Tony D

Broken Skirt=detonation Spun Rod Bearing and Broken Skirt on same Piston=DEFINATE detonation! The things break due to excessive, uneven loadings in the combustion chamber. You split the rods on the main beam when it detonates if you are making enough power and there is a flaw or stress riser---generally if you split a rod, you break a skirt AND usually the rod bearing spins because the oil wedge is jumped and the bearing is pushed hard metal-to-metal.

You wonder where these myths come from...like 'needing' a rebuild at 100K miles... Oh, waitaminit...those are applicable ot AMERICAN iron for like...the last 50 years! It all makes sense to me now! No, unlike an SBC the Datsun came with the bottom end constructed from forged components---cranks and rods. Nothing cast there save the pistons.

It becomes obvious to me some people harbor some resentment at being 'caught' ... or their friends being 'caught' and can't understand the root cause behind it. In Germany, you have you car keys on you and you're intoxicated...you're BUSTED! They don't have the problems we do. And they drive a heluva lot faster than we do as well. Perhaps it has to do with competence and society that pressures RESPONSIBILITY. This is opposite of the culture in the USA, and that's why we got the laws we do...

It's also been shown that the SLOWEST 15% of the drivers cause the MAJORITY of the accidents out there. So 'speed' can be fast or slow---what is your point? Sure, shoot them at the roadside as well. In a couple of months you will have nice clear driving roadways with people who are polite AND RESPONSIBLE. Laws are written because people are NOT RESPONSIBLE. Don't complain about the laws, complain about the ARSEHOLES that precipitated the encroachment of freedoms on everyone else. I offer a cure for the ROOT CAUSE: THE INDIVIDUAL TRANSGRESSING. I've never been for group punishment. I offer a solution to that root cause of irresponsible individuals: Crash the Car, be found with alcohol on the breath: BANG! Impound the car, sell it at auction the proceeds to go towards REAL driver's education. My stance on this is well known. People who drink and drive are acting irresponsibly. Everyone thinks they can handle it. Why take that risk? I'm sure we're all for commercial airline pilots with no alcohol limitations. Guys in the Nike Missle Siloes. City Bus Drivers... Hey, do what you want on the road, you can handle it. You're a man! HEEE MAN! Let me show you how much I can drink and still stand upright! AND DRIVE! I never said 'safety at all costs' and it goes counter to everything I have said in the past: I want to be able to drive my 66 Beetle with no air bags, no passive restraints, no 5mph bumpers---BUT IT CAN'T because of groupthink nannystate legislation. I don't propose legislation, I propose EXTERMINATION. Expermination of those irresponsible individuals who weave, cross the centerline, and when stopped smell like a brewery. Texting? Maybe mobile rape squads by trained dogs or something like they did in South America, unless they off someone then BANG! I got no issue with eliminating people who are so stupid they cause another's death due to their irresponsibility. It will make other THINK LONG AND HARD about what they are doing, and if the consequences to THEM equal that to the innocent bystanders they can kill...maybe that is better for everyone involved. I loose no sleep over a drunk who kills himself. It's a tragedy they take others with them, though. I would gladly facilitate their suicide solution. Wine is fine, but whiskey's quicker!

Curiously there is zero tolerance in GERMANY and their drunk driving rate of deaths is far lower than ours. Same in Japan where business drinking to the point of vomiting in the gutter is accepted. Curously Americans have an uncanny knack to kill one another when drinking. Personally I'd execute them at the roadside and send a bill to the next of kin. I've seen all the arguments before "Oh I'm just fine." (CRASH!) Be a man, have a beer, take a cab. How hard is that? I don't get it, I doubt I ever will. Why would anybody take an imparing compound and then operate machinery, drive a car... Why risk it? Off youself, fine---but you could kill other people. That someone callously disregards it out of some misguided machismo has never made any sense to me. Has nothing to do with the cops, the laws, or MADD. It has everything to do with personal responsibility. If drunk idiots didn't drive after drinking, there wouldn't be a law forbidding it. Think about it for a second. Really think about it.

