Tony D

If every school in the US graduated every student NOW, there would still be a shortage of Engineers. The 'cookie cutter kids' are exactly what most industries need: people with a sound technical theory background to teach a business to and cultivate long-term. Unfortunately lack of hands-on skills limit their usefulness, and the Colleges cultivating a mythology that with a degree you won't get dirty gets a lot of these noobs into a very dangerous trap. I have been on jobs with noobies who were absolutely shocked that they had to touch a wrench or hang over a hot steam turbine for 4 hours of a day... and who quickly quit quietly soon thereafter. Someone has to do failure analysis in a lab, and someone has to do it in the field. And when they can't figure it out in the lab....well...someone's going to stand over a hot steam turbine for 4 hours of a day! My son is now loving the 'Show up the first day and see if someone is a no-show' to get off all his waitlisted classes. He was waitlisted on everything, he might get his math next Wednesday. If he only gets one class, I sign him up and pay for a correspondence course that will keep him busy. Something related, or not. But you got to keep at it or it's hell geting back into it after the break!

For those US Citizens wondering 'do I need a Visa' to go here, check out this page: CIBT Quick Check Easier than wading through the state departments webpage and paragraphs of bureaucratese...

You work cheaply Randy! 1000 hours of fabrication and labor on that kind of project would be 5X that (minimum) were I to take it on... $100 an hour, 8 hours a day, 20 days a month, six months of the year... Most shops doing quality work would be at least $50 an hour, and that's still 2X what you would charge. Watch out, you're undercutting yourself!

Actually not it's not. Whenever Frank quits TALKING and actually ships a container THIS direction, I plan on snagging one of the European LPG conversions. They have a nice tank that fits where the spare went, and is dual-fuel allowing running on petrol, and online swap to LPG. The best thing is that the car I was in with it (1979 280ZX!!!) was using MEGASQUIRT as the ECU! IMPCO carbs make for a quick and easy installation, but EFI technology is not that prohibitive. It's just finding compatible donor vehicles to source many of the parts secondhand. Anything new is expensive. An HKS surge tank was over $1000 new, but can be hand now for 1/4 the price. It's just a matter of 'trickle down' time to happen.

When you realize in the JDM the hexagonal spacers were threaded, so they don't fall off, installing/removing a seat becomes a breeze! Also, their JDM cars had 'dual mounts' meaning another set of holes about 2" forward of where the US Market Seat Mounts are---plenty of access even for my fingers. Their JDM studs were also quite a bit longer to accomodate a BIG stack of those spacers underneath to 'boost up' the vertically challenged domestic consumer. This goes hand-in-hand with some other maintenance procedures I've done. They are particulary onerous on a US Car (think anything with the pedal cluster upper pieces) but are a BREEZE on the RHD models. The last set of seats I did, I simply cut the damned sheetmetal stringers out of the car, and bolted through a reinforced section of the floorboard directly. I will do the same on the Shark Car, as it's front seat mount was pretty much ripped through due to excessive upper body inertia coupled with 265/50's out back and and heavy turbocharged right foot!

I had a 5MGE.... yeech! Never again. Blew a head gasket and channelled the head to the point of uselessness almost immediately. If you like those splayed-cover heads, the unobtanium unfinished PAECO-GOERTZ head is what you desire. My photos of this SanDiego Swap-Meet Find float about the internet. Comes with the jigs to machine it, and a full set of blueprints (hand-drawn!) I wonder if that guy ever sold it... I realize now my photos of that head date from around 1999/2000. Saw it on the back of a truck as a guy tried to sell it for $$$ at the local Z-Car Club Meeting. I don't even want to think what he paid for it at the Swap Meet. I didn't even want to ask! I know it would depress me... Thinking about it, that head would be wicked-bitchen with my Hillborn Methanol Injection Setup on it!

We don't have an emoticon to express a guy in a trenchcoat hiding (nay, suspiciously and conspicuoulsy concealing) something. That is about how I feel about that thing! Come to think of it... it's 'packed in' up top in the yellow car. Man, I got so much crap I've packed away in storage... I should look through my documents, his original invoice may have that information on it. But finding time to get to do that may be tricky. We actually met at one of the early MSA events, and his...er... "Manner" towards someone asking questions drew me to him. After that the price came down considerably. Anybody who dealt with Don will know what I'm referring to! That I was drawn to it out of curiosity is probably indicative of my downfall at another site...

Commonwealth of nations usually lets you in with a stamp, or in many cases you get a visa on arrival when you pay a fee. Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Morocco, UK, Holland, France, Belgium, Spain, Germany (hell, the whole of the EU nowadays) don't require a specific visa for entry. India: Visa. Indonesia: Visa (available on arrival for US citizens, $25 thankyouverymuchpleasecomagain!) China: Visa. Technically most of the places you go you are getting an entrance and exit visa, it's incorporated as a stamp. But some countries require you to get the visa and permission to travel to the country beforehand. Now that I have a new passport with all the neat biometric crap incorporated, I'm thinking of getting my 10 Yr Indian Visa... Talk about a stupid requirement if you issue one for 10 years WHY BOTHER AT ALL? Just take my money every time I arrive like Indonesia does. Then you can raise the fees each year and rape me for progressively more and more... But I digress...

