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Been a while since I posted any updates. Been moving along. For the Turbo car I decided to build my own wheels. Ill CNC machine the center sections myself and have the lips and barrels spun for me. I really like the old SSR RS8 wheels but finding them in the correct bolt pattern, offset, and caliper clearance is impossible. I fould a set close, from Japan and had them shipped over. Since this car uses Z31 hubs and such, the spacing is out much more than a standard Z so I need a bit more positive offset. I dissasembled the wheels and scanned the center section into my computer and reverse engineered the shape. Next I re-assembled them and had the 245-45-16 tires Im going to use mounted. I test fitted them to the car, and close, but not good enough. This is the fist time this chassis has been rolling on its own wheels in 27 years. Its been on a cart or a lift. Felt good to see some progress now that the suspension, brakes, and cross-memeber are finally complete Scanned this complete assembly and put it in CAD. Now I have the exact shape of the tire on the rim. Cool cross section of it. Finally I scanned the side of the car, put it into CAD. Now I can adjust my wheel center offset for caliper clearance, and adjust it to work with new Lips and Barrels I will order for the proper offset and fit to the car. Having it in CAD alowed me to look at it from every angle and check all clearances, for calipers, springs wheels lip, ect. Even compressing the suspension to make sure I have fender clearance at full travel Final wheel spec is: Rear - 5 lug = 245-45-16 on 8.5" width rim- 27mm positive offset, 2.25" outer lip on the rim Front - 5 lug = 245-45-16 on 8.5" width rim - 31mm positive offset 1.75" outer lip on the rim Next I need to find some time to program the CNC and start cutting chips. But I got distracted on the NA car, so that update is next.

Three weeks until I'm home and properly working on the car before a long road trip. I've been creating a detailed list on some Google notes of everything I hope to accomplish. I'll update once I truly get to it, but for now just wanted to share my excitement for my new brakes. Was in Utah about two weeks ago for a handful of days for a music conference and my brother was kind enough to let me borrow his truck to drive up to Logan just for one evening to have a quick dinner with the siblings up there and I took a quick trip to my folks' place late in the evening and opened up some of the parts to keep my motivation haha. Also had a big box of new seals from Resurrected Classics. They were kind enough to give me a steep discount on their weatherstripping kit when I asked if I could get it without the door seals since I had already purchased the S30 world seals before they released their kit. Looks like they were kind enough to give me the discount and kept the door seals anyway! I'll be making a thorough comparison of it against the Precision kit I have, mostly to see if it's truly far better for some of the worst fitting parts.

Thanks for the replies and comments. Time is always an issue, however Im at the age now where my daughter is 26 years old and working full time. Been married 30 years so the wife is obviously understanding of my hobbies. Hopefully continuing to make progress regularily. Hoping more people come back to the forum and participate in the community. Here is a picture of me and my daughter when she was probably 2ish years old, same car Im working on now. I need to get her back in the shop for a new photo - Time flies

