JMortensen

I had to move the seat for helmet clearance on the halo bar. The steering stuff is pretty common. I buy most of my stuff from www.colemanracing.com, speedwaymotors.com, jegs.com, or behrents.com. Betting they all have everything you need.

My seat mount is about the same height as yours and I didn't feel any need to lower the wheel. It would be easy to raise/lower with a full race 3/4" column, just use jam nuts on either side of the rod end and move up and down. On mine I could shim down the wheel from the pedal box if I wanted to move it. I have a bunch of stuff on the to do list, that one has not come up. Related though, I did move the seat 1.5" to the right. Have thought of moving the column to the right to compensate, really don't notice when you're driving, but I still know it's wrong.

Curious to see what you come up with.

Modded factory box.

Looks a lot better!

Tegris is not light. I have a COT splitter made of tegris, turned out too narrow for my front end, so it's just sitting in my shop. Pretty cool, but probably weighs as much if not more than plywood. If you just use it for the front lip and then do something else from the lip to the front xmember, that's a good one. If you use plywood, it does matter what kind. Birch is supposed to be the stiffest, so that's what I used. It is heavy. I've seen lots of alumilite at autocrosses. Looks great until it touches the ground, then not so much. I decided on plywood to see where it rubbed and how bad, thinking that I could adjust things and then do a more expensive/less durable one after I worked out the bugs.

If you look at many of the Time Attack cars, the 911 RSR, etc you'll see that a lot of them just cut the bottom half of the fender off and leave it wide open. I have considered doing something like this, haven't committed yet because it's pretty drastic, but will probably get the itch one day and attack my car with a cutoff wheel (again). http://www.dsf.my/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/porsche_911_rsr_2.jpg

Those new ears on the strut tubes look BEEFY. Very nice. Same problem here with gear ratios. I looked at Super T10s for weight and strength, but that 1:1 4th really kills top speed. F8.8 with 3.08s gets you to 165 with my 24.5" tire or 172 with Ben's 18s. A taller rear gear means a wider spread between gears too which isn't great. 170ish is about as fast as I ever want to go in mine, dunno about you guys. I won't be attempting that without some more aero though. Nice thing about 18s is that there are a lot of race tires available as that's the common size for professional cars right now. Car looks great Ben. Congrats.

Video is private. From the description sounds like a broken ring or pinion gear. Ring gear the crunches come slower because it turns 1 time for every 3.54 or 3.70 or whatever turns of pinion gear.

Upload to youtube or something. Right now says I need to buy a codec to watch. Many moons ago, when I first put my car together and before I knew anything about diffs, I paid to have all new bearings installed in my R200. Huge waste of money I didn't have at the time. Anyway, the shop left the pinion nut finger tight. I drove it around the block and it was making a weird noise, so I went and grabbed my roommate (also a Z guy) and attempted to take him for a ride. The pinion gear walked up the ring gear and into the carrier and locked the whole drivetrain solid. Luckily, this happened 2 houses away from ours, so we jacked up the back end and dragged it back home. Since it happened at maybe 5 mph, no damage was done, but I have a cool looking wear mark on the LSD. Kinda looks like a scar. Might be a place to start for you.

Should be fine

Are you doing this real time, or reporting what happened a year ago? If real time, I have a suggestion: don't use Z camber plates. You've got some freedom to change things, and you can make that strut top whatever size you want. Looks like you've already gone bigger than you need for the Z stuff. I'd use Maximum Motorsports mustang camber plates. Their stuff is camber/caster adjustable, they use larger bearings and have a better setup than Ground Control in terms of centering the spring on the bearing. I know some of the other ones center on the monoball, but they use small 5/8" monoballs. I think MM uses 7/8". Their engineer poo poo'd my GC plates back in the day. He's a good guy, and he wasn't doing it out of malice. Dennis Grant did the same in his book and on his site (towards the bottom of the page): http://www.farnorthracing.com/autocross_secrets5.html. I showed the MM engineer the updated GC plate and he basically said: "Still trash." https://www.maximummotorsports.com/Mustang-Caster-Camber-Plates-1979-1989-P252.aspx

Was thinking that might be hard to understand, so made a shitty drawing.

Better method than tin foil: use a couple pieces of 1" angle iron on opposite sides of the strut tubes. Hold everything with hose clamps. The angle iron will center the tubes and you can tack them together, then pull the angle iron off and weld it up. Won't be exposing your strut to any heat and really holds the tubes firmly.