5 angle refers to the seats and making an ersatz 'radius' to flow. Working the valve is a different procedure, this is not part of a '5 angle' valve job. 15, 30, 46, 60, 75 were the cuts I 'think' are commonly used on a 5 angle. The 1 degree difference between the 45 face cut of the valve face and seat is what gives your contact point to seal the valve. You then make two cuts below and above that to 'smooth radius' the seat. There are mechanical radius cutters that will do similar things now without multiple angles.

YEP!

it was listed around 99K US$, though with some of the bits missing that the car is missing, that could add to the price for restoration, as well as lower the price for acquisition. This isn't the most expensive prospect out there, and it's mainly because of the stuff that's missing!

Perhaps the fact that at -40 there is no pressure in the tank to run the car and you have to start it on gas, get the water up to temp, and then use that to heat the propane to get it up to pressure so you can run on it! Sorry, it had to be said. For a summer cruiser it might work fine. But propane sucks when it gets cold. And Lethbridge...well...it ain't Cancun come February! (Former Propane Vehicle Owner)

The expedite service from the US Passport Service usually comes in a FEDEX or UPS RED letter envelope, more than enough weight allowance to send both passports back. When I picked mine up, it was in a standard business envelope like you would send a letter in...no way in HELL my old passport would go in there and be mailed for ONE stamp! I use CIBT (www.cibt.com) for most of my passport stuff. I just happened to be in town, and it got me out of the office and driving the Z across town two times in a week (drop it off monday afternoon, pick it up wednesday after 11AM!) No payment extra, just gave them an Orbitz intinerary that said I was flying on Friday and you go to the front of the line! To drop it at CIBT's office on Wilshire would be insane for that service---they are literally right up the street! But when I need a specific visa, I can drop it at CIBT, and they will fedex it back to wherever I am. Hell, I can download all the visa stuff from their website,and fedex it to them...they fedex it back. Watch out for Nigeria, though. PRINT the first page of the Google Docs application, you have a number there that doesn't show up ANYWHERE ELSE during the process after you press "submit"----and guess what? If you don't have that number, there is no way for them to access your passport visa application and (of course) you must fill it out again, and pay another $127. Even in the bureaucracy....the Nigerians got a neat little scam going! Forewarned is fore-armed!

Nope, I did mine in person at the Passport Agency Los Angeles and when I was at the window, both my old passport and new passport were in the envelope. The old one has two holes punched in the I.D. Page. Same thing happened with my emergency passport renewal in Bangkok last September (needed 6 months past arrival to get into Malaysia), got my original back with two holes punched in the I.D. Page. That was done at the passport window of the US Embassy in Bangkok. Did you use a passport service, and did you pay for the expedited mail service? Many times an old passport (if renewed early) will still have valid Visas in it, to be used as proof to get them applied to your new passport. I got all three of mine, the only one I don't have is the original one the Military Issued back in the 80's. They kept that one.

No, it just takes putting it in the SUN machine and spinning it up to speed after each mod..."it's easy!"

Dang, I got excited there for a minute and thought someone snaked in behind my e-mails and had snagged S30-00002 out from my offer! You merely got a second Z-Car, you didn't actually "acquire S30 #2". Gave me a start, that did. Whew!

That may be the R380GP engine. It's got a thermostat housing like the S20, and it's obviously running Lucas-Style Slide Valve Mechanical Fuel Injection. It is NOT an L-28. What IS applicable to this thread is the water manifold in a high specific output engine: each cylinder has it's own take-off so that all water flows in the bottom, up through the head and combustion chamber, and out the top to a common return manifold. The "International Speed Record" is clipped off the bottom left of the page, and I suspect this would shed more light on the origina or usage of hte engine if it weren't obscured.

