Daeron

Too bad the question isnt between a Fair Body and a Wide Lady... THAT would be somewhat easier....

I'm not even a huge Star Wars fan (more a Trekkie) but in high school me and my buddy made a game of finding odd phrases to translate into various languages.... Solamente sabes el poder del lado escuro!!! Wenn du doch nur die macht de dunklen seite kennen wurdest! If only you knew the power of the Dark Side! (apologies for any mis spellings in the german)

sounds great, I LOVE the Pepsi product placement in the first video might there be room for a small "hood" on the outlet? I am picturing a slight angle cut in a piece of pipe, not enough to form a complete ring but something to be centered on the bit of the pipe most exposed to the engine bay, to "persuade" the exhaust gases to go down under the vehicle rather than anywhere else. Just a thought for possible (possibly un needed, for all I know) improvement.

that is awesome, thanks!

I was just trying to explain it to jimbo, not to you.. youre among the LAST people I plan on trying to "explain" anything to

testing at 28" sucks more!!!!! its a difference of pressure, 28" is a full atmosphere or ~14 PSI IIRC.. 25" is a bit less. Comparing flow bench numbers for two different heads is comparing apples to oranges. Comparing flow bench numbers from the same head on two BENCHES is comparing apples to oranges. Flow benches are tools to use in determining the difference made in machine work on one head. Take head, flow test it, work on it, flow test it again to see if you helped or hurt performance. Comparing flow test numbers is sketchy to say the least; it is ONE very loose specification on a very complex piece of equipment (the cylinder head.)

I got a Geo Storm Hatchback for HS graduation six months after I turned 18.. it took a bit more than a year after that for me to get a REAL car, and THAT happened to be my 280Z

I fully understood the second part of your post after reading through initially. Regarding the first paragraph, I can only say that *I* wasn't the one who started the "anal retentive," I just joined it because it looked like fun Seriously, though, I also have a tendency to inspect and attend to each detail, on each leaf, of my tree so to speak.. My comments regarding the "technique" were made just to further clarify my own understanding, and educational experience. I didn't expect to hear that it was worth DOING, just pondering how it might be done. Call it a "What if I was an engineer on a Formula One team?" pipedream if you want. Thanks again for the explanations, if this thread isn't stickied yet then I am DEFINITELY bookmarking it.

Thanks for the machining lesson! I discovered the answer to my question in TimZs thread as soon as I posted it and moved on.. but the explanation is MUCH appreciated. On the subject of weighing "one half" of the spring... couldnt you tie a string in the center (or the center of gravity, or the point beyond which the spring sees no motion, unsure which) and then fasten the other end of the string to a fixed arm, and weigh the moving end? If it's a matter of finding the center of gravity, I am sure you could get at LEAST a guesstimate based on the length of coil on moving end versus length of coil on stationary end.. Obviously I am in a *bit* over my head here, but thats where my ideas seem to function best.. If I am not pushing the envelope I am not really learning, the "familiar" stuff needs hands on experience to make into real knowledge.

"more photos please" is kinda what I was getting at with my post, in an offbeat and humorous way.

I was concerned that I might be contacted from the Haynes manual legal folks about plagiarism. I may have left a couple of things out; my post was more of a persuasive bit than an encyclopedic, "tell you how to do it" post. Point is, its a breeze. Use a jack to raise and lower the thing, but you have to use muscles to get it lined up right. It helps to have a friend, but it IS doable by yourself (and I am a SMALL guy with very little upper body strength..) The friend just gives you added stability and help threading bolts; two people can have four bolts threaded and one or two snug (ie, enough to take the load off your hands and arms) rather quickly.

