Pop N Wood

For just a little more than your stated budget you could get a new Civic. Not much in the way of a sports car but pretty much nails all of your stated goals.

Just got an $800 spot award at work, so the LM1 order goes out this week. Good to know about grounds, but I don't think the Holley double pumper will care. Gonna be an odd duck. A carb'd LS2 crate motor with a wideband, data logging O2. Now all I need to do is find time to work on it.

I like the way you think Life has been kicking my ass this year, but eventually I hope to get this carb'd LS2 crate motor on the road. A few other links to add to yours http://www.chevyhiperformance.com/techarticles/0508ch_chevrolet_ls1_carburetor_power_increase/ http://www.superchevy.com/technical/engines_drivetrain/induction_poweradders/0409sc_gmpp/ A recent issue of I think Car Craft did a piece on pulling JY truck LS motors as low buck swap candidates. They went with the carb set up, mostly to save time, but also because the truck intakes are too tall for most vehicles. So the price of the intake and carb was not unlike sourcing a F body EFI unit. What was amazing is they took a truck motor, added the carb and intake, and with just a cam swap were pulling down over 500 HP. One word of warning, the MSD ignitions for an LS1/6 motor are NOT the same as the LS2 motor. The reluctor wheels and location of things like cam position sensors are completely different between the two motors. I had the LS1 controller for 5 months before they released the LS2 unit. Little did I know at the time I bought the motor no one made a compatible ignition unit. Also I am pretty sure the intake will be too tall for a standar JCI LS mount. I got my motor super low, and should have adequate clearance with the stock hood and a drop base air cleaner. Probably not an issue for you either way. One other thing to point out. I bought a brand new LS2 crate motor. This is a 2005 Corvette motor with the carb intake. GMPP parts rates the FI crate motor as just over 400 HP and the carb motor at 441 HP. Torque is higher across the band for the carb'd motor. maybe there is something to be said for the open plenum intake manifold over the FI runners.

Welcome to the forums. Always nice to get new members with obvious skills. I love that nice clean look. Your set up on a carb'd LS motor would give it a nice retro look. I am also glad I had nothing but good things to say about your set up. I tend to put my foot in my mouth a lot. I ended up adapting a smaller alternator I found in a wrecking yard also. My motor is too far back and too low to use the stock LS alt. Got a Denso unit from a 90 Celica, then put a 5 rib pulley off a Supra on it. I don't have access to a mill, so I have to make do with a hammer and grinder instead. Not as polished as yours but looks like it will work quite well. To answer my own question about serpentine belts, they generally put the number of ribs and belt length in the part number. So it was pretty easy to get a ball park length with a piece of string, then just get a couple of belts and find the one that fits.

You can also buy radiator caps with pressure fittings on them. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to replace the cap anyway. Z cars do have issues with weepy head gaskets. I found my head gasket leak by dumping a couple of tubes of green food coloring in the radiator, wrapping clean paper towels around the head then running with cardboard in front of the radiator to get it to heat up and pressurize. When the paper towels turned green I knew the steam leak was. Only did it when hot and under pressure. How old is your radiator? If it is more than a few years old I would bring it in and have it pressure checked in a radiator shop. And of course you have already replaced any old or bulging hoses. If I were you just dump a tube of aluminum stop leak in and see if the leak goes away. Tha is what fixed my head leak some 15 years ago now. A little bit of stop leak is not a bad thing, especially with aluminum components. GM ships their brand new crate motors with a pill of stop leak in one of the coolant passages.

I was going to buy a innovate wideband for my birthday but was choking on the cost. Looks to be money well spent.

Don't use PVC for compressed air. It is brittle and will shatter if struck with something. The broken shards will explode and don't show up on xrays. They make land mines out of PVC. Go to the OSHA site for more information. I think it is even illegal now. If you start putting compressed air into one of the open copper pipes i am sure you will quickly figure out which ones are hooked up and which ones aren't.

Thanks for posting that. Looks like it will have other applications as well.

Sounds like you need a new 5 volt reference source. From reading that link I would replace the guage in the dash.

Damn. That is a weird one.

The advantage of DOM tubing is it is stronger for a given weight. If you just want something effective and are more worried about price/availability than weight, use a slightly larger/thicker tube.

.83" thick plate? Over 3/4 of an inch thick?