Oh, I've done that EXTENSIVELY but I'm swamped at work now doing some temperature profiles on compressor gearcases exhibiting an oil whip phenomenon... My head is so full of those figures now I can't remember specifics from my surveys. Driving to Albequerque for the convention, and then again to Kingston Ontario I did extensive measurements, including using thermocouples under hood, in the coolant flow, and at various other places. It's how I realized Atmospheric Aerosols and decrease in UV results in a lower temperature thermal layer at radiator level (which explains why a car in SoCal or Arizona overheats on an 85 degree day, and the same car runs cooler on a 100 degree day in Iowa---thermal layer in SoCal is 120+ while in Iowa it's only 103!!!) There is a reason there is a tank on the other end---it mixes good cooled fluid with 'poorly' cooled fluid. You can use that IR gun to find plugged tubes from calicum plugging, etc... It DOES show exactly where it's working for exchange and where it's not. You should know better than to make a statement like that! <EDIT> Oh, and to BJ's comment: somewhere around here I got a thermalgraph taken in 1992 by BEST (Bivens Energy Scanning & Testing Service) when they came to my plant to shoot our switchgear and MCC Buckets. He had JUST gotten the new camera (no more filling it with LN2!) and was up to take photos of anything and print them out (New kid with a multiple-thousand dollar toy!) I got him to shoot our building, most of the operators (an myself) as well as my cars headers, radiator, and engine!

By no load what does that mean? No fan and freewheeling the motor? That, I find an odd statement indeed! Especially restricting flow decreases load, and increasing flow increases load---you got that one backwards! Put a line amp clamp on your fan and observe the amps, the cover the radiator with some cardboard---you can almost hear the motor speed up. Cavitation of flow results in a precipitious drop of amperage. Amps=Flow Running with no flow across the fan, the motor should exhibit a much lower amperage than when spinning a fan and moving air.

Is this Rocket Science?

Graduating Class of 134 souls. By the end of graduation summer there was 119...I thought of it as 'natural selection' at the time. Even the two guys offed when the driver survived. He had to live with something he never contemplated. I contemplated it, so either I'm overthinking as a teenager, or I've always been an hardcore arsehole on some subjects. Probably both. I'm still here, so I must have done something right, and those who aren't didn't. This of course exempts Duane (Spinal Meningitis at age 19) and Carmen (Cancer at 18) from the above list of Darwin's Deciples. (three of whom, in a dense fog, decided that the centerline of M55 was the warmest place around to take a nap. The 18 Wheeler Gravel Truck Driver that went 'thump-thump-thump' over the black articles in the middle of the road at 5AM probably still has guilt about that to this day... Fog as in atmospheric haze, not the state of mind they were in when they made that decision which can also be described as 'in a dense fog'...)

Try closing the main contactor before the PWM is complete. It should jump the fan to full speed before the driver circuit is running at maximum capacity. This is how industrial soft-starters work, though usually the SCR's will take it all the way up to speed and then use MUCH reduced size contactors to bypass the VSD ramping circuit. In the old days they had full size contactors...someone figured out if it's up to speed or near to it, you don't need a big inrush capability just maximum amperage holding. As for the comment 'coverage is more important than CFM'---I'll call BS on that one! I had twins at X CFM on mine, and it overheated. I replaced it with a larger single leaving FAR more uncovered surface and it cooled just fine with X+ CFM. Later I went back to a dual fan setup for 'staging' of the fans and kept the same CFM as the single...still no problems to date and that was years ago! You can cover the entire radiator, if that fan does not move sufficient air it WILL overheat. If you don't cover the entire radiator, but have sufficient CFM it WILL NOT overheat. Been there, done that. Like BJ says: CFM=AMPERES no way about it. If someone advertizes a 5000CFM fan that runs on 5amps my advice is call BS on it and steer clear!