Hmmm, never noticed this thread.... My FIRST Z story has already been told in brief a handful of times.. My dad's 72 240Z is among my earliest memories. (I was born in december of 1980 and can recall Halloween of 83.. my dad moved to NC three months ahead of the rest of the family, sometime that November, so I have to call this my earliest memory that I can affirm the date of..) Sunday mornings, I went to church with Mom and the older brothers sometimes, but SOMEtimes I got to stay home with Dad. Those Sundays, we would ride around in the Z, drinking Borden's chocolate milk, with me going "vroom vrrom" (apparently, *I* don't recall that part, heh..) Born to be a gearhead, I guess. My INTERESTING Z story comes up in December of 2002. I got a flat tire, coasted into a local bar parking lot, and called my Dad for help. I had no spare, and incidentally, I bought my first legal beer at a bar that day. The old man showed up with an american racing rim off of a mongrel 280/240 that my brother had bought some months before. As far as we knew, these rims didn't fit properly on a Z-car without spacers.... heheheh. The rims are identical to the ones pictured here: Anyhow, he showed up with the spacer and the rim, and I got home and put a matching rim and spacer on the other side rear. Fast forward to Christmas Eve. I still have these AR rims on the back (no $$ for tires) and I go to my uncle's shop to do a rear brake job. It was the only opportunity I had to do it. The brake job was a BITCH because one rear wheel cylinder was shot and the other was near; I hobbled things together, bled the brakes, and by the time I was finished it was ten PM. Bade my uncle a good night, and started the drive home. I got about half a mile down the road when I started hearing a VERY minor clunking.. which slowly grew worse. After about 1.5 miles, I pulled a U turn, and headed back to my uncle's shop with a frown on my face. Less than 1/4 mile from the yard, there is a railway crossing... I went over it gingerly, but to no avail. The cause for the clunking became immediately apparent, as the driver's side rear wheel suddenly flew off and I was screeching along dragging on my left rear LCA!!!!!!!! I KNOW I had torqued the lugnuts down... but something must've gone awry. Fortunately I had removed the rear bumper, but not the mount. (75 280) I got my uncle's attention, he grabbed a steely spare, a jack and some lugnuts, and we jacked the car up first from the bumper shock, then jackstanded and hit the diff to lift it enough to put the other rim on. My uncle was muttering something about lugnuts that I didn't understand at the time.. but All I knew cared about was if my car could make it home safely. It did. Christmas morning, open presents, breakfast waits. My oldest brother and I (they were his rims) went a-hunting for the missing wheel, in the depths of the ghetto. (My uncle's shop is in an industrial zone RIGHT up the street from a neighborhood with the quaint name of "Federal Gardens") The wheel made it about 100 yards further than the car did, which brings to mind the amusing image of the thing bouncing and rolling down the road..... and then off into a vacant lot. In the end, my dad and my brothers (and myself) discovered that these rims take an "acorn-style" lugnut instead of the flat mag lugnuts we were used to from the standard slot mags and the ~12 spoke A/R mags I had on my car... and when the proper lugnuts were used, VOILA!! No spacer necessary!! And they even STAY TORQUED! How novel, eh?? This event, probably more than any other one thing, made me a man in a certain sense: I learned FULL FORCE exactly how fallible my Elders are!!!

One question.. You say "front to back," do you mean from the left to the right in this picture? Pivot end towards valve end and vice versa, as opposed to "top" and "bottom" in an assembled sense? Secondly this guy... Must've set you back a penny or six... Any chance that a balance with an accuracy down to .01 gram will cut it for this job? obviously the greater the precision of the scale, the greater the precision of the results... Nice write-up! Somehow I doubt it will be among the more frequently UTILIZED write-ups here, but thats just because too many people are too lackadaisical with their engine assembly. Thanks!

I have to say.. choose the Irish way!! (as bloody difficult as humanly possible) Put the Gnose on the Fair Lady!!!!!!!!!! RB it, and if you REALLY like the wide body kit, get some big fat sticky ickies on the back wheels so those flares are needed!! Then, give me the 260 chassis. I'll use it. Honest. My dad has a ford E-150 with a 351 hi output windsor in it, the van's toast but THAT engine is about the only V8 I think I would want in a Z.. (the vans been in my family since new, it was bought with Grandma's life insurance.. the van is gonna get crushed but the engine could live on, heh...)

heres what I do, even though I am FAR from actively searching for a car to buy.. I do this both for old skool subarus and datsuns. One day I took the time to go to the craigslist of each city in the state of Florida, go to the Cars for sale section and simply look up "datsun," lowercase, click on search dealers and private parties, and when I got to the results page, I bookmarked it. I put all those bookmarks in their own sub folder, and now all I have to do is open Mozilla Firefox (web browser) and go to that bookmark folder, and at the bottom there is an option to "open all in tabs." This opens the search string for every city in a separate browser tab, instantly. (well, as fast as the connection speed can handle it) I don't know if IE or other browsers have a feature similar to the "open all in tabs" that firefox gives me.. but if not, that is only ONE of about 3496861395687 reasons to switch to firefox.

I'd like to put my face between her gauges and say... B-B-B-B-BRITSKY!!

