tube80z

Are those a carbon based pad or a ceramic compound? I'm looking for something that works well but doesn't have as much dust as the PFC pads I've been running. Cary

It will effect steering, dive, RC, etc. How much I'm not really sure. I'm going to run a number of these scenarios on a generic Z car front end model to so we can have some actual numbers. Then we can put this to rest. If you have things you want to see now would be a good time to make suggestions. Cary

I've been resisiting the urge to write that it's a great conversion if you'd like your car to handle like a Pinto Cary

Carbs work by creating a pressure drop from airflow, not by manifold vacuum. Put a vacuum guage on a set of tripples and you will see zilch when you open them up. That's what the accel shot is for, to cover that condition until enough airflow makes up for the suddenly lean condition. Webers have so many combos because they were OEM carbs for a number of autos and needed to pass emissions. You won't find the depth of parts for Mikunis. The setup mentioned above sounds like it was originally setup for a pretty hot street motor or autoxer. We used tripples on the street with a 240 and it ran very well. The chokes were 32s and we had a little more cam. This was on a 2.4. When the car was no longer driven to events we went with 38s and a larger cam. It would only pull from hard from the 3500/4000 range to around 8K. It would do the same thing you mention when flooring it in lower gears. Besides checking the air/fuel ratio I'd suggest getting a decent Weber book. I have a factory manual that seems to be out of print but it has the basics to get these setup and working. I seem to recall seeing some good posts on this list if you use search that had much of the same info. Contrary to many opinions once you have these working well the seem to stay that way. Most of the issues I've seen come from carbs that are in poor shape and/or really crappy linkage. Bend a throttle shaft in one of these and it will really make tuning a nightmare. Cary "ah the good ol' days"

The rockers in these cars are weak by modern standards. In my friends 240Z that he put an LS-1 he put square tube in the rocker that the cage ties into. The tube that goes from the front of the rocker to the TC ties into this. The side bars for the car tie into this. I talked him into doing this after see a crash at a hillclimb where the driver was seriously injured because the rocker and floor folded in a crash. The car is very stiff, has an interior, and tipped the scales at 2500 pounds when we weighed it. I'd agree that in a car with a cage sub-frame braces are probably not as good as a few well placed tubes. Cary

I do think a relatively easy upgrade would be to create a new crossmember that allows you to run longer lower control arms. I would think something like a K-member the Ford mustang guys use would fit the bill. This would have the pickups for the TC rods and a new mount for the rack, which would need to be shortenned. Just a thought, Cary

You're right but it's almost impossible to do any real suspension work without them. You can do simple things like log the suspension travel and then look at it as you go through a corner. Then see where the all those points are that you worked so hard to design and understand what to change. Even as a lowly autoxer I don't run the car without collecting some data anymore. I'm hoping to add a number of channels this year and share the data. I'm saving to eventually be able to reach my holy grail, real time tire temps. The pic is Steve Epperly's 200SX GT4/5 car. Steve is a long time NASPORT racer and did run a B210 in the 80s. It was built very similar so that's why the pic may look familiar. Cary

A good rule of thumb is to run about twice the castor angle of the KPI. For roll centers try to keep it below 3 inches. Cary

A momentary traction loss. As in sudden and no warning. Cary

Sounds like you have a good start to me. Try and keep caster trail less than three quarters of an inch and scrub less 1.5 inches. A lot of the other numbers will fall into place. When looking at RC/ICs remember to look at their velocity rather than where they end up. The rate of change is what we call feel and are sensitive to. All manner of variations can be made to work and are dependent on tire/driver/use characteristics. Don't let RCs go through a tire or the ground or a tire under normal operating parameters. Bad things happen then. Cary

It was changed very little with offset at the top and the bottom. This car features custome built steering arms that move the lower mounting point towards the center of the car. The wheels in this case were something bolted on so the car could move. The race wheels are snug up to this upright. If I recall correctly they have about a half inch of scrub and less than ten degrees of KPI, but my memory isn't the best these days. Cary

