christoc

Originally posted at www.project240z.com Monday night I didn't get crap done on the project! I started to work on the oil filter/block attachment only to realize after driving around for 2 hours that I wasn't going to find any easy way to block off the oil cooler attachments for the 83 L28ET motor. By the time I got home from that it was well after 9 and I needed to spend some time with my wife. Tuesday I ordered AN fittings to go from the metric 18mm x 1.5 oil cooler fittings to AN -10 fittings so that I can run steel braided lines to the new oil cooler I ordered. All of that should be here tomorrow. Tuesday after work I began putting things back together on the Intake Manifold. I spent far too long digging around the garage trying to find parts I haven't seen in a few weeks. Yes, I need FAR BETTER organization in the garage. I'll probably have to spend some time Thursday or Friday night cleaning up if I'm going to have anyone over to help out this weekend. After that I headed off to Speed Sports up in Bridgeton (http://www.speedsportstopfuel.com, store hours from 7-10pm M-F) to pick up some AN-4 steel braided line for my turbo oil feed. I got a 1/8" NPT to AN-4 fitting, a 90 degree hose fitting, and the fittings I needed on the turbo side, as well as 5 feet (about 1 ft too much) of AN -4 hose. I figured out when I got home that the port on the block for the oil fitting is NOT 1/8" NPT, it's actually 1/8" BSPT, which is very similiar, but different enough to make my fitting not work. With this info, I think I've now figured out why the pipe thread plugs I had purchased a few months ago wouldn't work, I probably need BSPT for those as well. I've found a few parts online that I can order to convert from BSPT to NPT, I'll see if anyone locally has those tomorrow, otherwise I'll get those ordered tomorrow. After leaving Speed Sports I headed down the street to Autozone. At AZ I picked up a lot of hoses, clamps and other random bits of things I needed to reassemble the motor. I also picked up a GM open element Air Temperature sensor to thread into the Intake manifold to be able to tell what the air temp is going into the motor, I had to get the Wells part, I think SU107 was the # but I could be wrong. AZ didn't have a pigtail so I'll try Carquest tomorrow to see if they have the pigtail so I can wire this up to the megasquirt. After running around this evening I got to thinking about how much this project has cost me lately. Without going into specifics (because my mother will read this) I've spent more this month than I spent to purchase the car. June was the same, and possibly double what I've spent so far this month. I know I've got a few more things I'll have to purchase, but hopefully I've got all the big items out of the way, at least for this phase of the project. More coming this week, and I promise to start doing video again!

I need to go through and figure out how much $$$ I've spent on my fuel cell and parts so far. The fuel cell was around $170 I believe from summit, but I know i've spent another 3-500 in connections, hoses, and other parts to install this cell. I'm not done yet either!

I believe, and I'm very noobish at this (I hope to attempt what you're doing in the next two weeks) that the Fuel pump will fire for 2 seconds, until it sees an RPM signal. If the MS doesn't see an RPM signal, as you note, it shuts off fuel as it thinks the car isn't running. How to track why you're not getting the signal. Using Edis? Got the Pip/SAW wires backwards?

Originally posted here. After yesterday's fun Eric and I spent some time in the garage today. I was awoken this morning around 8:00am by the doorbell, the Dish Network guy showed up right on time, more on that topic tomorrow on http://TheMadBlogger.org. After I got the Dish guy going I sent Eric an SMS to let him know I was out in the garage working. The first thing I need was to lay some fiberglass in the passenger floorboard. I had missed a few spots on that side earlier in the week, and layed some extra resin in the floor to smooth out the pockmarks from the cleaned up rust. While I let that dry I pulled the extra rear end that I had in the garage so I could start cleaning it up. As soon as I saw the rear end/suspension sitting in the driveway I immediately noticed a difference from the rear suspension that is on the car currently. The current suspension doesn't have a rear sway bar, the spare does. That's fine and dandy, I'd prefer the rear sway bar, the problem though is that the fuel cell frame that I fabricated fits right where the sway bar goes on this spare suspension. I'm not sure what I'll do with that aspect, but Eric and I spent the rest of the morning taking apart the spare rear suspension. We cleaned a lot of parts, figured out that the shocks (at least on the rear) are KYB's, they do look to be fairly new (or unused as that may be more correct). We got just about everything apart, and came up with plenty of parts to clean and paint (Powdercoat for Rande?) later in the project. Before I can use the rear swaybar I'm going to have to figure out what I'll need to change on the fuel cell bracket to make it work. I might be able to move the mounts for the bar a little higher to allow me to use the cell as currently fabricated. From there Eric and I started to prep for paint the interior. We cleaned up some of the dust that had gathered, drilled some pilot holes for the seat bolts in the floor (to get to the rear brackets for the seat mounts we had to cut a whole for a socket to fit through). We brushed, vacuumed, wiped and scrubbed the interior to try to get it ready for paint. We lowered the car down off the jackstands and spent the rest of the afternoon painting the interior with a nice satin black "Chassis Saver" paint that I had picked up on Saturday morning. I had purchased a gravity fed spray gun back in 2003 when I had the 350Z, previously using it once to spray some waste of money wax on the car, the gun hadn't been used since then. I think the paint this time around turned out great, an easy low cost solution that is WAY cleaner than it was prior to all this work. It was a bit laborious, but I think well worth the effort, Eric agrees. Here are some before pictures And here are some after shots. There are more photos in my Flickr set for Project240z.com Tomorrow I'll be working on the motor again. I hope to get the intake and exhaust manifolds back on the motor so that we can put it in the car Tuesday or Wednesday night. From there it'll be time to start wiring up the Megasquirt.

