katman

Gland nut first. Then, if your camber plate setup uses a spherical bearing to center the shock check for slop there- shock loads hammer the liners out of most spherical bearings.

Very pretty. Same old issues- Not true triangulation so thrust and drag are carried by tube bending and I suspect the moment of inertia of the tubes is not as great as the stock part. No limit to how much an idiot can unscrew the heim joints. Threaded sections in bending. Not on car adjustable so what's the point. But did I say pretty?

That's a problem with the Tilton style upper spring perch with the thrust bearing. Also adds a smidge of bending to the shock shaft, but doesn't seem to be a long term issue on race cars that use that arrangement. Street car with more travel and miles? Dunno. I've always liked the thrust bearing as opposed to bearing on the spherical, since the shock loads tend to beat the lining out of the bearing in short order (at least at the rates we're running on race cars) and having the car weight added to that just exacerbates the problem. Ground Control has a spherical thrust washer type arrangement that I thought was clever. Maybe I'm getting old, but the more I think about it the more I like the original rubber isolators to take the high frequency vibes away from my arse....

Your machinist is going to kill way more power with his substandard valve job than you're going to lose in quench and combustion chamber shape. Just my HO. By the time somebody who knows Z heads properly locates the valves, cuts all the right angles, blueprints the spring seat pressure, and fairs the casting to the seats, you got $1500 in the valve job alone. Worry about how you're going to get the most out of your tune, not your quench. Again, just my HO. Like Norm says, a good healthy shave on an N42 makes the chamber look a hole lot better.

If you're making 48+ hp per cyl (say 290+ hp overall) that's a good size primary. Go with the 2-1/2 collectors which is what I think comes on that header and merge it into the final 3" as John says.

The letters stamped on Nissan L-series cams cannot be trusted to mean anything.

"..they will rotate in the correct plane with the movement of the control arms" Not exactly. The old Kontrolle style offset aluminum/delrin bushing will always bind up because of the connection of the LCA to the T/C rod. The application really requires a heim.

A lot of people seem to be really happy with the GC shocks and personally I'm a big fan of Jay's hardware- camber plates and such. Very nice pieces. But the AD shocks I gave more than the benfit of the doubt- even sent one of the Bimmer sets back to have him check them on his dyno- and my opinion of the ones I've had to work with is, well, momma always said if you don't have anything nice to say.... In road racing there weren't a lot of guys with the AD shock in Z's- most of us had developed the car long before the AD was available. The bimmers was a different story. WHen the E36 became legal for the class GC was one of the first with a complete bolt in suspension so lots of bimmers run them. I have never been one to do what everybody else is doing, especially when they are behind me on the grid. But I did give the AD's a shot. I would think autox would be a tough app to hone in on since your sessions are like a minute long and it would seem to be impossible to get enogh repeatable data with all the other variables constant to make any real judgements. Technically I don't see why on the same terrain that road racing and autox would have any difference in shock requirements. Keep in mind when you get somewhere close to critically damped for the bumps (high speed valving- faster than 5in/sec) the rest of the characteristic of the shock are really for tuning transitional handling. In autox the transitions are such short duration I imagine it would be tough to tune without some sort of data system- but I know in Pro Solo lots of folks have exotic double adjustables and somehow do it. Best of luck.

A lot of people seem to be really happy with the GC shocks and personally I'm a big fan of Jay's hardware- camber plates and such. Very nice pieces. But the AD shocks I gave more than the benfit of the doubt- even sent one of the Bimmer sets back to have him check them on his dyno- and my opinion of the ones I've had to work with is, well, momma always said if you don't have anything nice to say.... In road racing there weren't a lot of guys with the AD shock in Z's- most of us had developed the car long before the AD was available. The bimmers was a different story. WHen the E36 became legal for the class GC was one of the first with a complete bolt in suspension so lots of bimmers run them. I have never been one to do what everybody else is doing, especially when they are behind me on the grid. But I did give the AD's a shot. I would think autox would be a tough app to hone in on since your sessions are like a minute long and it would seem to be impossible to get enogh repeatable data with all the other variables constant to make any real judgements. Technically I don't see why on the same terrain that road racing and autox would have any difference in shock requirements. Keep in mind when you get somewhere close to critically damped for the bumps (high speed valving- faster than 5in/sec) the rest of the characteristic of the shock are really for tuning transitional handling. In autox the transitions are such short duration I imagine it would be tough to tune without some sort of data system- but I know in Pro Solo lots of folks have exotic double adjustables and somehow do it. Best of luck.