Hi everyone, I am at a good point with my build and wanted to share its history since its one of the few running and driving VQ37 swapped Zs in the country. I am going on over a decade of ownership. I originally bought the car from New Mexico and brought it over to Colorado. Come to find out, it was once a Colorado car also. I picked it up in primer with a rebuilt engine but not really knowing too much about it since all I had were photos and the owners word. The previous owner used it for autocross. The entire interior was missing and it had a rats nest for wiring. I remember it had a switch to manually turn on the fans. It also had a full radiator support and driver side frame rail replacement from a donor Z. I got lucky that this was done really well, I have had no problems getting the car aligned over the years and it drives straight! I saved some money and got the car painted in black, the car was originally a yellow car. The painter actually welded in floor boards and frame rails and closed up the wheel wells from where they were cut for the ZG flares. The rear hatch had to get replaced since it had an inch of bondo over the key hole. Luckily, I was able to track a hatch from a 240Z in the junk yard (when is the last time you have seen that haha). I added sound deadner to the interior and then took the car to an upholstery shop to get the interior put it. I also added some nice gauges. I was able to source some cheap Watanabe 16 inch wheels from yahoo auction Japan. They were different colors but I ended up paying around 900 usd after air shipping them spent another 300 getting them powder coated. I also picked up my Recaro seats from Japan. To this day I have no idea what car they came from but they are one of my favorite parts of the car. The SUs where swapped out for a triple Mikuni 44s. I drove with those and even had them tuned but they were too finnicky at altitude. During this time I got into flipping carbs for resale. I didn't want to deal with the Mikunis and decided to swap to fuel injection. I ended going Jenvey ITBs on Haltech. This setup actually worked great for about a year and even made it to the main page of my local Cars and Coffee. Around that summer I started to develop some running problems where I was running too rich. On my way to the tuner the worst thing happened. The car caught fire. From what I could tell, the itbs backfired and caught the fuel line on fire. If anyone is running itbs on an L Series, I highly recommend an airbox. I got really lucky since a guy like 2 cars back behind me had a fire extinguisher and that the radiator hose blew and stopped the fire. I sent the car over to my tuner/builder and waited on my insurance adjuster to visit the car. I was able to get a full payout through Hagerty and that kickstarted the funds to get my Z back on the road again. I knew I was done with L series. I never really wanted to build something that close to race car since I mostly drive my Z on the streets and occasional canyons. I wanted to stick something Nissan that could remain relatively stock. Something I could start up and just drive. In the past I almost swapped VQ35HR motor and have always had that build in the back on my mind but I noticed that the engines were almost the same price as the bigger brother VQ37. So I went with a VQ37 out of an automatic AWD G37. The reason I chose that engine was to avoid 370z's had been driven hard and the auto engines were cheaper with less mileage. The only change to the block that I needed was a lower oil pan from a RWD VQ and its bolts. I sourced a transmission directly from Nissan since at that time it was actually only about 500 dollars more compared to a used transmission. I looked recently and it seems like the transmission have doubled in price since 2021 when I bought mine. Here are the photos of when I got her back. We ended up putting some flake in the engine bay since I grew up loving lowriders. I also installed a GTR intake conversion. It ended up being a bit of a hassle since the custom fuel rail didn't clear the injectors. We had to extend the fuel ports on the fuel rail to make them taller so that it could clear. I added a catch can since the car is set to vent to atmosphere. I pulled the headers and stripped them and cerakoted them also. The custom hood didn't make it out of the fire so I went carbon fiber. Next I ended up getting the intakes extended to the front of the car to make it a true cold air intake. I recently took the Z engine harness apart and reloomed it and fixed one of my turn signals. Come to find out one of the wires was cut off. With the help of Dave Irwin, I was able to track down all of my missing grounds and also why both lights would blink at the same time (bad switch). I had an extra parts turn signal switch which I harvested and was able to get everything to work out. I recently tackled getting my horn to work. I have never got it to work since my entire ownership. The guys at classiczcar forum really helped me trouble shoot it. Come to find out, my only horn didn't work and for some reason my steering rack wasn't grounded. This is pretty much where the car is now. I took her to a local car meet today and I am hoping to just get more seat time with her. If anyone has any questions about the car or the swap feel free to message me.

if anyone's still tracking this build I have what might be a last update since the car is mostly done (lol is it ever done?). I finally cad-designed the front fenders and then had a local shop 3D print the parts, then took that to a bodyshop to integrate into the existing fender part and paint it. After that I overlayed the inside walls of it with carbon fiber for added stiffness and protection. I also cut the lower part of the rear fenders and put in a horizontal cf winglet to better extract air. Overall I think it looks great and the resulting new parts helps downforce a ton by extracting air from the wheel wells.

Since that broken rear differential a lot has happened.

Next order of business was electric fan and shroud, and radiator hoses. I chose the 2016-2019 Camaro single SPAL 18" fan. it will be PWM controlled and is a very popular choice according to the internet as it can flow 5000CFM. Although I cut up the factory shroud to "work" I felt like I needed something fancier. modeled up a base to start working from and had my friends at laserbros in NC laser cut and bend it up. Should have gone one or two AWG thicker so added some bracing as well as some mounts and very happy with the final product. Cut down the radiator and inlets and outlets on the engine and welded on some -16an bungs, made up a couple hoses. in the last photo of the "hose installed" you can see the end of the pipe for the intake I welded into the chassis I mentioned in the previous post. Also decided to move the alternator to the other side of the engine to get it away from the heat. When i pull the engine to paint the bay i'll design and make a bracket to permanently mount it over there.