Dude, you have problems. Just because you HAPPEN to have led an AMAZINGLY interesting life which led you through Okinawa junkyards in the mid eighties, and JUST because you HAPPEN to have this mind boggling bonneville car, and JUST because you HAPPEN to have such an extensive hoard of knowledge and experience with these cars.. doesn't give you an excuse to be a weirdo. Good thing we don't need excuses here, huh? :One_flew_over_cuckoos_nest: Hows THIS: I must not fear boost. Fear of boost is the Torque-killer. Fear of boost is the little-ping that brings total piston obliteration. I will face my fear of boost. I will permit it to pass over my intercooler and through my throttle bodies. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner spark to combust its path. Where the fear of boost has gone there will be nothing. Only Torque will remain. and WOW, there were like, 300 views in between the time I posted the 20K comment and this post here...

whiskey-tango-foxtrot!?! I never realized that the postbit here doesnt display my age, even though I try to always check the checkbox that shows my age... Dude, I'm only 26... thing is, all of those years have been spent in S30 Z-cars. (okay, there were 2 280ZXs and a couple of Z31s too.. but they don't count ) SO, I am kinda sentimentally attached to certain bits of the car. The dim green lighting, surging with the RPMs is one of those things.. the older style typeface on the gauges (pre-77) is another.. I am not your top-not "HybridZ" material in every sense, heh... On a side note, I rather prefer for everyone's age to post in their little header there on the side of our posts (thats what the "postbit" is) because it kind of gives something of a litmus test on their opinions.. Age doesn't ALWAYS equate to knowledge, but I am more willing to give weight to the opinions of a 40 year old than a 20 year old, everything else being equal. I'm off to double check that I didnt leave a checkbox unchecked.

in that case, hawk the thing and try to make your money out of it!! if YOU want a track toy, to have fun with and not worry about "messing anything up," then REST ASSURED someone out there is trying to make a nice driver and is interested in your proposed swap. In any case, simply posting that fact buried deep in this thread is NOT enough exposure, heh...

Square port header onto round port head isnt as bad. Linuxon: go to http://carfiche.com/manuals022/cars/ and find the Factory Service Manual (FSM) for the 280ZX. That should include the wiring diagrams needed. That, combined with the reading material linked above (both the atlantic Z club page, and the aftermarket ECU page) should help inform you. Basically, you have the wiring from the ZX that runs ALL the EFI and ignition systems, and the "hard part" you are trying to overcome is how to plug power into all of that; the wiring diagrams available in the FSM should take care of you.

really, swapping the tranny itself is only about a two hour job, if that, for those of us who have done it before... my point is that if you want to get that extra cruising milage, i would go ahead and get the fivespeed whenever you get a chance, and swap it in. Its only a matter of bellhousing bolts, remove the shifter, cross member bolts, remove the driveshaft, and drop the tranny. "Installation is the reverse of removal."

:iagree: boxes and bags and photographs are your best friend. I have a set of 8 color sharpie markers that make RE-assembly of ANYTHING much much easier than it could be, if I failed to use the sharpies during DISassembly.

closing up on 20,000 views on this thread, holy cow. had to point that out. (i believe that the giken head and the LY head both "go without saying" in any sort of comments about "the only DOHC L-series" at this point, )

+1, I would try an actual test fit in the car if at ALL possible.. The Z-car seats you posted an image of appear to be 280 style seats. I cannot recall specifically if they will bolt into a 260, but I am 99% positive that you can bolts the later style seats into the earlier cars easily, and vice versa.. BUT I am not certain. Nor am I certain which style seats your Z came with originally... Does the 260 have seats in it now? If so, check out the mounting brackets. I can see the "ears" on the front of the seats in the picture; those are the "later" style front mounting points, and if the seats in your car have those mounting points then they ones pictured are a straight bolt-in swap. If not, then your seats are probably the type that has "studs" dropping straight downwards from up underneath the seat.. Please forgive me, I haven't worked with 240 style seats NEARLY as much as 280 style, and all the 240 stuff was at least ten years ago playing with my dad's "grey ghost" as a teenager. HTH. Those civic seats ARE mighty comfy.. very firm and supporting, but DAMN nice to sit in on the long trips, too.

Dude, you SOUND like a kid in a candy store, possibly more than I have ever been able to notice from a message board post I would say the third video linked just above was probably the best, and also add that you can't blame the wife.. she didn't have the perspective for the right tape. I cannot WAIT to hear that thing when you REALLY punch the gas...