Do yourself a favor and replace the clutch master cylinder at the same time you replace the slave. Otherwise you might be doing it next year.

Sounds like a voltage regulator issue http://www.jrdemers.com/280ZX/overheat/overbase.html

Put a piece of cardboard in front of the radiator? Why are you worried about it? Does it run poorly at that temp? One thing that might help is a theromostatic control valve on the oil cooler.

Buy a second car and drive that in the winter. Either that or just plan on restoring the car a second time once you finish school. Z cars and salted roads simply do not mix.

You might be able to pull them with the brake lines attached, but you would be a lazy fool to even try. It is sometimes possible to get the the strut without disconnecting the bottom control arm. Just unbolt the 3 nuts holding the top of the struts to the car, DISCONNECT THE BRAKE LINES, maybe disonnect the parking brake cables and half shafts, then just swing the top of the strut down and out to gain access. What ever you do don't try to unbolt the spindle pins. If you have to pull the rear control arms, unbolt them at the inner control arm pivot points. Oh, and go out the week before you plan to do the job and douche down every fastener you think you may have to remove with liquid wrench or WD40 or equivalent.

It was because no one liked you.

Yeah, your clutch is not disengaging. The car is doing what you would expect if you try and shift gears without pushing in the clutch.

That is because copper is never really consumed. It can be recycled from our old products. There are also alternatives to most things requiring copper. On the other hand oil takes something like a few billion years to recycle. Some day it will get so expensive we will run out. There are alternatives to oil, but right now they are simply too expensive in comparison. Gradually market forces will drive us to the cheapest form of energy. I think the only valid point the Greenpeace people have is whether we are paying the full, true cost of our oil dependency. But questions like that are probably best discussed on other sites.

I have to agree that it is a very biased article, worded to forward his argument. He does raise a lot of valid arguments concerning the hidden costs of hybrids. I have always felt hybrids are more of a gimmic than anything useful. As for batteries, I have heard there is no environmentally acceptable way to dispose of a used battery. Offering $200 for the old battery packs is a bit self serving because used batteries have good salvage worth. I imagine the Prius batteries are no exception, especially since they are large enough to make recycling cost effective. I wouldn't expect any great advances in batteries any time soon. They have been trying for decades, but unless some break through discovery is made there will only be incremental improvements. You could allieviate a lot of the worlds problems if you could discover an enviromentally safe battery with about 50 to 100 times the capacity per pound of current batteries. And yes, the known oil reserves can keep pumping at the current rate for the next 100+ years. But that is assuming the current rate will not continue to increase radically in that time. China and India are developing so rapidly. That is changing everything about the way we need to look at energy usage. They say if the average Chinese used as much energy as the average American China alone would consume something like 4 times as much energy as consumed by the entire planet.

Low pressure usually means carb type pressures, maybe 6 to 12 PSI. Fuel injection, well I don't know what pressure fuel injectors need to operate at but isn't it 35-60 PSI. Don't confuse "pressure" with high or low flow. They are two physically different pumps. One pump just keeps the reservior full. It doesn't pressurize the cannister cause the cannister has a return like back to the tank that won't allow that. The second pump, the one drawing off the cannister and feeding the engine, has to the right pump for the engine you are running. If it is carbed it will be a low pressure pump, fuel injected it will be high pressure.

My stock 240 always did fine with the stock width tires. I think I have run 195 and 205 wide tires. Some tire compounds DEFINITELY do better in the rain than others. 20 years of driving a pick up truck have proven that to me. Look for a tire with a Class A wet weather rating. I want to put a set of summer only tires on my Z, but one of the things I absolutely will look for is the wet pavement rating. Never know when you are going to get caught in the rain or hit and errant lawn sprinkler.

If you want steel Home Depot sells them. They call them flare nut fittings or JIC.

Stay away from arbitration. There is more than a passing coincidence between the words "arbitration" and "arbitrary". They will assign fault whether it makes sense or not and whether there is enough information to assign fault or not. I had a woman turn left in front of me when I clearly had the green. Although there were 200 people behind me no one stopped to give a statement, so it was my word against hers. It went to arbitration and I got assigned fault for not trying to avoid the accident. My own insurance company said they didn't agree with the arbitration and did not raise my rates, even though there was probably $15K in total damages.