That shave job looks a bit heavy. About 17#? The bottom one looks like the Tomei or Kameari CrMoly, and is a nice flywheel. It is NOT LIGHTENED, that is the way it's made! You can't shave a stock wheel down to 9-10# simply because the cast material won't support the stresses. The CrMoly unit is forced billet with HUGE strength compared to the stock flywheel's cast material. That allows cross-sections to be thinner with equal strength. Cost is due to its what it costs. Shipping is not that much. If you look at the local price in Yen, you realize the price isn't that bad at all. I have several of those, and they are pretty intense if you aren't a good smooth clutch-shifter person.

Understand the reason for 5mph bumpers was to keep the lights and signals intact when in a parking-lot collision. The resultant liability introduced for automakers by this government nanny-state edict resulted in grossly overdesigned bumpers for a while. Look at the bumpers on a 77 Impala, and a 77 280Z. Not much difference. Standardization of design by engineers (ugh!) Most grey-market companies federalizing the non-USA models simply welded pipe into the stock skinny bumper and showed 'engineering calculations' that it reinforced it enough to protect the lights. It did not, however conform to the mandate that the bumper return to it's stock location within 30 (seconds?) minutes. Hence the shock-absorbers... There really is no way to take a car pre-73 and make it act like a 280Z. The 73 did have 2 1/2mph bumpers, and the early 74's had narrow bumpers that met the interim 2 1/2 standard with the return to stock position mandate (add distance, mount on shocks.) What you are MISSING here is that the body is a DISPOSABLE STRUCTURE. You DO NOT WANT something that will remain intact. The fact of the matter is when you hit something you will break the car, and likely it will be rendered useless. ALL bumper standards revolve around reducing the incidents of loosing signal and main illumination in parking-lot low speed fender benders. In higher speed crashes (defined as above 5mph, even though currently there is no 5mph bumper standard, they have returned to 2.5 mph standard so the conformal bumpers with good aerodynamics and ligher weight can remain on the car to help the producers of product jump through the other governmental nanny state dictate of CAFE...) the body is the deforming crash structure. The goal here is OCCUPANT SURVIVABILITY, the survivability of the early 240Z in a 40+mph frontal offset crash is shown in my previous photos. It looks decent enough. Had some internal things been changed there would have been less injury, but given the severity of the imapact what the driver sustained was very minor. The biggest thing about surviving that crash was THE DRIVER PUT HIS SEAT BELT ON BEFORE LEAVING HIS PARKING STALL! Had he not done that, chances are real good he would have ended up on the hood of the vehicle that hit him, or in the middle of the intersection after being flung out of his seat and thrown out of the vehicle while it spun in mid-air. I have seen this firsthand on the 60 freeway where a passenger made like superman as he exited a blazer's windshield (his fists punched through it seemed) and was flung out into traffic lanes while the truck did a pirrouette on it's front bumper before rolling several times (in his direction, I was ready to look away should it land on him, but ultimately it did not). The driver (who chose to wear her belt) was still in the seat a little bumped up and bleeding. He was in the fast lane with a rager indicating a severe spinal injury (I watched him bend over and his nose and upper maxillary was broken when he kissed his own knees on impact). Again, the biggest safety factor is the driver. Wear your seat belt and AVOID accidents. That is cheaper, and IMO probably the MOST EFFECTIVE WAY to make a 240Z safer! Seat belts being in a car doesn't make it safer. WEARING THEM DOES. Passive restraints in a car doesn't make it safer if the driver then ASSUMES he's invincible because he has airbags, and drives like an idiot. Statistics are starting to prove this out. It was first suggested to me in the readings from the old Hippy John Muir and his idiot book for the VW. As I age, the more of his sage advice comes back to haunt me in my own thoughts. People are stupid, and people die. Perhaps we shouldn't be protecting people from themselves through governmental mandates and oversight. Ultimately this seems counterintuitive to the best interests of the human race...