Don Potter is dead, and you ARE NOT getting my recurved E12-80! I don't even want to try to explain what he did (I have a clue by what he explained to me...), but I get stock timing (10 initial) and have a 36 total at that point, WITHOUT factoring in vacuum advance. I think it adds another 7 or 8 degrees to that total under cruise conditions. It's the only car I have that I can still run 87 octane in during the summer that does not ping under heavy throttle or medium throttle on a 40C+day climbing the hill on the way home. The 'ramp' on the backs of the centrifugal weights has had several 'steps' cut into it, and they along iwth the mating pins that they drive have been polished like crazy for smooth action. I don't know if the weight was changed or cut down I won't take it apart to figure it out either. The vacuum slots were altered but from a casual look inside it looks stock. I had that done back in the early 90's, and the cost was not as much as a Megasquirt, but was MORE than a Megasquirt KIT! I would suggest you find someone with an old SUN distributor machine, make good notes on where you are pinging, and then start simulating it on the SUN. From there, you can start grinding and filing the weights to tailor the advance curve to your liking. Without a distributor machine to do this simulation, you're pretty much hamfisting it as it's internal mods to the distributor you have to do to get the 'exact' curve you want. It's somewhat time consuming, but the results are amazing in terms of what the car can ingest, what kind of performance it delivers, and fuel economy. This is like carburettors. Anybody who says this is 'easy' has never done it! And it's one of those reasons I LOVED it when MS-n-S came out with the ability to drive a single coil even on an 8X8 map. The 12X12's on the MS1 are 'click click click' and you're done! It's just words on a page, and I understand that for most people that's all they are...but once you've gone through the process on a SUN machine, and tailored a set of advance weights to EXACTLY what you want on the car you have, you won't appreciate what I'm saying until you get your first standalone and set up an advance curve in about 3 minutes. Most cars don't need 'steps', it's a linear equation and it is super easy to program the bins. For that stock weights work fine. But when you start dealing with fuel that's crap and have various load issues or mixture issues from fuel delivery that demand some 'kinks' in that straight line from off-idle to 3500rpms the EFI stuff is WORLDS faster. Remember, just because you got an MS doesn't mean it HAS to do the fuel. Or the spark. It can do either, and act as a neat datalogging box to boot! Sadly, I'm a masochist, and keep looking for an old SUN Distributor Machine. "Just because I can do it, I should have the tool that lets me show off!" You won't appreciate that until you do it. Don Potter was a god when it came to recurving the Datsun Distributors, and having done it myself in the past, the results he got with mine simply made me want to kow-tow and thank hiim profusely for sharing his magic. And there's no way in hell I will ever sell that damned distributor! So DON'T ask. Good Luck!

Unless you are planning on competitively racing, what advantage over the stock manifold will you get? The stocker is proven to over 500HP, and since it's steel (not cast iron) it's weldable, and therfore configurable to suit external gates. For the cost of a used turbo manifold, and some fabrication, you're still about $1000US lower than the cheapest POS "Turbo Tubular Header" out there...

In japan they simply flipped the cover over, and ducted it to the base of the windshield...

Would that be the one that links directly to "Roadrunner Search" without anything else? Otherwise it's conjecture, nothing more. Everything sounds easy until it comes time to do it. Everything in the thread was in the future tense...you have update information we don't?

If you have any perforation of the metal, ANY topcoating will seal in the moisture that is fallacious to say it's peculiar to Rhino-Lining. There are standard 'chip guard' coatings that are used on current production vehicles that allow the gloss paint of the rest of the body to be topcoated over it. They work well and I have seen them applied to the earlier cars successfully. If the color accent is what you want, then either option should work: coating with the above mentioned rocker guard, or simple 1/8" thick rhino-lining will do the same. It's heavy, and who knows costs versus the standard treatment mentioned above. I have seen it applied as undercoating, which it looks startingly similar to the stock Nissan stuff if applied correctly, and makes for a very tough underside of the car, resistant to everything as you mentioned. This same application I've seen on 'both sides' of the floorboards including the trans tunnel and wheel wells. I DEFY it to 'trap moisture' when applied like that! No access front or rear. We actually had it applied and then put the plugs in the floor with sealant: it held a rocker-panel level water level for several days (we were curious)---rocker to rocker, including the seat mount brackets. It adds weight, but is suitable for use as-is without carpet as a very scuff-resistant floor covering, as well as deadening sound (it was applied heavily in the differential area to stop that R200 noise!) With the photos you gave, I'd probably go with 'option one' and use the conventional stone-guard. To apply the rhino lining (line-x, whatever...) you reallly want everything off the car, to do just the rockers on the outside won't do a whole lot more than what the cheaper conventionally applied stone guard for the late models will do. Whatever you decide, post photos. Good Luck!

For a track, absolutely -- most only allow water wetter and water. Get a 24psi cap to add boil-over. But for a DD, make sure the glycol is to the limit for low temperature expected. I run around 10% here in SoCal as from my testing with industrial compressors I've found anything more affects heat transfer. I don't need more than 25F protection, so I don't need 50/50, and most people don't. Run as little Glycol as you need to on the road, and use the higher pressure cap for more boil-over protection. It really helps with the nucleate boiling issue. Even with a 16psi cap, and a three row radiator, I'm not getting 'hot'. Airflow OUT of the engine bay will help. Do some experiments with the back of the hood unlatched on the saftey catch, and then progress to a couple of 3" diameter holes on each inner fender well (four total) for airlfow through the radiator at speed, as well as less front end lift at speed.

Well, now that he's get :lol:ting the hang of the kick panels, the door panels can be next...with some more speakers in there!

Always investigate the hot pink block in the car on the junkyard pile... 100,000 yen later (268=$1 at the time, you do the math) got me a N/A 3L with a full ported head and 74degree JDM cam. Ended up selling it for a generous profit after it's capabilites were proven through several years of...uh.. Yeah, I sold it for more to buy more stuff to go turbo. Now I wish I had it, for nothing else than the head and cam.... My first 8000 rpm engine. Not a bad deal from the junkyard and a hot day pulling it! (Normally at the time, an L28 would sell for around 20,000 yen... When the junkyard owner said "Sanzen" I knew what he meant!)