Tonight I spent some time working with fiberglass in the car. I was hoping to repair a few of the holes in the floorboards. I made quite a mess, but learned quite a bit. Here are some before photos. The passenger side needed the most work as it was in the worst shape due to rust. I used quite a few pieces of fiberglass matt on the passenger floorboard covering some of the holes. I also covered up a few of the sharper metal pieces of the floorboard. On the driver's side I used minimal fiberglass matting and mainly used resin. The driver's side was in far better shape than the passenger side so I used resin to smooth out the surface on the driver's side. It turned out far better than I could have imagined! You can't really see it in the photos, but it's quite a clean look on the driver's side now. I can't wait to see how all this looks once painted. Though before I paint I'll be cleaning up the fiberglass with some sand paper. I'll spend some time Thursday and Friday night working on the floor. I hope to try to paint the interior this weekend. The interior may have to wait though as I hope to finish up a few other things this weekend, mainly the fuel lines and getting the motor back into the car.

Originally posted at www.project240z.com Take 2, stupid internet browsers, I typed this once, I guess that's what I get for not typing it up in Windows Live Writer instead of in the browser. As anyone who has read the blog consistantly will know, I never get as much done as I "plan" to do in a given time frame, this weekend so far is no exception. Thursday I got most of the driver's seat mounts welded into place, but I didn't finish them off, I left the tabs for the actualy mounts off. Friday night I tested some rust remover on the exhaust manifold, no luck on removing any rust with the products I tried. This morning I got up at 9:30am, lounged around for an hour and a half. I went out to the garage and welded in the tabs for the driver's side seat mount. From there I was all over the place, here's a list of things I worked on today, in no particular order Test fitted new injectors in fuel rail/intake manifold Cleaned the intake manifold Cleaned the exhaust manifold Test fitted IAT sensor in intake manifold Cleaned the transmission and bell housing Scraped undercoating off the car around the transmission tunnel and floorboards Removed all the stock fuel lines (3) Mounted the fuel pump and bracket Test ran some new braided fuel line (need to buy more as I don't think 20ft is enough Prepped the driver's side interior for paint (removed paint/primer, will do passenger side and paint later this week) I've gotta try to hit the junk yard tomorrow, also will be racing Jansoon's M3, so we'll see how my first BMW experience goes. Here are photos of the driver's side seat mounts, as well as the prep work for paint.

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I ended up mounting mine, well nearly, this weekend. I've got some bolts to put in place, but everything else is there. You can read a full writeup with the link below (or in the member projects forum). http://www.project240z.com/Blog/tabid/53/EntryID/69/Default.aspx I've still got a lot of work left to do to clean things up, but I think this will work well for now.

