markrolston@mac.com

Art Morrisson CNC bent. Wouldn't do it again. They did a great job but we ended up cutting them anyway to improve footwell space. Would have been easier just to start with raw steel. But they did fit the Z06 front end for me according to specs- so some convenience. Ha! rear suspension. yes. crazy. I did it for fun. Totally not necessary. But cool.

Thanks. Only after making the dash and center console I found a vendor that is making them. It would be far cheaper to go with them ( https://retro-spec.myshopify.com/collections/datsun-240z-260z-280z-s30) The wheels are 18x11. The design is custom one-off. Boze wheels fabricated them. I've done a preliminary shakedown. It is wicked fast. Scary. at ~2200lbs it's easy to get moving. Handling is good but springs will need replacing as it's too soft.

slow to post but a few weeks ago I took the car to Nismo Fiesta and the car won Best of Show. Pics from the show below. Warning- they are fuzzy. The camera lens was messed up. It also turns out red is hard to photograph. hmmm. I had only just picked the car up from the paint show the day before so it was a rush to get it there. For the last few weeks I've been working on finishing up the interior and lots of small bits of refinement. A final set of pics will be coming soon. Then I hope to call the project finished and just enjoy the thing. It's been a ten year project. https://farm1.staticflickr.com/943/40239399110_240591301f_h.jpg

The paint has been sanded, cleared, sanded and polished. It looks beautiful. Next week we will clear the carbon parts and put the car back together.

It's Audi's Masano Red- the color they use on the 2008/9 RS4, among others. It's a brilliant 5-layer red that has white underneath it.

The car is very nearly finished. After nearly 10 years of work it's finally painted. The red is beautiful and is striking when you see the contrast between the painted parts and the naked carbon underneath. I plan to show the car for the first time at Nismo Fiesta in San Antonio in Mid April.

The car is still at the paint shop. The body is almost prepped for paint. They did a fantastic job making everything fit nicely and straightening out all of the surfaces.

The body prep for paint is coming along. It's taken a lot of work to take the subtle waves and kinks out of the CF body. But it's close and looking perfect. It will hopefully get painted next week.

You're not the first to react that way. There's always the "you're painting over the carbon fiber??" reaction. So here's the logic: First, the CF work is ok, but we made no effort to ensure the weave ran consistently across the body. it's all over the place. And the molds have all kinds of small errors that reflect my original Z's body errors. It doesn't survive close inspection. It also seams against the few remaining steel elements like the doors and roof (safety!) And I wasn't into the idea of building some kind of raw naked-tech racer. The vision for the car is as a refined material and mechanical platform that reveals itself only upon close inspection. At first read it's just an old 1970s Z car, albeit shiny paint with flares. The magic will be in how all the materials and technology reveal themselves as you open the doors, lift the hood, etc. For example the hood is painted on the outside...relatively normal looking right?... but lift the hood and ...omfg... underneath is a custom chassis, motor, and naked carbon inner hood surface. I think it'll work.

small update. big news. Car went to paint a few weeks ago. Starting the process of getting painted.

FYI. I'm bringing the car, along with my RBZ, to the San Antonio Nismo Fiesta this coming Sunday, April 30th.

composite doors are an easy way to get killed on the track without a ton of engineering in the CF structure. That's not something I can do. The car has steel where it's most needed.

I did. I apologize for not posting but we were so caught up in testing that I didn't take many photos and completely forgot to get video. The car is insane to drive. The throttle is too sensitive and it'll spin it's wheels at the slightest tap. On the bumpy Harris Hill track the bumps cause my foot to accidentally depress the accelerator just enough to send the wheels spinning. Not good. We are adjusting the throttle map to attenuate the tip-in throttle intensity. We are moving to a smaller brake MS for tighter braking control and we're going to get some stiffer shocks. Otherwise it's a blast to drive. Next up is to finish the various CF parts and get it painted. I also need to find some better doors. These are too banged up. .

