veritech-z

Been feeling nostalgic for my old 280z lately. I did keep the whole turbo/injection setup with megasquirt, so maybe someday I'll get back in the game. I never had a place with a garage back then, so most of the "fabrication" was hasty and chop-shop status (note the zip tie-to-radiator-support IC piping mount), but I still stand by some of the choices as being poorly implemented viable ideas. I had plans for under-scooping the top mount intercooler with a tray that was ducted to the front of the car, and then a louver plate attached to the top to help pull air through at speed. As it was there though, I'm pretty sure all I was doing was heat soaking it. One of the things I'd convinced myself was a good idea that I never saw anyone else do was feeding fuel into both ends of the JSK fuel rail, with the pressure regulator/return coming out of the center. My thought was that since the rail was so long, there would be benefit in feeding it from both sides to prevent the injectors downstream from starving. That's one of the choices I'm not sure I'd make again. You can see that better in this pre-turbo picture: After turbo install:

Looks like France required yellow lamps until 93. Learn something new every day: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_yellow

Pretty sure yellow lights are used by certain endurance classes so you can tell the GT spec (slower) cars from a prototype car in the night as they come up behind you.

@JPN_Garage, that sounds like a cool conversation to have, good luck with the business opportunity. Not to subvert this thread any further, but I started modelling my flare idea in Maya. It's pretty rough at this stage yet:

I got a quote from these guys to re-barrel my Impul RS-IIIs, they didn't seem to be size limited: http://spintechwheels.com/

If money is that tight, this may not be the advice you want to hear, but you might consider walking away from this one and coming back to it when you are in a better position to do it right.

Badjuju, I don't think that first model will give you meaningful results for actual aero simulation because it has a totally flat underside (unless your car has a bellypan). I've been toying with the idea of making a 1:1 polygonal model of a Z car in Maya, which is the 3D package I'm most familiar with. I'm not sure what the best way to go from polys to a solidworks file is though. BurtonBrown, do you know what tool your analysis guy is going to use? *edit* just saw this thread is 2 years old. Even so, virtual wind tunnel software is a thing i would be interested in hearing more about

I imagine at this point it is going to be prohibitively expensive for them to change anything if the molds are made and they are ready to ship flares to people. That's why I suggested revisions for a version II in the future. Whether or not it's your thing, the LIberty Walk kits are casting a long shadow because they seem to be well designed for the cars they go on. I think the Rocket Bunny kits are trying to take that feel and bring it to the masses, but they aren't quite as "right" looking to me. This kit, as it currently stands, feels like it is one more degree of adaptation decay. Incidentally, the owner of Liberty Walk has an S30 in his personal collection that doesn't have these kinds of flares on it: http://www.speedhunters.com/2012/08/liberty-walk-shakotan-s30/img_0103-hi/

I think these are so close to being perfect, but the fronts are really not working at all for my taste. The rears are great, except for the angle of the back portion. These seem to be trying to capture the essence of a Liberty Walk flare set, but in execution they miss the mark for me. If you look at what LB is doing, they are accentuating existing body lines and creases with the angles. Liberty Walk Aventador: This set is visually jumping through a lot of hoops to do something similar, but in a way that misses the point a bit. The front flares in particular are just not coming together; the problem is the rising line that comes up to join back to the existing character line. I really do think you'd be better off with no rocker portion at all (as some have suggested) if you're going to do that, or making the lower rocker portion fare in like the ABR S130 flares and having this require some cutting to install (or make it a full fender replacement). ABR S130 flares: I think for the price y'all are charging, these are a great starting point, and even with these criticisms, I'd probably still be seriously considering a set if I had a Z in my garage. I spent a few minutes in photoshop with a random car I pulled off the internet to visualize what I think would improve these if they make it to a Version II. Looking at how Liberty Walk treats cars that don't have dramatic body lines at the mid-line (GTR, M3), I just brought the front flares all the way down to the rocker. On the rears, I made sure that the crease line where they terminate aligns with the existing character line, and that the trailing edge follows the bodyline of the car. I think mine have too many rivets, and now that I look at it, I think it would be cool to have a small cladding piece at the bottom of the door to tie in that portion of the rocker line as well, but I don't have time to work that out just now. Here is the LB Works GTR to show how they did their front fenders:

NURBs used to be the standard in special effects from what I'm told. The instructor that taught me 3-D made the head for the Mathew Broderick Godzilla movie, and they used all NURBs back then on some super high-end Silicon Graphics hardware. I forget what it stands for, Non Uniform something or other. In video games, we use all polygonal models. Great model, by the way.

And Sweet Home.

Shogun Assassin, you need to find that one.

What is it actually, a Cavalier?

I've heard this joke as a "Henway", which sounds ever so slightly more like a legitimate auto part.

You may find decent info at http://www.japanesenostalgiccar.com as well.

I too once met a girl so fair in the darkest depths of mordor. Here's some geek trivia: ever read the lyrics to that song? Gollum is spelled Golem, which is like a Jewish mud-robot, as opposed to a midget with radiation poisoning. BTW, I thought this was going to be a typo thread title, until I noticed it came from Auxiliary...and then I knew exactly what I was going to see when I opened it.

We'll see. I'm not going to be able to take a look at it again until Wednesday. Depending on what I discover then I'll have to make the call. I'll definitely regret letting it go if that's what ends up happening, since I've got so much time and parts-scrounging and deal making tied up in it. I got it a few months before I got married, and it kind of feels like part of the family. I'll be a lot more picky about which one I get and what I do to it if I end up getting another one. I've been out of school and working for awhile now, the problem is that I work in Orlando, and I live in Tampa (90mi one-way commute). I've been working for a startup game developer and I don't have any benefits, which means that my wife can't quit her job to move to Orlando. I've been trying find a job at a larger company, which most likely is going to mean moving out of state. Transporting a dead car to who knows where isn't going to be any fun at all.

Yeah, I think it's just a case of too many things going wrong with it at the wrong time in my life. The car is definitely not a priority for me right now, and getting rid of it definitely feels the path of least resistance. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to miss it, but I just don't think it's in the cards right now.

no, I'd spent the whole day up to that point on the wiring, i'm pretty sure it's as tight is it can be. I had it do this with the headgasket once before. I have my MS on a switch, so i can engage just the starter (which is on IT'S own button) with nothing else turned on, and it still won't turn over. I haven't looked at it all that hard, but I have had it lock up once in the past like this and it turned out to be water on the cylinders. It could be something else, it's just my suspicion right now without doing any real exhaustive testing.

Like 6-8 weeks ago, the fuel pump went out, and took a ton of other crap with it. I finally got all that sorted out yesterday, drove it two miles up the road to put air in the tires. I heard a loud clunk-ish noise, and the engine quit. The starter won't turn it over, just sounds like it's hitting the flywheel and stopping. I'm thinking the best case scenario is a bad headgasket with water leaking into the cylnders (thus preventing it from turning over), worst case is the engine is totally slagged. Neither of these scenarios is particularly attractive to me, as I don't have anywhere I can take the head off anymore (don't work at the dealership, and i live in a townhome with a draconion HOA), and I don't have the resources to just swap the whole engine out.

That's how you know you need to get out of a project...when it has you so fed up you're making inscrutable lolcats out of it...

So fed up...thinking of selling it.