It does matter to a degree in the back but not as much as the front, which is what I was thinking about. Here's a pic of how this is commonly done on GT cars. Cary

Just remember when starting with a strut as an upright you should fix the high SIA/KPI. Cary

Older supras and MR2s had a strut suspension with additional arms that located the strut to take bending loads off. As John mentioned you need to figure out the anlges and articulation so you don't bind things. Another option for drag only would be what they do the front of many FWD cars. Those funky traction bars. As long as everything was in rubber or poly you could use those to keep the arms from moving, again assuming that's the real issue. If not then you need to look at making the bushings less compressible. The only option is then a monoball or heim. And since someone is good at fabrication it sounds like they would just build new tubular lower arms with heims/monoballs. Not that those are cheap. But before this all gets carried away some simple tests need to be done to understand what the problem is. cary

If you do this turn them upside down. The lower mount them becomes an a-arm to the old strut tube the the top is a reverse a-arm and toe-link. This will make getting the geometry right a little easier while letting you burry the upright into the wheel. Here's a pic of the idea. Cary

This car is an automatic isn't it? Get a buddy to power brake it for you and watch what happens to the wheel position. Does it move forward? A friend showed me this once on his car and it had a major toe-change. He used to run some toe-out to deal with the deflection and claimed it made the car easier to drive. If you see deflection then you may want to get creative at seeing where the deflection is coming from. Until you know the issue is the wheel moving or not coilovers may just be a waste of money. I can't think of any easier way to do this. Cary

I don't have any answers for you but I can tell you how to test to see what the problem truly is. You need to perform what is called a parasitic compliance test. To do this you will need to build a jig for the front and rear tires that bolts to the hub and is the same radius as the tire (quarter wall 2 inch square tube should suffice with some bracing). You will also put a toe plate on the hub to measure toe, camber, and lateral/logitudinal displacement can be measure with a plumb bob. These will be bolted to the hubs and then you will lock them in place using either brake pressure or some form of clamp to keep the hubs from rotating. Then at the bottom of the jig you will attach a porta-power with a pulling attachment (it also needs a guage). This will simulate the force of the launch of the rear tire and braking at the front. This should be configured so that you can slowly go up to 3000 to 4000 pounds of pulling force between the wheel pair. I would recommend going up 250 pounds of force at a time and measuring everything. Be careful doing this as you'll end up with a lot of force on things as you measure it but this should show if you have an issues that are force related. I know this sounds like a lot of work but it may show you things you can fix that will make your car even faster. I was curious what MPH you see in the 8th and what the time was. I've been trying to figure out 0-60 and 0-100 times for a high horsepower Z. Your car sounds like what I was looking for. Hope this helps, Cary

Now come John, you should know the TIG is for the house Cary

This what I did on my car. It also makes the plumbing a lot simpler than having it stick out the back. I could run down to about 1.5 gallons before I started to see slosh related problems. I got the car this way and it was much easier to tilt the cell than turn it around. Something to think about. Cary

I was going to use these on my unibody car. As you mention they don't fit well unless you cut a hole into the firewall to position them. On my tube car it has space for these so it isn't an issue. I prefer floor mounted pedals for how they move. If you think Tilton is expensive AP makes a really cool setup that has the master mounted facing backwards that fits just fine. The price involves another zero. Cary

That's pretty much how it went. I was overly optimistic on how much braking force the car could generate. I've routinely seen the range you show above. I've been able to get to 1.2 only in a few straight line tests. I really couldn't understand why the car can corner at 1.4 to 1.5 and only stop at around 1. I found out last year that it was the tires that are my limiting factor. This year I plan on logging brake pressure to try and get better at braking. I know that I'm not very good at that and need to improve. Cary

It's interesting but unclear to me if you can be semi-tube like the front of your car. I know you can't molest the firewall. Cary