I just wanted to share something pretty exciting in my world. 5 weeks ago I overheard a friend talking about how hard it was to get any machine work done. And it hit me..... I know how to rebuild heads I just need equipment. Did some research and found that 4 of the main shops in the area have sold out or retired. Told the idea to my father in law. And was just spit balling with him. I dont have the cash to start anything and it was just an idea.. well he gave me and my wife a rather large gift and I have now bought a storm vulcan 85b blockmaster and a winona van norman Ph-2000L valve ane seat machine. Still need a valve grinder and obviously tons of tooling. But im excited to see where God takes this. Been 25 years since ive done and work but am excited to get back into it. Plan to get the surfacer going and try to drum up some buisness to make some income to buy more tooling. I onoe they are not the best machines bit they are functional. Just wanted to share

Hi,guys, after one year off with other work, i put back the engine with reground camshafts, and ready for new start !😅 Wait and see ,and Happy new year

My custom made 3d printed aero hood latches are mounted.

Went out for some Auto-x this weekend, and had a proper blast. Highly recommended for anyone here who still hasn't gone to try it. Enjoy a slow lap, some V8 noises and straight cut gearbox whine. I have a handful of things to think about and address moving forward, but overall I'm very happy with where this sits. Next up is OnGrid at the Ridge in late July for more testing, and maybe, just maaaaybe a little redemption.

Was not implying that the only way to get work done on a project is to not have a wife and daughter!!! I can see how that could have come across. Mine is 14 and will be a freshman this year. Ive got 4 years..... Then who knows. As she has gotten older I've been telling the stories of her helping me in the shop when she was little. Her stepping into a drain pan full of oil in ugg boots that I promptly threw away with out telling mom, Me hearing a pppsshhhh noise and I turn around to see her with a my blow torch pointed at her face, Praise the Lord she didnt click the igniter She would have been around 2 also at those times.

Been spending alot of time getting the chassis on the NA car cleaned up and ready for paint. Its a super clean almost a no rust car, so I want to strip it completly bare, metal prep it, straighten the floor pans which are really clean just slightly dented from wrong jack points. I started out by stripping everthing off and making digitized and CAD files of all the tar flooring. You can still buy it from Nissan. I have a laser cuttter so I will use it to cut all the replacements. It is an original paint car, so it was hard going in on it. Next I put it on my rotissary I built for the Turbo car and got to work on stripping all the factory undercoating. Using a heat gun, scraper and some mineral spirits did the trick but it took a long time. All super clean original metal under the car This is what it looked like under the front fenders BEFORE cleaning, so super happy and even under the cowl all original paint

Almost got it done. Such a pain in the as* I probably should have started over, from my old ecu to this ecu wiring.

They did send me another set of control arms which was nice of them but they are also a bit short. I did make some modifications to make them work. the kit is supposed to use 8 washers per side but i needed more to align the toe adjuster up, I do have T3 spindles so that may be part of the variation I was seeing. So I machined some spacers because stacking 15 washers was not my favorite design. The spacers tightly fits over the spindle and then takes up about an inch of space and allows 5 washers for "adjustment" The guy from apex did called me and we chatted for a bit about some other design concerns I have. Which was great and he took it well. Apparently they just aren't good at measuring things. They said they are going to try and make me a shorter set of front control arms aswell because the front setup at its absolute max shortest setting is still .375" wider than the stock assembly which doesn't allow me to use any of the roll center or control arm adjustments with my wheel and tire combo. I was hoping to correct geometry with everything being adjustable but that's not the case since the crossmember mounting points are wider than the factory one so I had to max everything out to its shortest point to even fit. With that said I have been plugging away at stuff, brake lines are ran, rear suspension is in, engine is assembled. adapter kit for the trans is machined, body panels are getting put on. started on the interior, everything takes so long. painting brackets and hardware and aligning everything but i am very happy with how its coming out. I was told the car came with a 240sx diff, its actually a j30 diff so it has a 3.91 gear ratio. That may be a slight advantage so not to mad. Anyway, after all this reading. enjoy some photos.

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.

