Doc Hawk

If you threw it in there without balancing, and you have a driveline vibration... at least you'll know why

5 year update: this clutch still feels and performs great. Car is autocrossed monthly and driven on weekends.

Threw a spare coil at it. Starts right up, over and over. Makes sense, yes? Bad coil giving too much resistance, low spark energy, not enough to start the car without a second battery but enough to keep a running motor, running... sluggish performance from inefficient combustion. I will try driving it tomorrow.

I am running MS1 Extra on a 3.57 board. F54 block with dished pistons from f54 turbo. Compression is 165 on all cyls p79 head 240z "A" grind NA cam 240sx throttle body pallnet fuel rail with 440cc injectors w/inline resistors Non egr n42 intake T04e turbo with nice intercooler Once started, the car runs and drives, although it feels like a 140 HP car off boost - enough to get out of its own way, but not quick. On boost, it feels about as quick as my old 2.8L NA. It will only rev to about 5000-5100 RPMs before it just doesn't want to rev anymore. It is very hard to start *unless I use jumper cables or a charger*. The battery is an Optima Yellow Top with 13.6 volts, and it has plenty of juice - it can turn that starter very strong for a loooong time, over and over. The battery tests fine. I have adjusted pulse widths (2.0ms), warmup wizard, cranking enrichment, after start enrichment, first start enrichment, and everything else I can find. Nothing seems to affect startup, hot nor cold. It is not flooding (checked plugs, and had settings that erred on the side of lean, too). Could the hard start and the low power output be related? Bad coil? Are their some grounds that may be suspect? Thanks for any help. David

Guy had the heads done, throttle body, and port matching up top. Got it home from the shop and his unemployed dad said, "son, let me show you how to drive that." Romped on it, got the rear end loose, locked up the brakes, and next the car is doing a Dukes of Hazard jump over a center median. Front frame is tweaked, front bodywork is a loss, but the built motor and 6-speed are flawless

Cygnus, for those of us running other versions of MS, a few screenshots or another video file of your tune would be much appreciated.

Nice work! Really clean integration. It gives the widemouth look you were looking for. Regarding your charger, it's not the drag you should be worried about, it's the lift. I race these cars and if you aren't pretty specific about combating front end lift, they get very uncomfortable in a high horsepower car.

I'll trade you a good shape console for those Techno Toy bump spacers. Shipped or you can come down to San Diego to do the swap. I could meet you in, say, Oceanside or Carlsbad depending on the timing.

Welcome back, Ben! Great talking to you today. She's in good hands. (And thanks for the photos).

Just a clarification on ownership: Yetterben is in WI, and sold it to a guy who had it shipped out here to the West Coast. That guy had it for perhaps 6 months before he gave up on it. Comparing the photos Ben posted to what I received, I think much of the strangeness that I found was done by the intermediate guy. Ben did struggle for a long time to get his maps to run smoothly and reliably (and he blew up two motors). Having added spark control, I can say with confidence that other folks' input in his threads was accurate: 20 degrees fixed advance across the board does not make for a well tuned motor. It seems very happy now.

I have a very clean 73 shell in San Diego. I bought it before I had a use for it because it was the cleanest unrestored S30 I'd ever seen. Only real rust on the car is in the lower right corner of the hatch window, which can either be repaired or you can replace the whole hatch for under $100. The lack of rust is remarkable, but just as impressive is how straight all the panels are when you look down the sides of the car: It would be an awesome start for someone who is looking for the cleanest and least molested beginning for a solid project. Work on the car immediately instead of working on rust.

I emailed you. I have a super-straight '73 roller I have been saving for something special, but I have two other S30's to finish in front of it so I need to stop hoarding (see this pic?)... I can sell the silver car. It has blue doors on it now, which are still straight and rust-free. The silver car was originally destined to have a V8 put back into it (one was previously installed and running), but my car priorities have changed and I'm now working on my green turbo 73, then the blue 72 shown above will be getting an LT1. So this one is now extra. Can come as a bare roller, or you can pick a nice L28 or V8 from my collection. Manual transmission to match. Many upgrade parts also available, all depending on what you want to spend. I'm in San Diego. Hoping for something close to $1000 for the shell. I am definitely willing to talk about a partial or full trade for the kind of things you mentioned in your post. Cash is not critical. It is the second most straight, rust-free unrestored project Z I have ever seen (and as you can tell, I have seen a lot). Check your inbox!

