Leaderboard

It's been long enough! The car has been on the road for a few years now and I needed to catch up on some maintenance and upgrades this past Friday. On the to-do list was some maintenance, mainly diagnosing a clunky front end, as well as a new speedo cable and the long-awaited LSD and fuel pump install. There were wins and losses on this day! But first, the wins... It's always nice to have friends help out to make things go quicker and today was no different. We got the rear end out without much trouble, it's nice to work on a freshly put-together California car. The LSD is on the left, along with some cruddy old axles I had lying around. Those will be addressed later... While the diff was out, we thought about how to tackle my rear toe issue. The chassis doesn't look like it's ever been hit but something is definitely off. Here are the rear toe numbers from a while back: For the sake of on-car adjustability, we decided to slot the transverse link brace. I calculated, based on rough measurements, that we'd need ~1mm slot so we milled off 2mm. Slotted vs stock And a major win, we're finally at zero thrust angle! Goes to show that it doesn't take much to have the rear toe go out of spec, especially considering a stock Z has no adjustment back there. (The amount of cross-camber is annoying and I plan to find a way to fix that as well) The LSD install went smoothly and we finished up late that night. It's clunkier than my old diff, yet to be determined whether it's the backlash or the u-joints in the axles. There's also a bit more gear whine but not really in cruising RPM ranges. Filled it with Redline GL-5 diff fluid which has friction modifiers in the formulation, the clutches are nice and quiet so far. Acceleration is definitely peppier but it's not quite the 80mph cruiser it used to be. I haven't had a chance to push the LSD much yet but that'll come! Now for the other stuff... After a quick investigation, the clunky front end turned out to be a loose FR gland nut. We snugged up the rest as well. Channel locks did the trick without any drama or disassembly. However, that wasn't the only clunk. Grabbing the wheel at 9 and 3 also revealed a lot of play in the steering. We initially thought it was an inner tie rod but it turns out the play is internal to the steering rack (!). I plan to see whether I can make any adjustments to fix that. If it's too far gone, I have a spare rack I can toss in. If that happens, I'm curious to measure the rack ratios to see if there's a difference considering my spare is a 240Z rack and I have no idea what's in there currently. The speedo cable went in without much fuss but the speedo is still non-functional. Haven't probed further. I did put a matching 19T (white, 3.9 diff) speedo gear into the tranny so the speedo should be accurate once it's actually working. We didn't have time to do anything about the fuel pump so that's been postponed. The major annoyances left with the car is the lack of bump travel causing the suspension to bottom out when it shouldn't and the rev-hang issue. We'll be sectioning a spare set of struts in the coming weeks to deal with the former. Once those are dealt with, the refinement level and enjoyment will go way up.