JMortensen

There is another thread with a guy getting screwed by Whitehead. I'd try any of the others. I've never bought from him, but Joe @ modern-motorsports.com seems like a straight shooter.

Ah, the Dial-O-Matic! Twist the knob to set how much fingertip to remove!

I was in one of the informercials for the Popeil Pasta Maker for about 5 seconds. I believe my quote was: "It makes the best mac and cheese you've EVER had!" BTW those are shot in his house. They roll bleachers into his living room and point them at his kitchen. No shit. Big house. Beverly Hills. Crowd at the time was people who owned other Popeil products. They had some spaces in the bleachers and didn't have people to fill, so they called our office and I think about 10 or 15 of us went down to fill in the holes.

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To be clear, I'm not defending Whitehead at all here, but the credit card companies DO take the money from the merchant and give it back to the customer FIRST. At that point the merchant has to prove that they shipped a product, that it was the right product, that it was shipped to the right address, etc. Almost all of my chargebacks (I get about 10 a year now) are for unauthorized purchase. Somebody steals a credit card and places an order. I do my job and deliver to the address given. I never talk to the people or interact in any other way, but the cc companies say it's my fault for taking a fraudulent order. Some people seem to believe that the credit card company eats this fraud. No. Merchants do. I say this as a guy with literally decades of experience: one of my first jobs was working for Ronco (the "It slices, it dices" and "Set it and forget it" company - Ron Popeil is the father of the infomercial) and my job there for the last year or so was answering chargebacks. It was a 40hr/week job, which says something about the quality of the food dehydrator he was hawking at the time. Then I went to a merchant services company called Cardservice International, where I monitored chargebacks coming in to merchant accounts and withheld money from them until we could verify. They were a startup at the time and their business was centered around providing merchant accounts to people who big banks wouldn't deal with. Small businesses and business owners with bad credit scores. I saw lots of fraud from the merchant side at that job. With the click of a mouse button I held $250K from a merchant's bank account, in 1995. Turned out I was right, they were scammers. Also caught a dentist's receptionist scamming her boss. How? I saw a refund. Who gets a REFUND from their dentist? Then I searched the card number and found a second one. The receptionist had taken her bf's cc to work, swiped it and issued a refund for $1276.39 or some nondescript amount like that. LOL. Since then I had a couple jobs turning wrenches, but for the last 20 years it's been all mail order, where this chargeback thing is just part of life. Doesn't matter how scrupulous you are; there are identity thieves out there, and they won't hesitate to screw over a guy like me, who is just trying to make an honest living. Lately I've had quite a few scammers order the most expensive pet door that we sell, enter the correct billing and shipping address and then ship to some random person's house. The banks' theory is that they then just follow the tracking and stake out the house, and they go swipe the doggy door after UPS drops it at the porch. Sadly, I went about 10 years with maybe 1 or 2 chargebacks in the whole year, but in the last 5 years or so it's REALLY ramped up a lot, lost about $4K in Jan 2020 to fraud. The right thing to do with Whitehead (assuming all the claims made here are true) is small claims if that works internationally, but even if you win, good luck collecting. Social media pressure is also a good tactic.

Think of it from the perspective of a business owner who gets victimized by the chargeback process: You did a transaction with a crazy customer 6 months ago, now, months later, the merchant is informed that there has been a chargeback. Not only does the chargeback immediately take the money out of the merchant's account and return it to the customer, but it also puts a black mark on the merchant's record and costs $35 for the paperwork processing fee. Sometimes they do a dispute and then a chargeback. Double the fees, double the fun! After all this happens you are guilty until proven innocent at which point you can win back the money that you should rightfully have been paid. You used to have 30 days to do this, now I think it's 90. The merchants are seriously bent over in this process, and it's all agreed to as part of the merchant services agreement with the bank. It's in the fine print, didn't you read it??? I'm not for people getting screwed on their transactions, but you have to realize it happens both ways. 90 days is more than enough time, IMO.

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.