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New axle shafts came in today, woohoo. Now that’s how the snap ring is supposed to sit. Hopefully I can put them together this weekend. Also got some other goodies, push to start electronic locks and window kit.

Me three!

I would be down for that!

What's the word Z heads!? When is the next run of apparel going out? my Fat A outgrew my OG shirt and hoodie and would like to order some HybridZ goodies 😁

Great progress! The car's underside, as a whole, looks really good. 👍👍 Sorry I don't recognize that little L-shaped bracket -- it may be custom, from a previous owner.

It’s been a long week where in a lot happened, including me getting engaged to my beautiful girlfriend last week! But personal stuff aside we are here for the Z. The body shop couldn’t wait any longer and with my permission they ended up modifying the passenger side frame rail to fit. All in all they did a great job and the end product looked great and above all was very strong. As an added bonus they even gave the frame rails a new coat of underbody spray and drilled two holes in each rail to coat the inside with wax and prevent condensation buildup. This meant I could finally pick the car up last Friday after being over 4 weeks stuck in the shop. By coincidence I was free from work that day so I even got to start the reassembly of the interior starting with the dashboard. And I also quickly strayed the Apex fender braces silver to match the rest of the car. I finished reassembling the dashboard during which I had a little bracket left over. I have studied every possible parts diagram and video but I can’t seen to find where this bracket came from. It was stashed together with all the dashboard parts and bolts but unfortunately I wasn’t smart enough to take pictures of the disassembly. Does anybody know where this little bracket belongs? Anyway I decided to continue the reassembly of the dashboard and reinstall the dashboard into the car. This went rather smoothly even though installing the dashboard all by yourself is a bit of a pain. I immediately tested all the electrical components to see if all the light (which I replaced with LED’s) and gauges still worked. Everything fortunately worked except the tachometer backlight which turned out to just be a reversed polarity, which isn’t an issue for halogen bulbs but is for LED’s. This was easy enough to fix by switching two pins inside the tachometer connector. I’m now at a point where the dashboard is complete and the carpet is mainly in. Because of a national holiday I will have a four day weekend starting this Thursday. This means I can finish the interior of the car and start installing the Apex front and rear control arms, steering knuckles and front crossmember. I really hope these don’t contain manufacturing faults or else they own me a really big apology.

05-11-2026 ATLAS Z UPDATE. So I had a little time tonight before the sun set so I went out and taped the edges of the carboard I cut out in the pattern of the real cover (with the center cut out larger than the hole needed) and then cut cardboard into pieces and pushed it up to the fuel cell and taped them down all the way around. Then, by lifting carefully I was able to remove the whole thing, and....after putting blue tape on the aluminum cover, I used a Sharpie and drew the outline. Now I just have to cut it out and clean file/touch up here and there and it should drop right on!

Flatout got a set of control arms that were made too narrow and don't fit. Apex seems to have been sending things very slowly lately and then having a low rate of good parts when they do send them.

I've noticed that refreshing the page when it hangs seems to help. I can go down the main page and open new tabs with all the threads with updates, and some will load right away while others won't. I refresh the ones that don't load, and then they seem to come up. It isn't a 100% success rate because sometimes they fail to load again, but it's almost like some queries get lost and sending them again kicks the server into gear.

Most of the Apex kit has been good, a few minor fitment issues on some parts and that front bracket to attach the subframe with the hidden carriage bolts was a PIA to get in. Getting these axles has been a mess. I ordered the rear kit 8 months ago and still waiting on parts. Luckily I’ve got lots of other things in my build to work on, but if I didn’t I’d be really upset.

05-09-2026 ATLAS Z UPDATE: I finished installing the Apex Engineered rear strut bar and then went about cutting the floor pieces from my skilard floor and got it to fit all back together. Then I installed my rear license plate light and got everything all wired in at the rear of the car, and finished running the fuel cell breather hose down and cleaned the whole area up. Then I started on the venter of the console. I used some thin gauge aluminum plate....making templates out of cereal box cardboard and then cutting the aluminum to fit. Then I drilled holes and mounted the 2 pieces for today, masked it off and painted it in matching Rustoleum glossy black hammertone....matching the dashboard. I took some cardboard I had left over and made 2 templates of the rear cover plate, and then cut the center out of the first one, so I can begin the process of taping in pieces to get the hole cut out just right, then I can cover the aluminum skillard cover with blue tape and draw out the pattern and cut it out. I am also going to be installing the Snow Performance Stage 1 braided water ethanol 3 quart tank back there, but I haven't decided on the spot I want yet. All teh wiring is now ran up and down to the floor behind the passenger seat. PICS:

engine looks great. Really loosing confidence in APEX parts.