Long week number like 200 but happy with the my progress. Made a tweak to a color based off a cadillac cts5 v blackwing. Its a bit more "copper" tone of orange than I was picturing with the modifications but I am very happy with it. As soon as I started pulling the masked off areas and was seeing the contrast with the grey I loved it. Did get some fisheye on one door so I'll have to fix and respray that at some point and a couple sags/runs in the clear to sand out, but I can make some serious progress on the build now. did get the engine stripped down as well. Bearings, rings, valve springs and a gasket kit have been ordered to freshen it up. but otherwise everything measured out good and seems like a good starting point.

Hi everybody, long time for updates. Been quite busy with kids and a very nasty divorce going on. The good news is my garage and cars are still intact and I am still making progress, although very slowly. Car is very close to track testing. I decided to have a new pair of steering arms machined to match the front geometry. I will post more when they are finished. In the interim, I took the time to catch up on some side projects I wanted to do. With the advancement of AI, some of the projects I considered impossible a couple years ago have turned out to be quite easy now and very inexpensive. Based on Arduino technology, I have integrated a motion sensor into my data acquisition system. I use a Race Technology DL1 Club box which is limited to 8 analog sensor inputs, but can decode an almost unlimited amount of CAN signals. So I built a circuit that decodes the motion sensor and outputs a CAN signal. I now have 3-axis roll, pitch, and yaw angles along with speeds and acceleration live data. It will all be packaged in a small box that mounts in the car. Next is a infrared tire temperature monitor. A 16x4 temperature array sensor once again combined with Arduino and CAN output board. I am trying to package this as small as possible so it can be mounted on brackets roughly 4" above the tire. Again real time data of inner, middle, and outer tire temps while driving. Hopefully saves a lot of time when dialing in the camber and pressures. More to come...........

Been a long week but got everything completely stripped and got some epoxy primer layed down on all the metal surfaces. have plenty of body work to do but atleast its sealed and protected now. Hopefully in the next week or two i can get the bodywork done and get some color on it. I did talk to john and his comment is "I don’t claim to be an expert on bonding. But in my experience cracking at a bond line is often due to inadequate surface prep both the underside of the fiberglass and the underlying metal), poor bonding agent, not enough bonding agent, cheap body filler, and/or excessive flexing of the unibody. On the other hand, I know a lot of guys who do the bolt-on installation. For performance applications, it can be an advantage for working inside the wheel well". With that said I think I will spend the time to make the fitment as good as possible and make a last minute decision based on how well it fits/looks.

Carbon fiber door and door cards came in, these things are super sexy 🥰

Without the oil cooler, my water temps were never an issue. Never over 200 on track. When I put the Aviaid Mangusta pan on the car it had a provision for an oil temperature sender. Even though my water temps never got too hot on track, once I installed an oil temp gauge, I discovered that my oil temps were getting near 300F. I added the Setrab 34 row cooler, and my oil temps stay below 250F.

03-25-2026 ATLAS Z UPDATE: I got some of the fittings in I need for my crankcase pressure to catch can to intake setup. Also tall of my carbon fiber panels have been cut, final polishing on roof section then ready to ship to me and bond them on! Then make the borders shiny!

That has got to be the best balance of Form and Function of a Datsun that i have EVER Seen!! Absolutely amazing!!

Unrelated update but reasons as to why there's been a lack of updates to this thread: Got a new job that demands a lot more of my time so unfortunately less time to optimize the SLA conversion. Upside however is that I'm learning NX which seems to be some next level software. I think this design is going to take one more fundamental change to really get the dynamic geometries perfect but the work I have so far has been a pretty excellent starting point. The car is also back from the rust repair shop and the cage shop, needless to say my wallet is in a lot of pain at the moment (especially with the S54 being built) but we do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard and we hate money. Anyway, enjoy some photos of the cage in the meantime.

Got it off Amazon: https://amzn.to/4aS32Br And picked up a male pigtail off eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134129914749 I actually replaced the wiper arms too. I used 93 miata arms which bolt up to the stock datsun wipers mechanism. Passenger arm is a little long so I may shorten it. For wiring, I followed this guide: https://www.electronixandmore.com/resources/automobiles/datsun/index.html Note this is very specific to the later wiring for 1978(maybe 1977 too) and would not be applicable to earlier years.

