Boben

Did some sheet metal work on the rear compartment floor. I made a custom dimple die to use with a hydraulic press to get some stiffness to the new floor panel. Here is the proof of concept test piece: I made the new floor pan from three pieces. The reasons are many: It would have been inpossible to fit the whole piece between the poles of my hydraulic press, I did not have a big enough piece handy and also it was quite convenient to section the pieces along the fuel cell frame rails and weld them on the rails. Work in progress: All three pieces tack welded in place: Here's the finished floor with fully welded outer edges and some long stiches along the fuel cell frame rails (Also a sneak peak at my new fuel filler neck location):

Could you post up a video of the sounds. Looks very nice, but probably loud.

The car looks super good! Can you post your ground clearance and wheel spec here: http://forums.hybridz.org/topic/125395-whats-your-ground-clearance/

I need some help figuring out the feasibility of my prop shaft concept. The distance between the transmission output shaft flange and the differential input shaft flange is 826 mm so no point in including a center bearing like the GTR shaft incorporates. There are two identical CV-joints and a single U-joint to work with. The CV-joints allow some movement along the axle where as the U-joint is obviously fixed in length. The natural way to go about this would be to put the U-joint in the transmission end and one of the CVs in the diff end as it fits right in. The problem with this approach is that the adapter flange to the transmission end will have intercepting screw location when using the U-joint. Another approach would be to use the second CV-joint at the transmission end because the holes to the adapter flange happen to align perfectly without any interceptions. The problem with this approach is that both ends of the prop shaft will allow longitudinal movement, meaning that the shaft will float in between the joints. My question is, will this floating create a problem? I did some research and found that atleast Honda S2000 AP1 has CV-joints on both ends of the prop shaft and the joints seem to be identical. Also based on some youtube videos of the shaft, they both seem to allow longitudinal movement. Here is a picture of the S2000 prop shaft. Mine would look exactly the same.

My most recent agenda with the car was to retrofit the BMW gear lever to the 240Z. Here is the BMW assembly. I took it apart, cleaned the bits and meadia blasted. As the engine sits quite near the firewall, the gear box goes well into the transmission tunnel. In order to get the shifter to stick out from original position, I cut the support arm into lenght and went at it with a TIG welder. Is this what they call a short shifter or am I missing something here? The back end of the support arm goes into a bushing in the transmission tunnel. I went and cut out the bracket and the bushing from a wrecked up E39. I cut the excess stuff out and drilled some fixing holes to the bracket. Then I bolted two M6 distance nuts on the bracket Which are welded into the tunnel. Distance nuts welded in. The support arm in place with the bracket bolted on the distance nut. The shifter lines up nice and center. I will still have to cut a piece of sheet metal in there which will be welded into the original hole and which will have a round smaller diameter hole to take the rubber seal depicted in the first picture of this post. Also the actual axle changing the gears will have to be cut to lenght and bolted on.

That AC condenser looks to be a very nice fit. Any change you could share where that can be found? Size and possibly a part number would be great. The car looks amazing, congratulations!

Time to update on some of the latest progress. With the handle of the parking brake in place, I decided to clean up the rest of the original parts associated and check out what was required to mate the GTR-32 parking brake cables to the mechanics of the 240Z parking brake. And to the photos: Here are the super dirty parts before cleaning Turned out quite nice after some cleaning and brushing. I used turpentine as the cleaning agent. I noticed that the inner diameter before the thread of a thread insert/sleeve was just right for the knob of the GTR-32 cable so I fabbed the cable puller from those. I cut out an opening where the cable will slip into the seat. The welds will prevent the seat from opening and allowing the cable to slip through. This is the fixing plate for the GTR-32 cables. The original cable fixings had to come off. New cable fixing plate welded in place and cables slipped into the seats. The puller is now closer to the lever axle. I replaced the original long bolt with a short hexagonal socket-head bolt and drilled a hole into the puller to allow for adjustment as depicted.