Apex said that batch with the new vendor had the groove to short, they are sending some new ones. Glad it wasn’t me, was racking my brain trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Go the rockers and intake on today, engine is getting close to done.

I’ve got the full track attack kit, but still building my car. It won’t be road worthy for several months. I used the solid bushings for my 370Z diff.

Doing some housekeeping and realized my dumb 240z site was down. It's back up now for whatever that's worth.

05-08-2026 ATLAS Z UPDATE. My Snow Performance Stage 1 Water-Methanol kit with braided lines arrived and I have started the layout of it.

I'm seeing videos and pics of S30s running the full track attack setup. Are any of those folks on this board? I'm installing the 2026 version now with 5 lug and 370z 14" brakes. I wondered about the upper diff mount being solid but then realized that on the 370z the upper bushing goes into the solid frame. The track attack has the whole rear cradle being suspended by bushings already so adding an additional upper bushing to the diff would be doubling it. We'll see when I'm on the road.

Its been 10 years. Delete please

A slow-responding forum is commonly caused by high server load from excessive traffic, inefficient database queries, too many active plugins, unoptimized heavy images, or poor caching strategies. Other factors include network congestion, inadequate hosting resources, or unoptimized JavaScript. In other words, unless the forum owner owns the server - money ain't the problem - it's the server connecting to the internet.

Seems like half the time the site isn't even accessible. What's going on here? If money is needed, then I would suggest starting a fundraising campaign with its own separate thread. In the past, they've done well. Maybe another merch run if Cockerstar is up to it. The site is slow as it is due to the decline of forums. If this site becomes regularly inaccessible, it's probably going to kill off the remaining activity it has completely. Forums these days are mostly running on momentum, site problems kill that.

The steering shaft issue seems to be fairly common on LSZ's. My '77 280Z (which is manual rack & pinion) has a large diameter hole in the driver side motor mount to allow the stock steering shaft to go through. No elegant but has worked well for 23 years. Don't get in the death spiral of needing another modification based on something from a previous mod which was based on a previous mod, etc. I saw that alot so spent a lot of time noodling over fitment issues to keep things as simple as possible. FWIW - the 280ZX and the 280Z are very close i weight so would imagine the 280ZX would be fine without power steering.

Having driven an LS1 280Z for 23 years now I can attest to doing all that you can to stiffen the body. 240Z's weren't call "flexy-fliers" for no reason. The 280 body is better but I still flexed the body and had to reseal my windshield twice with a 380 HP first gen LS1. You might weld tags to the roof and then to the rollcage for just a bit better rigidity. What are you doing for gauges? fuel system? AC/heat? Sound system? Exhaust? stock seats?

I've been using a Dynomax muffler since 2003. It is a dual 2.5" and single 3" outlet. It is is in the stock location on my car with a custom bolt on tip that opens to 4". The muffler is valved so that at around 2500 it opens up. Up until then the car is very quiet but definitely becomes more pronounced at the higher, full throttle, RPM's. I actually got a random compliment from a guy this past Saturday at a stoplight saying how nice the car sounded. Go figure. contact me at: thebarn93@gmail.com if you have any questions.

It's been awhile, but thought I'd update with something funny I discovered. I've never really trusted the harmonic balancer and where it said 0 deg was. I tested with a piston stop and knew it was off a few degrees, but it wasn't enough for me to worry about. This thing is megasquirt tuned, so I really can just give it whatever timing it wants and be good with that. So I got lucky with someone selling an aftermarket balancer, used. It's the 90055 Pro Products PowerForce damper. I set my old balancer at 0 deg, right on the mark before I pulled it. Here is where the new balancer is showing it should be: The white mark at the top on the balancer is 0 deg. It's probably close to 15 deg off lol. This is before I torqued down the bolt, so I know I didn't move anything when installing. And now that I think of it, I've always had an issue with sync loss events if I went above 28-29 deg at light cruise. I also tried sneaking up on 30 deg at idle just to see what it would do, and it would sync loss every few seconds. But other than that, the car ran great. If anyone else has megasquirt and is having weird sync loss issues, make sure to check your balancer as it may have spun. I've attached pictures of my old balancer too. You can see the rubber is definitely cracked.

The dash looks fantastic. nice job on the entire interior refresh.