Hi All! I've owned a few s30's in the past and finally decided to build one. My car background is a lot of JDM cars including Supra's, AE86s, S13s, Skylines, a Stagea 260rs, etc. I have always loved the style of the s30 (don't we all), the aftermarket support for it and the random people who would stop me and tell me about their "Z" story. The story of this build started over a year ago when I purchased this 1978 Datsun 280z. The story behind the car (that I know of) was it is an American car that was brought to Washington and held at a speed shop awaiting restoration. Then was bought and stored in a heated warehouse for years in BC before i bought it. A little side story, I originally purchased a 1971 240z from the same person and they also had the 280z for sale but was well out of my price range. I would have loved to restore the 240z but unfortunately the amount of work it needed was well beyond my budget and experience just to get it to a useable condition. If you looked at it funny, rust would fall off the car. Mistakes we made. I was sold on what it could be but not what it will take to get there. almost a year later the 280z was still for sale, and the price was a little better. With some luck, i was able to convince the owner to trade back the 240z and cash for the 280z. Success!...Now, it seems the 280z was re-sprayed a British racing green but wasn't done the best and was flaking so i believe that's why it originally underwent the restoration in Washington. The car was just a rolling chassis, the front end had been primer epoxy'd and luckily had everything in boxes and labeled like "driver door guts", or "Rear hatch slam", which was nice to see. Now the goal of this project was to be a fun drivers, resto-mod car. It will be getting an RB26 from an r33 GTR, an RB25 transmission, DBW for the factory ITB's, Techno Toy Tuning full suspension, brakes, differential swap kit, running a Haltech S3 ECU and Wiring Specialties Harness, Poly fuel tank with an r32 skyline Radium hanger and Hellcat fuel pump. The bigger ticket items like turbo/manifold, radiator/fans, and then some smaller things are missing but most of the project is there now. I do plan of re-wiring the whole car considering I'm spending money in every other area. Now, just like anyone, I did set out with budget but considering since I last built a car, prices have gone up for parts which I stupidly didn't account for. Also a lot of, "well if i'm already doing this, then i might as well do that", and "since i have this off, i might as well get that." So the budget has been blown....but at least I'm happy! (maybe). BUT as it stands, the suspension and diff swap kit is in and the car is currently at the body shop getting the sunroof hole patched as well as some of the smaller trim holes plugged and a few small rust spots taken care of. Here are some pics throughout the build and as it stands. Any questions, advice or help for some "gotchas" will be welcome!

Great work so far! I’m sure this will be an awesome build. I suspect you will be running fender flares or a wide body kit seeing as your wheels are poking out a bit?

11-01-2025. 260Z work. I got the engine compartment sanded down after the glaze and then cleaned up the crossmember and rack with cleaning solution "g@s" and a toothbrush, and then steel wool, etc. Then I vacuumed out the cowl and primed it with rustoleum rust primerand top coated it with gloss black paint, then painted the engine bay with filler primer. Once dry I will use some spot putty I picked up on the areas that need it, hand sand it smooth and filler primer over that. Once it is good, then I will progress to color and then clear. Busy day! Pics:

Yes, still working on then, just have not posted anything. Bought some expensive components that take time to recover from. A blank PAMS head, that I then designed and has DelWest make me titanium intake valves, Inconel mnemonic stainless steel exhaust valves, also MoldStar 90 seats and guides. Had it assembled, and ports cleaned up for some nice flow numbers. Also purchased a Nismo 6 Speed Trans that was also strengthened and modified by HPI in Japan. I take some progress pics soon.

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 hairlines weren't that bad, it was the handful that were going through the edge of the rotor that I was worried about. Friday marked my first return to the track in almost 2 years. Knocked off a bunch of rust, the car worked the whole time, and I made a couple changes that were impactful and improved the car. I went pretty slow, so y'all could enjoy some v8 sounds for longer than normal

It was a good idea not to wait on rebuilding the 3.54 diff. The new LSD arrived weeks after I expected it and there's no shot I would have been able to swap it into the spare R200 before my trip. I'm excited to get this together in the winter though!

