Daeron

I would just go buy a half-height plastic dash cap and pop it on over the original. Take the cap back off anytime you want the car to look pretty. REALLY, the only way to preserve the interior of an S30 is to park it indoors all the time, or get rear louvers and a windshield screen that you use religiously. That, plus tinted windows, make a Z SO MUCH nicer inside. Less frequent need of detailing by far. THIS is the reason camaros, Zs, and many cars with very sloped rear decks use louvers; to keep the sunlight out of the car and preserve the interior. Louvers and a windshield sunvisor (especially now that they have the reflective mylar ones; My uncle's car hasn't really been on the road for about 10 years, and HIS interior ir the one I am picturing) keep out so much UV and heat it is ridiculous. I call these cars my favorite little greenhouses.. ANY angle the sun is at, it pours into AT LEAST one of the two pieces of glass. Usually it is both. Trust me; in South Florida (as in other places I am sure) you recognize features like this in automobiles; especially when you and your family live lifetimes in them.

Oh wow it almost looks like they used the blocks as a a source from which to stamp woodruff keys......

what are your compression numbers? it is easy to say "okay" but with additional evidence, sometimes a simple dip is enough to indicate a problem. I would also try swapping #3 injector with another injector, to see if the problem follows the injector or not. It is probably a red herring.. but it *is* alot less work than pulling the head. Have you tried a leakdown test? That might also help to corroborate the "headgasket" diagnosis.

Silverado is the more rational choice to repair; but.... What do you need help with?? If you drove it home, it must start, shift, and brake... what is wrong with it? This might help, both in knowing what to do, and in how to ask for help. http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=141861

I agree with tony, those are impressive raw castings, for a couple of guys who go about short sleeved and glove free and for my part, I will say: SCREW the machine work, I want to see these puppies bolted to a mock-up longblock (preferably in an S30 engine bay, but I'm not picky!) PRONTO!!! Seriously though, much respect! cannot WAIT to see you finish!

maybe "coolant flow" rather than "cooling flow?"

meh, reference is the red-headed stepchild of the infiniti automotive speaker world. if you like references, you'll LOVE kappas... Trebles so crisp they'll make yer eardrums bleed. You haven't LIVED until you've heard Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds at 75 volume on an eclipse deck (it goes to 100, but 50-55 is deafeningly insane..)

My old man was taking a front valance, an air dam, two headlight buckets, two fenders, a hood, and a wiper cowl and molding them into one single piece front end. that is A MILLION times more complex than what you are proposing, and involves warpping a shell around the entire stressed front unibody of the car. I don't see how you plan on getting curves right without using a mold of some sort, but whatever, it's your ballgame. By "mold" I don't mean necessarily anything necessarily re-useable, professional, beyond your expertise, or otherwise unecessarily difficult... just something that you can easily shape, and then lay your glass down into. If you just start with a couple of kinks in an aluminum frame, you are going to be spending HOURS building up the curves, sanding them down to try to make it look right, and you will probably wind up with a fairly heavy piece in the end. If you take someones junky fiberglass air dam and wrap a single thin sheet of cloth around the leading face of it to flatten the front, you take an already stable and sturdy piece and just give it a new fascia.

I don't think you understood my point.. my point is that A: it REALLY doesnt take alot of people INSTANTLY pissed to show that you are a worthless vendor and B: More people have had negative dealings with him than have reported such via his ebay feedback.. In other words, 22 people have left negative feedback.. I havent seen ALL of those people discuss this guy, but I know that I have seen more people say "I WISH I hadn't left positive feedback," then I have seen people say, "I left negative feedback." Like Naviathan above. So just from this thread, that is now 23 people instead of 22, and 4347 "opsitive" experiences rather than 4348. While I must admit that I would LOVE to be worried about these "tiny details" that the buyer is concerned about (tongue in cheek, my car is a POS) I am fully on the buyer's side here. If *I* had paid ~20K for a '70 240Z I would want it to be in better shape, and more closely match the posted description, as well...

.005% of 4360 is 22 people... make those 22 people mad enough to be instantaneously mortified, and they tell a dozen people each, and you have over 250 people who know how bad you are. How many members do we even HAVE here? 10,000?? If so, then 250 is 2.5 % of the members here. Statistics are EASY to manipulate. And I know that I have seen as many people say that they have left positive feedback, and regretted it, as I have seen actual complaints.

I just re read my post, and realized that I didn't convey the overall FLATNESS of the air dam, and the fact that it was largely one smooth plane from the upper corner of the "jawbone" through to the bottom, where it edged out slightly. In other words, take the MSA air dam I pictured, and cut the thing off say, right down flush below the turn signal. Then do that with my dad's.. and you see my dads is MUCH more of a flat line in cross section, nowhere near as much of the "zig-zagging" (from fore to aft) you would see in the MSA piece. Also, it sounded MUCH more "thrown together" than it was in the end. My dad spent about two years or more while driving the car, then about another year while racing it (before going with the G-nose) constantly massaging it, eliminating any flex cracks or tendency towards flex cracking, shaving weight where it wasn't needed, and squaring look of the thing up. In the end, the concept of boxy doesn't even come close, until you REALLY try to compare it side by side to a stock sheetmetal front end. I always had a custom-made grill like the one you showed in mind, and I think he did too, but it never materialized.