Here's my first Turbo Z car build thread. I've helped build one in my garage, but only as a helper. It's different when it's yours. I purchased a 73 S30 with 90K miles in non-running, mostly assembled condition for $2000 this spring. It came with the following: ZX F54/p79 w/new Ishino head gasket installed, 160 psi across the board Dished turbo pistons T3/T4 turbo .63 /.60 IC piping in 2.5" and eBay intercooler Nice BOV (forgot which brand) NA cam N42 non egr intake 440cc Supra injectors Pallnet fuel rail +1 extra 240sx throttle body w/spacer + 1 extra spacer ZX I/R alternator MegaSquirt 1 on 3.57 board 3 row aluminum radiator + 1 extra Electric slim fan + 1 extra 3.90 rear end 5 speed trans AEM wideband sensor & digital gauge Laptop with Tunerstudio All new urethane bushings except the diff mount and tc rods Rear strut tower brace Spindle pins replaced with aftermarket Fair interior (no holes, nothing conspicuously missing) 1 year old quickie spray Mopar 70's Sublime Green body (jams and interior remain yellow), flat black vented 280Z hood BRE spook airdam and MSA spoiler Here are a few pics of the car from earlier days... much the way I received it, but prior to disassembly. Problems and Progress Turbo and piping were out of the car, long block was in place, and a few turbo parts were missing. I had to lean on the prior owner a bit, but eventually all the parts made it along with the car. Took me about five afternoons of parts shopping and wrenching to design a new intake and piping system and install it, get the turbo in correctly, and sort out the oil lines and fittings. I went with 2.5" for the intercooler piping, using some of the original pieces. The previous owner had set up the intercooler piping to go from the turbo directly to the IC, then looped back across the radiator before entering the throttle body. I didn't like that because it took the air you'd just worked so hard to cool, and then ran it most of the length of the radiator almost in contact before getting to the motor. Now, the piping goes from cold air ram intake in the front of the car to the compressor, then out across the radiator with a standoff gap, then into the IC and straight out into the intake. The MegaSquirt install was kludged in there with wires leading everywhere and all possible shortcuts taken (bare wires stuffed into fuse clips to piggyback off stock fusebox for all EFI power leads, for example). Worse, it was running fuel only, with the distributor physically locked at about 20 degrees of advance all the time. No tables, no spark control. Very odd - I could not figure out how that would work (more on this later). For a while, I considered running the distributor locked like that, and adding tables. This would have worked according to The Internet, but I didn't feel like messing with it. I completely rewired the MS unit and the EFI wiring to run through three relays, and swapped in an optical '83 turbo ZX distributor enabling the MS to control fuel and spark. It's funny, looking at that last sentence, how easy it is to condense and trivialize many, many painful days of searching, soldering, troubleshooting, configurating, and kicking rocks into one tidy sentence). The car now runs on MegaSquirt and I am in the process of tuning it with the TunerStudio automatic tuning feature. One thing that was strange is that, even though the prior owner was not running spark control, he had the ignition control module (which solders into the MegaSquirt board). Not sure why he had that but didn't use it. There was also signs of soldering as if he had hooked it up, but it was not hooked up to work when I got it. There is a chunk cracked out of about 20 degrees of the water pump belt guide in the harmonic balancer. That'll need replacement. Looks like someone bottomed out the block or ran into a rock. The front cover lower edge is chipped or cracked, causing an oil leak. That'll need replacement, and it's an annoying task. Guess a timing chain kit is in my future. Heater core was bypassed but the coolant line was looped from the back of the head to the outlet hose, allowing coolant to bypass the back of the head. The prior owner suffered from the common misconception that looping is required, but it causes overheating (more on that later, too). Blocked off the lines and all is well. Coming Full Circle As is often the case, this Z has come full circle to HybridZ. As I was searching for solutions to some of the roadblocks I encountered with MegaSquirt, I came across posts from a guy named Yetterben, who has this avatar: Dude, that's my car! http://forums.hybridz.org/index.php/topic/89832-the-start-to-something-awesome-2/ So I've enjoyed several hours of reading Ben's posts, looking at his trials and tribulations as well as his victories. This has been a huge help - with the benefit of documentation, many of the kludges and rinkydink bandaids one finds on a used project car now have stories behind them, and they make some sense. Those head scratchers you always find now have answers to the "why in the world did he do that?" question. Next up is building an exhaust, hooking up the ebrake, and installing some seat belts so I can go drive and tune this baby! It's nice to have a Z in an engine configuration I haven't built before. I have been on a quick cruise, and the turbo is no slouch. It makes lots of white smoke at the rubber end! More soon...

Tidying up this thread... I looked into running the NA dizzy with the mechanical and vac advance locked out, but decided I wanted to go tried and true so I converted to an 83 optical distributor and am running that.

Just to put the solution on this thread's second half (after the car was running), the problem turned out to be the fuel lines. The stock return line was too small for the amount of fuel being put through the system, so fuel pressure varied throughout the RPM range. Going to a larger return line solved the problem.