I will be doing the first track shakedown of the car this thursday (Nov 3) at Harris Hill in the AM. Also, dashboard nearly finished. looks great. maybe too shiny.

still working on carbon parts and fit-n-finish. It's slow going. Here's a quick shot of how the rear diffuser neatly covers the rear suspension underneath. We hope to do track testing in September. I want to get this thing done this year.

small update. We're down to fit and finish. I never like the way the center console fit up against the dashboard. So we are reshaping it carefully to fit better. Then both will be surfaced in CF.

It is nearly impossible in my experience to get a custom ECU programmed anywhere near a factory ECU in terms of drivability. They literally spend 1000s of hours on the tuning map. It might be technically possible to approximate it but it would take a monumental effort. In any case, it's tuned now and running great. with only spring pressure it does 430whp. We'll tune it soon with boost control for ~200+ more.

I appreciate the advice from everyone to use a custom ECU. I have a Motec M6 in my RB26 Z (http://www.rolston.me/NewSite/Z-Blog/Z-Blog.html) and while it's arguably one of the best aftermarket ECU's, even the best programming can't match what the factory ECU can do for basic drivability. Any custom map likely suffers from cold-start, decel, part-throttle, and other tune weaknesses. I'm determined to start with the factory ECU along with the UpRev programming to see if I can have my cake and eat it too- meaning to have a nice drivable map along with the high power setup that I've built. So, on to the latest update. We fixed the issue and have now worked through our first test tune. It did 430WHP on spring pressure and a very conservative map. The setup will accommodate several hundred more WHP so we will continue to refine the tune. The schedule target is now to have the car finished and running for the Nismo Fiesta in San Antonio at the end of April. It may not be painted but I expect it will be finished otherwise. Then we can do a few months of test/tune at Harris Hill to figure out what spring rates, shock settings, etc. work best. If you recall, the entire frame and suspension of this thing is custom and therefore we have no real idea of what will work best. at it's current weight of less than 2000lbs it should be quick in any case.

no update for some time because we're running into a mysterious issue with the variable cam timing control. L/R cams not acting in sync and we can't figure it out. A lot of this is simply related to the fact that we're still using the stock ECU yet we've otherwise made a lot of changes to the motor. It's been slow but we feel close to working it out. In the meantime we're also trying to finish up the last bit of carbon work. From there the car will be ready to drive and get painted.

We fabricated larger diameter charge pipes to improve the range of the MAF sensors. It appears to be a typical issue with boosted VQs. Now back to tuning.

sorry for the long absence. We've made progress but it has been slow. I've been holding out for a big update but it keeps dragging out. Hopefully later this week.... We've been trying to tune the engine for a couple of weeks but have run into various problems, most recently a case where the boost plumbing was not allowing the MAF sensors to get a good reading. We are going to try fitting some larger diameter pipes. In the meantime, here's a few pics from the last few weeks: shown here: detail shot of intake plumbing, rear diffuser fitting work, progress on side door sills, and the car sitting on the dyno this week getting what hopefully will be it's first full tune.

Ok, so after the attempted dyne turning session, we pulled the motor and inspected it. Why? during the first few pulls, we noticed an odd clacking sound. So it appears that one of the bearings is bad. We don't think we did any serious damage and now we're sending the motor off to a very trusted builder to fix it and do a bench dyno to ensure everything is good. We did the original build ourselves and in not-so-perfect conditions. The parts are right but it's obvious we missed something. On other fronts, the rear diffuser is nearly done (I posted some pictures here) and we're now working on fixing the catch-seams for the front hood. Right now we have a small lip built into the carbon but it takes too much effort to line up the hood. The new design should help the hood find it's way into a perfect fit when it's closed.

After a week or so of delay getting the dyno booked, we put the car on the dyno today and found a handful of technical issues so we didn't really get it tuned yet. More to come...

The diffuser has turned out to be quite a complex project. But it's all glued together now and we're going to trim it to shape. I spent some time this week trying to decide what line to cut. Also, we're scheduled to put the car on the dyno friday at UpRev to do a first tune.

Obviously things have been very slow. I did not get to race it. But it's running and will get tuned this next week. And we finally have some decent progress on the rear diffuser. It hasn't been trimmed so the pics you see show it hanging far lower than the final part.