"Most of us take off the heavier 260/280 bumpers. How much difference do those really make in a higher speed accident?" 70+ mph into the back of a free-rolling Dodge Neon going ZERO mph? A LOT OF DIFFERENCE! It was the difference between wrapping the entire engine into the firewall due to no absorption and spreading of the impact (look at the 240 I posted earlier) and being able to simply jerk the front end back straight and continue racing for another 7 hours. I don't know about you, but hitting a stationary car full-rearend at 70mph is pretty high speed in my book. And the bumper was not damaged! It sprung back out. And in fact was the anchor point for my F250 to jerk the front end back relatively straight. The radiator was the crush-zone that absorbed the final bits of energy. Into a solid reinforced concrete wall at 70mph? Maybe a moot point there. But in practical application: taking those off is colossally stupid from a safety standpoint!

Oh, and BTW, the interplay between a KA engine harness is not really that much. I would posit you will be able to get what signals you want into and out of the engine bay with probably six or seven wires at most. And they won't really be more than ignition (key-on) power, battery power, interface with the fuel pump wire, ignition signal to the tachometer and maybe some relays thrown in there. Really the engine is separate from the body wiring altogether. If a speed switch is needed, that's in the dash for the EGR on the 73 (speedo) and with some electrical knowledge you can alter the circuit to actuate at a speedo pulser output someplace other than 45mph.

The dash harnesses are almost identical. I refit the dash in my 73 Fairlady using the FSM from a US Spec 240Z a WIRING DIAGRAM WILL NOT DO IT ALONE! What you have to do it compare the wiring CONNECTORS, the functions will be the same respective to their position in the connector, but the colors will differ somewhat. Like the combo switch for the lights---there is an extra wire in the three pin connector in the dash harness from the turn signal on the Fairlady that is not there on US Models. That wire is actually in the harness in the US dash, just not in the US Combo Switch--it's for 'flash to pass' on the headlights and is a simple ground through the button in the turnsignal stalk for the FZ (some Fairlady Z's...) Same for all the rest. My harness was cut like you wouldn't believe. Most of these morons don't cut more than 5 or 6 inches off the wires so you can graft the ends on from a US dashboard (or buy the connectors from Vintage Connections) and restore that dash harness to like-new condition. But a wiring diagram leaves you in the dark. You have to know where in the connection each colored wire goes---THAT DOES NOT CHANGE. Once you figure out which connector holds what color wire, it's a simple matter of going onto the wiring diagram and changing the color codes for future reference. This goes for all the subharnesses, actually. Why do I say to do this? Because I didn't and will have to do it again when I troubleshoot some things that have come up after 15 years of owning the car. If it'd done it then, I'd have a laminated copy of the wiring diagram under the spare tire cover like I have on all the other US Market Cars I have! Good Luck, it's not rocket science, just tedious!

" More often than not a not-at-fault accident just means legally you weren't liable even though clearly you played your part (it takes two to tango)." Someone claiming to be in SoCal posting that boggles my imagination! In the land of Illegal-Alien Swoop-and-Squat Predators I find that an offensive comment---ESPECIALLY since I have been a swoop-n-squat target! Sometimes (and in more cases that you would think, especially in larger metro areas) it really ISN'T your fault, and in more cases than you think, it's outright felonious activities bumping up the accident statistics! Curiously, 'Swoop-n-Squat' is unheard of in some states with No-Fault Insurance. Meaning you get into an accident, your insurance pays for your damages. And the other party pays for theirs. The Insurance Companies work out subrogation of the claims---it ceases to be an income source for the poor who can afford to buy a car at lein sale and then go cruising the interstates looking for a commercial vehicle that has signs on it that signify "WELL INSURED CORPORATE VEHICLE VICTIMIZE ME AND YOU WILL WALK AWAY WITH AT LEAST $50K" The biggest safety device in the vehicle is the driver. Period. Drive like everybody is out to get you and chances are you will go quite a while before someone succeeds in getting you!

if someone has one, send it to me as well... I have an EARLY one (actually the whole S30 Manual 1971 vintage),but not the later one. The differences are not really substantial, and not a lot will interface with the body harness on such a swap anyway. Using the US FSM should be close enough to figure out where power is located, and generally where it's coming from---what more do you need?