Some of their stuff is good and some is hot garbage. Max the owner doesn't stand behind his product and has a tendency to try and blame "modifications" to your car as the reason. I have a lengthly (4 page) post on classic z car about my problems with his door assemblies. Resurrected Classics door problems I have their door weather strips and their fuel filler neck and the are excellent. My advice is no matter what you buy test fit as soon as it arrives and go from there. The doors were so bad that I ended up not using them. Max refuses to refund my money so I make sure to take the time to tell people about my experience. Do not trust what he says as he says whatever he needs to to get out of doing the right thing. Caveat Emptor with this guy for sure.

Hello everyone. I have a Jan 1971 S30, purchased by my father new. The car was a garage kept, California daily driver. Every day it made a 10mile round trip to his work, in the windy road, wine country hills of central California. I learned to drive on this car back in the 1980's. My brother had it for a spell but after moving to Germany 15 years ago it fell into disrepair. It's back under my care because the Dr. is in. Cheers

Hello everyone and welcome to my 1977 280z project! I will be using this thread to document my journey with this car and all the little thing that will be done to it to ultimately restore and modify it to be my dream car. I bought the car last week at auction for the decent price of €20.500,- kind of on a whim as this has been my dream car ever since I first learned of there existence (thanks Wangan Midnight and the Devil Z, I know its cliché). Yes €20k is a lot of money but a mid-condition one sells for over €32k here in Europe nowadays. (You can see which side I tied up and which side my dad tied up 😂) What drew me to this car was the paint (absolutely not perfect and needs a repaint at some point but looks good enough for now), the goodies like new wheels and tires, new wooden steering wheel, factory 5 speed gearbox, R200 diff and the claim that the engine was rebuild 10 years ago. Although when picking up the car it turned out there was no documentation what so ever. The car runs and drives and is in fairly decent condition but currently has no valid inspection (called APK in the Netherlands) as the previous owner stats it’s because of the car running rich. Of course it has a cracked dashboard, some small surface rust forming and is missing bolts all over the car but these are all thing that can be fixed over time. For now my main goal is the fix some little stuff and get her on the road so I can start to enjoy the car. So naturally I placed the car on my Quick Jack lift and ordered a bunch of parts from Z-Services EU in France. There are a few thing I like to address before taking it in for inspection. The hood doesn’t open as the cable brackets are missing, the door hinges need rebuilding as the doors won’t close properly, some general maintenance and fixing some sweating oil seals around the car.

Welkom! It’s good to see you posting here as well.

waiting on apex engineered LS mounts to come in Tuesday. They sent me some to see how much I need to modify them to make them fit on the LT motor. Then there gonna make some to start offering for kits

The access panel is to get to the fuel filler neck. I think I got the panel from Allstar Performance. I wish the panel was just a little bigger so that I could remove the filler plate though the opening. The one I have is just a little too small...

Time to update the build threat again. Things are moving slow at the moment but none the less progress is being made. I have contact with two local body shops in the area for the frame rail repair and to measure the body to see if it’s twisted in any way. One of the body shops is specialized is classic car repair and restauration but will probably be quite expensive but none the less a representative will come by to look at the car this week. The other body shop is a more generic one that also does a lot of classic BMW’s and has done some paint work for me in the past. There hourly rate is a lot cheaper, I know they deliver great work and I know they sometimes are willing to do cash work. To save money on the body shop hours I decided to bite the bullet and order a bunch of parts from Apex Engineered which should arrive somewhere next week. Deciding what to buy was quite difficult as the shipping rate varied a lot but in the End I got the shipping down to $284. I all I bought the frame rails, front fender braces, front and rear control arms, steering knuckles, front crossmember and the rear strut brace. As importing stuff from the US is pretty expensive I decided to place a bigger order then what I strictly needed to maximize the value for my money. As the car needed to get welded anyway I ordered the front fender braces as well to reinforce the front of the car as they weren’t that expensive and seemed to me as a worth wile upgrade. As for the control arms my main reasons for buying those was to delay any major body repairs. If my body turns out to be twisted repairing it would turn into a full on restauration project. I do plan on restoring and repainting the car some day but not now, so as a temporary solution the adjustable control arms allow me to tune the effects of a twisted body out a bit. At some point I would like to get the full Apex Engineered Retro Mod suspension so this will give me a great starting point to work from anyway. To save some more money at the body shop I will strip down the interior and remove the fuel lines myself before sending the car of for welding. But before doing that I still have a chance to fix some small stuff surrounding the engine. My backorder from Zservices in France finally came in together with a used Bosch AAR from a Porsche 944 as my original AAR turned out to be broken. So last week I took the valve cover off to adjust the valves and replace the gasket as it was leaking a lot of oil. Good thing I did as the valves where very out of spec. The adjusters where a pain to get loose but after that adjusting them was very easy. I put everything back together with some new NGK spark plug wires and started her back up. Even with near freezing conditions the car started right up and idled better then ever before. The engine still runs very rich at idle and I suspect it might be an injector issue but other then that the engine runs great and the emissions are within the limits so I will place that issue on hold for now. My plans for the coming weeks are to strip down the interior, remove the fuel lines, front fenders and doors. This will also give me the opportunity to clean and inspect those parts of the car for more hidden surprises. I will also repaint the fuel lines as they are full of undercoating and try to restore the dashboard as with any Z mine is cracked. As for the doors I want to rebuild the door hinges and maybe try and reupholster the door cards as mine are actually of a 2+2 and have a giant hole instead of a second door latch. I’m hoping to get the car back on the road after this so I can finally start to enjoy my 280z this spring. Video van WhatsApp op 2025-11-24 om 10.58.36_fab92d46.mp4