The rear strut tube should be 2" longer than the front, and yes, you need a spacer under the strut if you are running the same insert front and rear. Because you lose an inch more in the rear on a 280 by removing the taller isolators, and the front is the end that runs out of travel, you really don't need to section 280 struts in the rear at all. If you dig enough you might come across some posts from me from about 10 years ago when a guy had sectioned his rear struts and was trying to run it anyway. He had preloaded the crap out of the springs trying to get the ride height higher and that just meant that the suspension kept topping out. He spun A LOT that day. A LOT. LOL

Was thinking my first set from GC in '95 or so had 5" adjusters. Just to clarify. Looks to me like you might run the spring to the bottom of the adjuster without getting the ride height you want. You could grind the perch off of the strut tube, but that's a hassle. The other solution is to run a shorter spring. Shortest spring that doesn't coil bind is always the best choice because it's lighter and it will resist bending sideways when it compresses. I started off with 10's, worked down to 8's and now run 7's, but I also have super stiff springs and run very low, so don't need 6" of travel.

I bought super long ones for mine and trimmed them down. My first set were Ground Control. They had 4" adjusters. I set them up by putting the adjuster all the way up on the collar, then setting the perch so that the adjuster just touched the bottom of the spring, figuring I wouldn't be ever be preloading the springs. Looks to me like if you did the same you might have the perches welded on substantially lower.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like your coilover sleeves are longer than the strut tube. Shouldn't be like that. The Koni bumpstops will compress a lot, and you'll smack the camber plate into the sleeve if you bottom it hard enough. Easy to trim down the sleeves and put the cut end on bottom so they don't look terrible.

If you just say Z31 Turbo LSD or 87-89 300ZX Turbo LSD people who want one will know what it is.

37:10 = 3.70 gear ratio. It is the Z31T LSD. Congratulations! That's a huge score.

The cover is from a Z31 Turbo. Doesn't necessarily mean that it's LSD. Pull the cover off and take some pictures of the carrier. An open carrier has round cross pin shafts. The LSD will have a square pins, or diamond shaped if it's the more rare NISMO version. There are pics of both in my big diff post in the drivetrain FAQ section. If it is LSD it's worth lots of money. Seen the finned cover alone up for $400, not sure if they sold it at that price. Seen the whole diff with CVs go for $1200+.

2) Strut doesn't need to be vertical with this design as you mention in point 4. It can tilt and the freed up toe link allows the strut to compress without side loading. You can move the wheel back for aesthetics if you want, just not so far that the toe link or the rear link bottoms out as the suspension goes through its travel (I think you'd have to go really far for this to happen, but never tried it). 3) I did the math 15 years or more ago, but if you use the 1.5x the thread diameter I think that means you can move the heims joint out 5/16" before you run into the limit. There are a lot of people who run them further out than that, including me - my front LCAs were out probably 1/2" for a long time, might still be - but anyone doing this is ignoring the rule of thumb in that case. How big a deal that is is up to you.

The 39 spline option doesn't neck down to the splines, so the splined section is stronger, but it still necks down to the nut, so that part wouldn't be any stronger. The best solution is to get rid of the stub axles and go to a more modern CV where the splined end of the CV plugs through the stub and the axle nut is on the outside of the flange. There are a couple options that are available. The unfortunate thing about those is they generally have extremely heavy uprights and require all new brakes, struts, etc. so you might gain strength in the driveline but at the cost of well, cost since you're replacing a lot of parts, and weight. I wouldn't even consider this kind of change without ditching the R200 and going to something with more ratios and LSD options like the F8.8. YMMV.

I paid out for my Miller 135 mig, and at the time 15 years ago, that was the common wisdom; you get what you pay for. Nowadays I'm not so sure. Lots of cheaper migs, including HF brands, with good ratings. 15 years ago the main concern was getting infinite wire speed adjustment, and I paid $200 more for Miller than Hobart because Hobart had 4 or 5 clicks for wire speed. Now, you can get the adjustability in a bunch of different brands.

More bots? FWIW I went down to HF and picked up the $400 tig I had mentioned 5 years ago. It was on sale, paid $319 before tax. Got it home and had a case of buyer's remorse about it not doing AL, and returned it and bought a $600 unit off of Amazon that had good reviews. By the time I added an Argon bottle and a few accessories I was up at $900, but that's still dirt cheap for a tig. My electrician neighbor is going to finish up wiring 220V outlet and I need to heal up from surgery, but in about a month I too should be laying some crappy beads down.