Originally posted here This morning I set out into the garage to tackle a fairly large task, at least in my mind. My goal was to build a frame that will secure my 15 gallon fuel cell to the Project 240Z. In case you don't want to read the rest of this post, I was successful! I began with a few shots of the car before I started cutting into it (further than I cut last weekend). There are various shots here, above and below. After taking those shots I got to cutting. Dave (from www.soloperformance.com) and I had discussed how to mount the cell into the car on Tuesday when he came over, so I had an idea of what I wanted to do. I quickly marked some lines to cut with a sharpie, then proceeded to tear up two cutting wheels removing metal from the rear of the car. I don't know why that stock metal tears up wheels, but they sure to go away quickly when cutting on the car. Here are photos of what was left after cutting. The intention for the fuel cell frame was to bolt a bar on the back of the rear differential mount, weld to 1x1" square tubes parallel to the ground running towards the back of the car, then come up at a 90 degree angle from those tubes with more square steel. Those two vertical posts would weld to a bar running inside the back of the car, this bar would also be bolted into the car, not welded, so that if necessary the whole frame can be pulled out with minimal effort. Here are a few pictures of the end result of the frame, as well as some of my crappy welds! I figured out with all but two welds done, that I had somehow adjusted the wirespeed on the welder in the wrong direction, and that was why I was having a horrible time. I think they''ll hold though, they just aren't very pretty! This frame easily goes in and out of the car, which should come in handy if I ever need to remove the rear end (which I plan to when overhauling the suspension, after the car runs). Here are a few shots of the frame sitting in the car And here is the end result, the fuel cell sitting in the frame, sitting in the car. I think the frame turned out great and I love this photo The tank sits just low enough, it is barely visible from the back of the car, I actually had to walk 10 feet back and down a couple feet of driveway incline to see either the tank or the frame itself. I've yet to bolt the frame to the car, but that can wait. I'll get some nuts, bolts, and washers tomorrow for the various things I need to mount, fuel cell, seats, etc. All in all I'm really impressed with myself, I got a lot more done this weekend than most weekends, though I still have the build the driver's side seat mounts (I finished the passenger side yesterday). What's next? Well like I said, tomorrow night I'll be building the driver's side seat mount, as well as visiting Mr. Whittle's house to test fit some fuel injectors into my new fuel rail that should be arriving and the old intake manifold. If the injectors he has fit I'll be ordering injectors on Tuesday. After that I'll be running fuel lines, and be working on putting the motor back together so I can attempt to put it back in the car next weekend if all goes well. That might be a lofty goal, but this whole project has been lofty for me, so why quit shooting high now!

Well, after figuring out that the seat mounts I had made earlier in the week wouldn't fit I went back out to work on the 240Z this morning with a bitter taste in my mouth. I started off with a few quick pictures of what I had put together the other day. From there I removed the Corbeau brackets and started grinding the welds down on the tabs that I had added to the cross braces. I removed all four tabs with little trouble. Being that I haven't welded much before, this was the first time I'd had to remove a weld, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Here is the end result after removing the tabs. From there I got smart, I decided to do a bit more test fitting of the seat before I did any more welding. I attached the Corbeau bracket back to the seat and put it in the car, using towels to keep the seat clean. For the new positioning I decided the seat brackets basically needed to come forward in the car 4 to 5 inches from the original tabs I had made. With the two cross braces in place I wasn't comfortable making tabs that long and with little support, so I installed two more cross braces into the car, in front of the two existing braces. These two new braces were each welded at the body, and then to the original (from earlier this week) brace in the middle, actually reusing the tabs I had recently removed to add some support in the middle. I then welded on new tabs, this time spanning both braces on each half of the seat, adding support to the tab, as well as making the tab 2" wide instead of 1.5" as I had originally made. This should create for better support of the seat brackets. Here are the photos of the newly created tabs and cross braces. I position and drilled holes for the Corbeau bracket in the new tabs, visible in the latter photos above. After getting all of this setup I was anxious to get the seat in the car and see how she fit. To get the seat in the car I had to mount the Corbeau bracket directly to the seat with 4 bolts that will go through the new tabs in place. I wrapped the seat in towels and put on some clean latex gloves so that I wouldn't get the fabric dirty from all my gunk. In order to actually thread the nuts on the rear bolts I have to tilt the seat backward, for now this is alright, but when I actually go to use the seat this won't work well. What I think I'll do is get a combination of some rubber and metal washers, which I think will allow me to tighten the rear nuts down and still be able to tilt the base of the seat back a bit, once tight, lower the front of the seat into it's tabs and tighten up the bolts there. The front tabs are easy to access, the rear tabs, not so much. Anyways, here are the photos of the seat in the car. Tomorrow I'll be installing the driver's seat, most likely in the same manner as the passenger side, I'll also be starting on mounting the fuel cell, cutting out sections of the rear floorpan, and then fabricating a frame for the cell to sit in. The ultimate goal for this 15 Gallon cell is to build a frame that will allow me to easily remove the fuel cell and install a smaller cell. Using the larger cell for Time Trial and HPDE events, and having a 5 gallon cell to use for autocross events, saving weight in the rear of the car. More tomorrow!

