JMortensen

I am biased towards the CLSD, but the helical will give less understeer as it doesn't do as much on turn in. It will also be more likely to spin one under accel, but if you're running a stiffer front spring type of setup that shouldn't be as much of a problem.

I'll take that old, beat up LSD off your hands (seriously). Also seriously, It may be that the pinion bearing is bad on the diff. That is very common. The LSD is probably fine if you haven't stripped the tabs off of the clutches.

OK, I'll jump on John's bandwagon with the coasting, but I think you're doing it pretty much everywhere. There are very few places where you should be coasting or feathering the throttle. SOW has more of those places than most tracks, because it is such a tight track and has a lot of left/right transitions, but seems like you're still coasting a lot. It looked like you were using the gas as if you had really skinny tires on the car, not really giving it gas until the car was straight, then easing it on, and almost like you didn't want to give it gas in transitions at all. It was REALLY hard (for me anyway) to keep my foot in it until I had to switch to heavy braking, with no in between. If you're not already looking for braking markers on the side of the track start doing that, and then pick a safe one and start moving it closer and closer to the corner until you're getting the most out of it. Driving that way has a much higher pucker factor. I was still working on it when I tore my car down. Looks to me like you could go into turn 1 and 2 a lot harder.

Garvice, if you're looking for info quick, you had best not follow my thread. Would be better to go do it yourself, then I can follow YOU. Otherwise you'll be waiting a while for a result...

I haven't actually started on this yet, but I did talk to Tony Woodward and learned some interesting things, and I thought I'd put them down here for the benefit of everybody. So the plan for my car is to run the rear FA slicks all around. That's a 15x14 wheel with a 15x12 or 15x13 tire, both tires are designed for the 14" wheel, it's not a hellaflush stretch thing. I eyeballed it at 5" of scrub, which is A LOT, and I figured there was no way in hell I was going to do this without ps. I've been casually looking into the Subaru and other ps options for a while, and hearing things like the pump can't keep up, and the rack feels dead and steering feels numb, etc. I finally got interested enough to call Woodward steering, and got Tony Woodward on the phone. This guy is awesome, knows his stuff backwards and forwards, and really went through every one of my questions and answered them all. So here is what I found out: Do not buy an 18†race steering rack and put longer ends on it. Too much lever hanging out unsupported. He was pretty clear that this is a bad idea, was going off on people getting bad advice, etc. Woodward racks come with a 6†stroke, Z comes with a 5†stroke. I just went and measured the Z rack at 1.8125 inches per turn of the wheel. The Woodwards come in a wide variety of ratios, but I was looking at a 3.14 in per turn rack, which would be VERY fast, about 1.75x as fast as stock. Now I'm thinking I might go slower, maybe a 2.5 or so inch per turn. Even that would probably be pretty twitchy for a street car, but should be great for autoxing, and since it doesn't require shorter steer knuckles, doesn't have an adverse effect on Ackerman. Some sort of steering stop will need to be devised. When I called Tony I had measured the rack travel wrong and thought I had 6 3/4" of rack movement because I measured at the wrong place, so I didn't ask about this, but the tech info on their website seems to indicate that what fixes this is using a housing that is 1" longer than the rack itself. Basically then the tie rod runs into the housing, preventing it from using the last bit of available rack gears. Tony suggested a 950-1 servo and a 210 torsion bar and said that would give very light effort. He said if you put this rack on a new Mustang you could steer it with one finger. Effort can be adjusted later with a heavier torsion bar (spring that returns the wheel to center) or a smaller servo. I gave him the center to center control arm pivot distance of 23.44†and he suggested that I use an off the shelf 23.25†wide rack measured from center of monoball to center of monoball. He said if the tie rod is shorter than the control arm, you’ll get toe in on bump which is bad, and with the 23.25†rack it will be close enough to dial out bumpsteer to the point where the difference would not be noticeable. He said they could do a 23.44 rack if I wanted, but he would go with the shorter one just to be sure. He suggested the high load option based on the scrub, and also said that 5†of scrub was nothing compared to what some modified stock cars run. This made me feel like I wasn’t a complete idiot for considering running 5†of scrub. His opinion was that it wasn't going to affect the handling negatively, it would just make it nearly impossible to drive without ps. If you have ps, no problem. He said Woodward is the only company that makes their own valves inside the rack, and that every other manufacturer was using smaller valves, and the restricted orifices cause the "damping" on a factory rack.. No damping on a Woodward rack, but you will have damping on any other rack, race or not. Said the rack needs 2.6 gpm @ flow controlled rpm. Once you get up above a certain rpm, the rack still only puts out x gpm. He estimated most pumps put out about 3 gpm at their flow controlled rate, which was going to be achieved by about 1200 (pump) rpm. Also said that it would be likely that I would have a 5†pulley on the crank and a 6†pulley on the pump, so I would have .8x rpm on the pump vs at the crank. So basically, he didn’t think pump volume was going to be a problem, even with a stock pump. Also said pump bearings are submerged in the ps fluid, so they can handle very high rpms with no trouble whatsoever He suggested moving the rack back, and I told him that I already did that looking for Ackerman. He was impressed. The cost of the rack is $1560. As soon as I finish typing, I'll go back to rubbing some nickels together. There is some really good tech info on Ackerman and a bunch of other stuff on their website, www.woodwardsteering.com