In the good ole days a good alignment shop used to be able to put a rig on your strut and bend the bottom of it up to a degree. Have to watch your tire clearance on the inside against the strut, but otherwise a pretty dang cheap way to get another degree of negative camber. Dunno if they still do that sort of thing, its been a few years. For a track car on radials you really need prodigious amounts of front camber.

I have worked with some top notch 240Z pilots and frankly all of them thought the shocks they had were great. Most of them could do a lap with crap shocks as fast as they could with the double adjustables properly designed and damped for the app. One lap out of 20. The difference is on the stopwatch after 20 laps, and in the tire temps and tire wear. JohnC raises an interesting point that I too have noticed. For some reason shock manufacturers that come from the street end of things seem to think performance comes with raising bump and rebound in proportion to go from "street to track". It's like they're afraid of "jacking down" the shock. I prefer much more rebound than bump in my race shocks than whats usually available in a single adjustable.

I have worked with some top notch 240Z pilots and frankly all of them thought the shocks they had were great. Most of them could do a lap with crap shocks as fast as they could with the double adjustables properly designed and damped for the app. One lap out of 20. The difference is on the stopwatch after 20 laps, and in the tire temps and tire wear. JohnC raises an interesting point that I too have noticed. For some reason shock manufacturers that come from the street end of things seem to think performance comes with raising bump and rebound in proportion to go from "street to track". It's like they're afraid of "jacking down" the shock. I prefer much more rebound than bump in my race shocks than whats usually available in a single adjustable.

I had several made for our ITS car by Richard Clark Gaskets in Blaine MN. Several thicknesses available. I gave him permission to use my drawing if he ever had another Z customer. Worked a whole race season on one engine with no problems. Couldn't make it work on another engine. In our case we needed control over the gasket volume so we could push the rule limits on compression ratio.

Dude, you'll get more replies on this forum if you learn how to spell and use punctuation. Jeez.

Dude, you'll get more replies on this forum if you learn how to spell and use punctuation. Jeez.

"You can see a lot just by looking." -Yogi Berra

Interesting, but with a few eyebrow raisers. C-5's have 6 digit tail numbers; first 2 digits being the year they were delivered. There are 2 "special" C-5's in existence, not 3, and they don't have "chipmonk cheeks". They were originally modified to carry an environmentally controlled container the exact size of the Space Shuttle cargo bay- approximately the dimensions stated in the article. The mods were not visible from the outside so that the USSR could not detect the special C-5's from the others. We think the first payload was the KKH11 spy satellite- it would have been the right time period (about 1987). They are in USAF inventory as C-5C's. A modified Lockheed L-1011 has been used to carry a Pegasus missile to altitude for launch into space. Very similar concept- use the plane to do the initial heavy lifting. The droop winged XB-70's were built to explore the concept of "compression lift". No. 1 is at the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patt. I never knew there were parts for another. Cool. Makes me wonder if this is "Aurora". Thanks for the link John.

Gee, how about using a timing light and putting it where it belongs, then idle the carbs down and reset the idle mixture?

I've had Illumina's blown out on an old ITS car with 240lb/in springs on it. I suspect the mode of failure is the valve stack can't keep up with the rebound forces caused by higher rate springs and they fatigue.

Take all the rockers out, take the cam sprocket off, and see if the cam turns freely (duh, don't forget to do something about the chain if you have the front timing cover on already). If it does, then you at least have something you can work with. My guess is the head was "freshly restored" by a hack and it's worthless, but let's hope for the best. Removing one head bolt won't hurt your gasket. Let us know if the cam turns with two fingers.

Well I measured an L24 block once to draw up a custom solid copper head gasket for our ITS motors and got this: Cyl Distance 1-2 3.802 2-3 3.795 3-4 3.864 4-5 3.795 5-6 3.802 Go figure.

Well, since we don't know how much you got in your account, we still don't know how much you're willing to spend. Here, this isn't very exotic: a good tune up. Proly make more horsepower than a cam. this is going in a Model A, like Ford?

How much money do you have to spend??????