Thanks James, a buddy of mine also directed me there again. We're going to fit some Ford Lightnightning 42lb injectors when the rail arrives on Monday and then I'll quickly place an order from somewhere.

I ordered a fuel rail from Lone Wolf that finally shipped today. It's setup for 14MM injectors, James there suggested that I get Mopar Super 60 injectors. I'm going to try a local dealer tomorrow, but right now it looks like Summit and Jegs are both back ordered for a week or two. What are my other options? I've got a stock L28ET, but putting in a megasquirt and planning on more upgrades in the very near future, so I don't mind running more CC's than I prolly should with my current setup. I've been digging around the forums/search but couldn't find any good answers. Thanks for your advice.

I spent another hour or so tonight working on the passenger seat mounts I hope to get some bolts tomorrow and attempt to mount the seat into the car tomorrow night or Friday. I'm still waiting on my fuel rail from Lone Wolf Performance. I hope to hear from them tomorrow and have the part by Friday. If not I'll have to find myself another source for a fuel rail. Goals for this weekend. Mount both seats in the car, though I'll pull them back out until I'm ready to leave them in there for a while, they are too nice to keep in such a dirty car till it gets cleaned up! I'm also shooting for getting the fuel cell all fabricated and mounted into the car, along with fuel lines run to the front of the car.

Tonight was a semi productive night on the 240Z, which is always a good thing when some productivity happens during the week, it's hard enough being productive on the weekends. More on tonight in a bit. Summit Racing kindly sent me all of the fuel part oddities I had ordered last week. I had a 12x12 box sitting at the office when I returned from lunch today. I was dissapointed to find such a small box, after spending so much money! But I guess I did order "small" parts. After work I headed home and met up with Dave from http://www.soloperformance.com/ who came over tolend a hand. First we hypothesized on how to mount the 15 Gallon fuel cell I have for the car. I think we've come up with a good plan, and I hope to start fabricating that later this week. After going over that plan we started cutting and fabricating new seat mounts for the Project240z. We got quite a bit done on the Passenger side of the car. I started on that side just incase I were to screw something up, I can always drive without a passenger seat if needed, but I'll always need a driver's seat! Here's a link to the Video I took tonight. Towards the end you'll notice a small camera issue, the tape came loose and the camera basically inverted, which made for some kinda cool video as well. I also took some pictures of what we accomplished on the seat mounts. Tomorrow night, or Thursday I plan to finish up the passenger side brackets and get started on the driver's side brackets, as well as to start cutting for the fuel cell. I'll have to pick up some more 4.5" cutting wheels though, I've gone through 3.5 of them in the past two days of working on the car and have plenty more cutting left to do. I say tomorrow or Thursday, because I'm not sure I'll get any work done tomorrow (Wednesday) because I may head off and play roller hockey with some guys I used to work with at The Sporting News (www.sportingnews.com), they are in the process of relocating the "online" side of TSN to North Carolina and I think Wednesday night is the last night for Ray Slover at the pickup hockey games that have been going on for the past 5-6 years now. More later this week!

The 240Z once again stands on its own! Eric and I put the brakes back together on the car, put the wheels on and roll her out into the driveway. Spun her around, and rolled her back in. Then we procede to begin on the fuel cell installation (read cut ♥♥♥♥ out). Tonight I'll be working with Dave and Eric to cut more, and start fabricating the mounts for the Fuel Cell which I hope to have mounted by the end of the week! Here's the video from Saturday's work

Have you tried any othe the other holes on the thermostat housing? I've got two housings, one off a 78 2+2 and one off a 83 L28ET. Only 1 or two of the four holes seem to match up with threads. It's the weirdest thing trying to find plugs for them so far.