If you still want a deep air dam and don't want to be fixing it all the time, you might try copying a Flex-Dam like I used to have. It's a regular height FG dam with a rubber skirt on the bottom. I found the rubber was flapping at about 80 mph so I went to plastic lawn edging from Home Depot, worked like a charm. I do like the air dam though. First thing I thought when I saw the pictures was "where did he get that air dam?" Here's a pic from the grid of an autocross. I don't know that I have a better one to show, but I'm sure you get the idea:

Sell one or both of your cars and buy one that's already driving with the V8 in it. You'll save A LOT of money, and the build isn't that exciting when you're not doing it yourself.

Might want to read this too: http://forums.hybridz.org/index.php/topic/22762-scary-tension-rod-failure/

That Smoking Tire moron is the guy who drove a 250 GTO replica and didn't realize he was in a Datsun: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc6MqgjIVSI

Hmm. Sounds familiar:

Kinda funny, just picked up Reason Magazine for January off of my coffee table, and there is Radley Balko railing against drunk driving laws for the same basic reasons that I am: http://reason.com/ar...nk-driving-laws

Keep starting in 2nd. No reason not to. You can put a taller diff in there, 3.54 is easy to find, but is shifting going to make you faster because you have more torque multiplication, or slower because you lose time shifting? I would guess that you'll be slower for shifting. So long as the highway rpms aren't annoying with the 3.90, I'd stick with it. If they are, then jump down to a 3.70 or a 3.54. You can use the trans calculator to figure it all out, not sure if all T5's have the same ratios, but it does have a T5 in there and you can manually enter the ratios if they're wrong: http://webspace.webring.com/people/cz/z_design_studio/

OK, you drink, you drive, you lose reflects reality in other countries. So what? There are other countries where chewing gum is illegal, where women aren't allowed to drive, where people are married as children, where female circumcision is the norm. I'm not judging drunk driving by what other countries do. I'm going by the numbers. If you actually read what I wrote previously, it's clear I would convict your highway weaver if I were on the jury. It would be so easy to go ad hominem in response to your insults, but I'd prefer to stick to the facts because they support my case so well. It's not tinfoil hattery to say that 250,000 million miles per month is the number that is driven in the USA. That's roughly 3,000,000,000,000 per year in the USA. That's 3 trillion, folks. Divide by the number of innocents killed, leaves you with one billion. So it's a one in a billion shot that you'll be driving on that mile when the drunk comes out of nowhere and takes you out. Those are odds that I can live with, if you can't, stay home. You want societal costs? How about the people who can't get a job because they've been arrested for 38 in a 35 at 2:15AM. That might harm their potential for employment for decades, costing society a productive member and the government quite a few tax dollars. And that is happening 750,000 to 1,000,000 or more times per year. Regardless, it's kind of a pointless argument, because as much as you want zero tolerance, it isn't going to happen. There is no political will for it in this country.

It's on the small side is because of the smaller motor, and the type of usage. For autocrossing you need power all the way through the rpm range. I came at them wanting a 228R which is probably right about the size you have now, but they were pretty sure that was a bad idea for my purposes.

Hmm... I thought the early cars had a smaller area there. I know the shifter hole is in a different place and the consoles are different. Anyway, no, I'm not putting the switches there. You mentioned that low oil pressure switch on another thread, I still think that might not be the best idea. Consider that you'd be most likely to lose oil pressure in a hard corner, and that shutting off the spark while at the limit of traction might have some adverse unintended consequences.

7 months later, just ordered my cam. Talked about the cam suggested before, but ended up with a 220/224, .581 lift 112 +2 LSA. He said this cam will peak around 6300 and have a nice flat torque curve. The previously suggested cam would peak around 6100 and would have a little tiny bit more midrange. I told him I have a habit of buying too small and regretting it, so we went with the larger, and he said that the difference would be pretty minimal, probably not enough to tell on the butt dyno. He also talked me into a gasket set and dual roller chain due to the constant accel and decel of an autox or road race engine. I'll have it soon, and probably won't be able to drive it for another year, so don't ask how it worked out, because I have no idea...

