless finish after powder coating and it is a good place to use a floor jack. I then spot welded on the larger plate in the original locations I then tigged the seam between the spot welds Then tigged on the center stainless plate Then blasted the entire cross member and powder coated it in a super black semi gloss powder coat. Powder coated the motor mounts as well I always first do a primer powder coat that is sandable I sand most off this off to fill the small blemeshes Then final coat Finally the brushed stainless plate for the floor jack Next up is getting a new transmission, then finishing the exhaust

I had some time in the laser today so i decided to make new mounts for my seats😀. More on this later as they have no priority and are" a bit " of neerd warning. As the engine is 6.2 litre why not make it a 620Z😎

Don't tell my wife Like I tell other people. some like to fish, some like to bowl, I like to make.

Even if 100 people commited to purchase, its still tiny small numbers vs an OEM production. Its got to be done out of passion and at least not to lose money. This is why this is such a huge acomplisment for someone like Derek, We are fortunate the passion runs deep. I cant imagine the hours of "un-billed" time

He's saying although we are launching a DOHC head in 2024 we readily admit it will be pale in comparison the mighty KN20 from Datsunworks. At least that's what I'm hearing.

Here are some updated pic of my 77 280Z.

Here is a few pics of the 1977 280Z that I started on in Sept. 1994 Z28 Camaro donor car with 74,000 miles. LT1/4L60e transmission. Swapped out the R180 for R200. Keeping all stock gages and Datsun shifter.Suspension upgrades coming soon.