I finally got the video working from my new camera. I installed Windows Vista again last night on my home Machine (after 4 months of running on XP again) and with Vista the camera works great! You can see/download the video with the URL below. But please right click and save the file, it is large. 180mb, but I think the quality is well worth the wait for the download. http://www.christoc.com/p240z-6-16.2.wmv

With the help of a buddy of mine I was able to get the intake manifold removed from the car, as well as the exhaust manifold and the turbo. I had hoped to have video up today but for some reason my laptop apparently decided to have some troubles with the video file from today. I do have the engine removal on tape, in high def. I got a new video camera today, Natalie and I needed one (she's got a lesson with a very big name in training on Monday that she wants me to record), the camera is amazing. I hooked it up to my plasma TV and holy cow, my garage looks better on TV than in person! I'll work tomorrow to get the HD video off that camera. I have a few hours of video with my normal webcam setup, hopefully this chkdsk I'm running now will repair one of the videos. Otherwise it looks like I'll only have the motor removal from the webcam, not the 2 hours of work after that removing all the intake/exhaust manifold parts. What's next? Cleanup time. I'm going to be ordering a fuel rail, injectors, pressure system/guage, and look into options for cleaning up the intake manifold. I may end up trying to have some machine work done on the manifold, and have the intake/exhaust manifolds coated before I go to put them back on. More on that later this week. Hopefully video later tonight, if not sometime tomorrow. Here's a link to the Video

So I spent some time tonight working on trying to remove the intake manifold from the car. Long story short, I didn't get very far and I'm going to pull the motor back out of the car on Saturday. Getting parts removed off the motor is a huge pain in the rear with it in the car, so I'm just going to disconnect the driveshaft, motor mount and transmission mount and pull the thing back out for now. I'll probably take this time to look at replacing the fuel rail and injectors while I have it out of the car. I need to pull it out so I can retap some of the holes I need to fill, as well as clean it out, I'm sure it has all sorts of crap in there that I'd rather not blow into the motor the first time it starts up. Here is a link to the video from this evening. Nothing too interesting, but a cool camera angle. Removing the motor on Saturday should make for some good video...

Yet another blog post/update http://www.project240z.com/Blog/tabid/53/EntryID/56/Default.aspx Last night I returned the Vertical sander that I had purchased from Sears that was broken when I removed it from the box. I got a replacement sander and brought it home to install. I setup the webcam on the wall, right above the work bench, and got to work assembling the sander. 5-10 minutes later I was ready to start sanding on the aluminum I had cut with a jig saw the day before to make a blockoff plate for my AAC valve on the intake manifold. I tell you what, a vertical sander is a fun thing to have! Here's the result of what I was making, though I'm still going to drill a hole in it and tap that hole for the temperature sensor I'll be mounting in the intake manifold. I also got to use my new drill press to drill the holes in the plate, it all worked really darn well. After getting the plate made I decided it was time to remove the intake manifold from the car so I could tap and fill some of the holes on the manifold that I don't need to use. I brough the webcam with me and mounted it directly above the motor on the chery picker. I started removing bolts, then decided to read the haynes, it told me I need to remove the Turbo and a few other things to get the manifold removed, I guess I should of planned things a bit better and done most of this work BEFORE I put the engine back in the car, it sure would be a lot easier to get to. Once I realized how much I had to remove to get the manifold off I decided I didn't want to do all that last night, it was nearly 10pm by then. So I moved to the other side of the motor, bringing the camera with me to the other side. Andy and I decided last week to remove the attachments for the oil cooler for now, I'm going to attempt to get the car running without the cooler for now, and reinstall it down the road as I don't have all the hardware for it. So I started removing it last night, got it removed, and then saw that without the attachment there isn't a way to mount the oil filter to the block. So tonight I'll be attempting to remove the oil filter attachment from the parts motor (78 l28e) to see if I can use it on the 83 L28ET. After all this I decided it was time to head inside and play with the cool video I had shot last night, only to realize that I had click on the record audio button, instead of record video. So yet again, there isn't any video to be had Tonight though I promise I'll do my best to get it right and have a video to post of the evening's work.

Yes

It'll be a time trial car as well eventually. Also will drive it on the street occasionally.

So I'm in the process of trying to figure out what I can to for my fuel cell. I picked up one of the 15gallon aluminum ones from Summit that arrived today. Now the decision of how to mount it, whatever I do I'm going to have build a "metal bulkhead" to seperate it from the passenger compartment. Anyone have any thoughts? This is an XP autocross car now, I dumped the idea of trying to make it SM2 legal.

I upload all my videos to Youtube, best bandwidth and hosting for the price!

Dittmer eh? Want to help out on another one? I'm up in Creve Couer, getting ready to start wiring this week (I hope). I just ordered a fuel cell and fuel lines today, so I need to get that all plumbed up this week, then I'll start on the wiring.