No switches in the ashtray area. Actually the 70 doesn't have as large a space there, the ashtray was up at the front ot the console on top of the fuse block. I think the dash is close enough to the wheel that I should be able to reach the start button while strapped in, that was the goal anyway. I was thinking about reflections on the windshield too, and I can do a top if necessary, but I was going to try without it and see how it goes. If I need a top later it will be easy enough to tie one into the top mounts and the holes at the windshield.

Thanks. Yes, I do have a trick up my sleeve; I'm going to let someone else do it for me. I suck with electrical. I could probably get it done, but Dave, the guy who does all the MSA wiring harness upgrades is local and owes me one, so he's going to handle most of the wiring for me.

It's called a TC rod or tension compression rod. Occasionally referred to as a strut rod. If you put the right term out there you might find one easier.

I didn't have it planned out, that's just what seemed best when I put it in the car. As to the paint, I think if you could have a machine spray it so you get a uniform thickness (or a better human painter), then there wouldn't be a problem. Spraying by hand, I think it's just my inconsistency that is the issue. The heat gets it to crinkle up, but you can put all the heat you want on it and if there isn't enough paint, it's not going to do anything.

Seen that before in older Volvo engines. They complain about pinging, turns out they've got 1/8" of carbon on the pistons.

Well painted it again for the last couple hours, finally got the whole thing to wrinkle up with no shiny spots. Solution? If you get a shiny spot, don't try to fix it. Paint the whole damn thing over. I was able to fix one spot and so after that I kept trying to chase the shiny spots down, just kept making it worse and worse. Finally I put a THICK coat on (amazed there were no runs) laid the thing flat on the work bench and started in with the heat gun. You can really see when it gets dry to a certain point and starts to crinkle. I started at one end and worked to the other, and then hung it up to dry. I did manage to blow a couple specks of dirt onto it, but at this point I think I'm done. Patience for this paint is wearing thin.

Thanks John. I just wasn't quite happy with how it turned out. If I had cut the holes in the dash myself and it looked all crappy I would have left it, but since it looks so nice I decided to try again. First I tried some "spatter paint". That looked pretty bad, so I took it all down and tried again with the crinkle paint. It really wasn't any better, but the smooth spots were in the same place. I just hit it with a red scotchbrite Roloc and I'm going to try again, if that doesn't work I'll wait for it to stop raining and try again, but we have rain every day in the 10 day forecast so that might be a bit time consuming.

Zero tolerance would seem to be the answer if you have the opinion that people shouldn't drink and drive at all, and I think that is what MADD and other groups are pushing for, but again, I see it as an unreasonable infringement on liberty. I think the problem is that "you drink, you drive, you lose" doesn't reflect reality. I really do wonder how many people are technically under the influence but just make it home without any trouble. I would guess that it is much much much higher than the number of people popped for drunk driving. They drink, they drive, and they don't lose. Just looked it up. From this page: http://www.popcenter.../drunk_driving/ If you can do something successfully 2000 times and not hurt anyone in the process, and then on 2001 the government comes in and says what you're doing is wrong and that you have to pay a hefty fine and take alcohol awareness classes or court ordered AA, I think that is wrong. Again, if you're unable to control the car on attempt 2001, that's a different story, but that's no longer my impression of how it usually happens. Note also that speeding has a very similar page on the same website, and yet nobody seems to want to take me seriously when I compare the two.

Let's forego your insane totalitarian pipe dreams and stick to the subject. The statutes are arbitrary (used to be .12, then .10, now .08 since I've been keeping track) and the idea that 750,000 get arrested per year (probably more, I noticed on that one map that CA alone has over 170K people a year arrested for DUI and Texas has 90K plus), and guessing most are probably fined $1000 or more says to me that the $750M or $1B or more that the govt takes in might have a little more to do with the laws and help explain those arbitrary limits falling more than the danger to the public, which seems to be coming down, and yet the punishments get stiffer and stiffer. I used to believe that people who got arrested for DUI were drunk and swerving all over the road. Now I know that is not the case. Stick your head in the sand, imagine me to be a macho idiot who drinks and drives as a point of pride (that's about as far off the mark as you can get), forsake the Constitution in deference to the same groupthink nannystaters that you claim to despise. I'll keep on trying to assess the risk rationally and arguing for people to actually have to be failing to drive the car in order to be considered drunk driving.