I GOTTA get my dad to dig up pictures of the grey ghost with his one-piece front end on it. We still have the front end (and hopefully its going on my car one day? HAHA) but it is hanging hood side against the wall, headlights pointing up, on the interior wall of the loft we have that covers the back 1/4 of our "shop...." It was (I think) a multi piece fiberglass front end kit with a fiberglass stock-looking valance, and a custom made air dam, both of which had seen better days. My dad takced everything to his car, got some cloth, and pieced it all together into one. I got him to look at these pictures earlier today, and he says his airdam was largely that flat, except it was ducted. MY recollection is that it looked ALOT like this MSA fiberglass air dam: Now, he specified that there was a small lip that wrapped around from the bottom and up into the mild flare of the front fender.. in other words, one complete smooth line. *I* seem to recall the slight recession that runs from the ducts to the flattened license plate spot, but I may be wrong. (The "valley" along the center of the "ridge" that is the air dam) Anyhow, it was in the end an AMAZING looking one piece fiberglass front end. The hood was a home-plate shaped (plus cutouts for the inspection lids, the "hood" had little winglets there.. so it actually looked almost like a Space Invader ship pointing in the direction of travel) affair that, when opened, exposed the radiator/crossmember but not much else to the front, and went all the way to the stock cabin-end hood location. The front end was made with essentially a square box going from the back of the air dam to the radiator crossmember, easy to seal. No accommodation for 240 style turn signals was made, even though the car was a 70 240. I think he had little generic amber light modules mounted in the top corners of the totally squared grille opening, and I can't recall any grill on there. The front "tip" of the air dam matched the front "tip" that would have been hoodline, but the entire nose was shortened and blunted a *tiiiiny* bit. Sound interesting?????

Please use a proper subject header in your posts. Something Like .. READ: why you should not purchase from "DatsunParts" on eBay!

That opening in the front is MORE than adequate to allow airflow into the radiator. I would try to find an airdam that someone had that was buggered up and fugly, maybe cracked fiberglass or something, and then rivet some sheetmetal onto that, and pop a mold off for making a fiberglass airdam. That seems about the most viable method IMHO, but it IS alot of work... It seems to me that altering your standard MSA airdam would be the easiest way to go, one way or another. My dad has a one-piece fiberglass front end that he salvaged, repaired, and bonded a glass airdam onto. He then basically "flattened" the front of it much like that, but I cannot visualize how much contour was left. I will ask him about it tomorrow.

The seafoam was an attempt to remedy the smoking. Bob, I would highly recommend you just find an L28 from an NA 280ZX to throw your cammed E31 onto and call it a day. You may find that you want to run higher octane fuel than you want, but my guess is that would land you around 200ish horses, and guess what? in a 240Z thats PLENTY... with 200 horses, its time to work on the suspension.

Word!! This is a battery powered light you are talking about?? What kind/how many batteries? Oh yah, btw.... Thread, JACKED!!! mwahahahaaa

I KNEW I was getting wires crossed!! I've been looking at sentras lately and had my chassis designations all schmutzed. (greatest smiley EVARRR!!) Well, unless youve got the VG, my point still stands, heh. BTW I WANT one of those cars BADLY. AE86 eat yer heart out.

Thats funny..... When I saw this thread had come up in my subscribed threads list, my initial reaction was "Well, hey, that one kinda stalled...."

Juuuuuust right!!!! :2thumbs::2thumbs: except for the shifter IMHO, but everything else gets perfect style points.

The 4-banger needs that gearing to run worth two pickles. The L6 has enough torque that you don't need it so badly. Not to say that a Z with 4.11 gears isnt a good idea by any means!! Just saying the KA has more of a need than the L-gata.

Hey mods... This thread has turned into a decent example of what to do to a new to me Z that has been sitting for a number of years. It *might* behoove to move it to the S30 forum and make it a sticky??? Of course, if it is deemed too "pedestrian" to be worthy of sticky status here on tech-savvy HybridZ I can dig. To the rest of the HybridZ public: keep the tips and experiences coming! This is the sort of thread that helps SOOO MANY people, but isn't always easy to find.

I bought a really nifty little 3 LED spotlight thingy at walmart a few weeks ago thats the bee's knees, and it would work GREAT as an under hood light. It has a cigarette lighter plug on it, and the cord reels up into the body of the light. Three LEDs, with two modes, one single light and then one with all three. For 6-8 bucks, you cant fight it!

??? no, he has two stock exhaust manifolds and was wondering which would be better for performance. Kind of a "pointless" question, but you can't blame him for not knowing there was no appreciable difference. It only becomes pointless when you know the truth about the answer: that the only exhaust manifolds that will really offer much performance increase are expensive Nismo or Stahl headers.

thanks for the confirmation, but isn't that diff a little too young to legally post pictures of it exxposed like that on the internet??

you are welcome. Now, how different would those ports look if they pointed opposite directions? Oh, wait, they DO. Those are sections of a P90 L28ET head. The exhaust port "slice" is simply flipped.