The three speed had different pressures, modulator, and extra clutch elements/wider bands to handle the torque. Looking at the SDS in the Nissan manual would tell you. I think I have one, I'll have to look.

The area of the radiator is approximately 1ft X 2 ft. That means 2 Sq Ft. At 60mph, thats 5280 F/M, meaning 2Sq Ft X 5280 F/M=10,560 cuft/Min Slow your car down to 30 mph, and below that you start to see temperatures rise on a 100F day, so my assumption is that a potential flow of 5,280 CFM would support the car at speeds/heat input similar to driving at 30mph on a hot day. Going by that rule, I have not had an electric fan that failed to cool the car, or cycle in stop-n-go traffic on even the hottest desert days (110-120F!)

I find using SMS is difficult as the repetitive hitting of the button to properly spell words takes a while. I'm getting good at it, and I'm off to buy my first touchscreen phone tonight (Nokia Clone here in Shanghai...) so I can 'stylize' (use a stylus...) and use proper words in my SMS's. (Texts to the uninitiated.) Yes, I spell out 'see you later' or 'see ya!' I do NOT use 'C U L8R'... Can't grasp its nuances. Don't want to grasp the nuances. QWERTY boards are becoming standard, use them. Even on the phone! DAMNIT!

Do you know if that applies equally to the Z31T Tranny as well? That would indeed have the same internal beffier components like the L28ET (FSM can check I guess, extra clutch disc in low, higher line pressures, different modulator...) I may have found something worthwhile in a Z31 Automatic! I got two of the Maxima Trannies, but if I can go with the Z31T by just changing the bellhousing and torque converter to the one from the Maxima (or the Z31 Torque converter) that's cool by me! Would make the conversion of the 510 Wagon easier...

Or better, maxima bellhousing, and Mitsubishi Starion Transmission (more clutch packs for a dedicated turbo-application along with modulator set for pressure, etc...just like the ZXT Three Speed, only with the o.d.) Same tranny, different bellhousing/torque converter and can't recall but maybe output spline on the the tailshaft... all easy enough to swap. The transmission unit itself beefier though.

SEE! SEE!

Ray, you are SO CLOSE with this statement! You have just misphrased it slightly. You realize in your statement that you have a "Pertronix Pointless Ignition" Which really I take to mean "Pertronix Pointelss Coverted Distributor"... Really anybody using a Converted Pointless Distributor is close to realizing a Distributor is Pointless. They are not the same thing... You have a Pointless Distributor, now realize a Distributor is Pointless. COP my man...COP!

This is not really true. The needle and jet size can limit the flow of the fuel ultimately, but a single SU with a 0.100" jet can support FAR more horsepower than you will ever see on your L24. The stock Datsun SU would support a Crown Turbo Kit to about 12psi. Using a Jaguar 2" having a 0.125" jet would support the kit to well over 20psi. Do the math on the horsepower. The thing is the fuel pumps are weak, and when yo ustart sucking hard on CV carbs the float bowl level drops. Put the site gauge into the float bowl in the little hex plug provided and do a dyno run---watch what happens to your float level. Realize that a high pressure pump (something that can push 20psi) and a backpressure style fuel system can really help with keeping your float bowl level proper under hard load and high rpms. Nissan came out with the flat tops because the mandate for idle emissions. it separated the idle from the main system in order to run a proper power taper on the main system, and put a finely controlled metering block in for use at idle. The power valve was supposed to work for interim 'accelerator pump substitution' by richening the transition so you didn't have a flat spot off-idle and bog. If the power valve takes a dump, you go rich. Really you can retaper the needle at the transition point to go rich when coming off the idle circuit, and still have proper AFR up to the top of the RPM range if you run a flat top. But I digress...