4200 engine update. Progress pics of my intake. almost ready to go to the polisher!

More work on the 4200 today. cleaned up the rest of the block and head, and then pulled the oil pan and cam cover. NO SLUDGE. very clean inside. I got the outside of the cam cover clean enough to at least get started on the modifications I will do to it (add an alloy oil fill to the back, add a breather port, shave off 2 original ports, cut off unnecessary brackets, weld up the original oil fill hole and probably lower it a bit as it is very tall . To fit under a Z car hood it has to be chopped about an inch......although a small rectangular hole in the hood with the polished cover sticking up can be made to look really cool. Yeah I had an adaptor snap on me, the crank bolt is SO tight, I will probably need heat and PB blaster and smack it a few times to shock the treads to get it off. I need to clean behind it and it needs to be cleaned up and painted.......I wonder if the heat will ruin it? Before I called it a day, my AR5 transmission arrived.....in need of a rebuild, the pilot shaft has wiggle room. pics follow:

Slowly making progress Fender revised and partially welded Turn signal mounted

Heat wave going on here +27 in the shade, had to test how hot this can go on normal driving. that small 10" fan goes on 87celsius and it can keep it cool in the city, second large CFM fan goes 92celsius. oil coolant pump goes on 85celsius and highest i saw was 92celsius, 96celsius goes coolant fan

Good post. I was frustrated for a long time with companies not sharing spring rates on these parts. FWIW, Viking is legit, lots of fast SCCA guys run those things with good results. IF those spring rates were chosen to prevent bottoming out of the shocks, that's pretty poor design. My guess is that the motion ratio of the bellcrank will be the limiting/bottoming out feature here, and that the conversion to pushrods has resulted in some high force multipliers. My guess would be Viking starting point is mounting in a "muscle car" front end, where the motion ratio is fairly low. I'll be interested to hear what the APEX guys say!

Broken photos and links is honestly one of the biggest detriments separate from the attention span and social media issues. Most forums barely make enough to sustain themselves so the self hosted photos are always quite small and it's a bit frustrating when you're trying to see something in detail. I've been thinking of hosting my photos elsewhere but a lot of places like imgur could end up suffering the same fate as photobucket someday. That being said I'm still regularly updating here and directing people here when I can. I'll say one last thing that's a praise of forums and makes me hate social media lately - AI accounts and scammers making the 50th shitty group called "S30 240z 260z 280z and 280zx lovers and owners group" with stolen photos from reputable people make me want to blow up some Facebook servers. Drives me insane. Every few days lately someone posts about how someone scammed them out of money from some group. If you're even remotely active online the accounts have so many red flags too, so it hurts to see.

Yeah the broken thread links stink. The pictures might be even worse. I always upload my photos to the site rather than link to a hosting service. Threads that are 20 years old still work great if the poster did that.