JMortensen

Best thing about these wheels is the weight. 14 lbs each. I have a set that I sand blasted and then barely started polishing out if anyone is local and interested. They're in rough shape and would need a lot of elbow grease to make pretty. I'd let them go for $50 for the set. I just want the space back in the garage... Not worth it to ship these though.

Aesthetics is subjective. I don't see a pressing need to post about all the crap that I see that I don't like, especially if it's an aesthetic issue. I'd have 20,000 posts... I also don't see a need to show respect for someone else's aesthetic taste because they are able to put stuff together. If you put together a Yugo with a Chevy Cavalier drivetrain in 2 days that might be impressive in terms of fabrication, but don't come to me for comments about how great it looks. Now if you want to talk about a really bad taste, have your tonsils removed as an adult. For about a month now I've had the taste and smell of what I can only guess rotting possum anus would taste and smell like in my nose and mouth. Apparently I have breath to match. It's trailing off, almost gone now really, but let me tell you: breathing out and then inhaling that rotten possum poo-cutter fragrance is a lot more disturbing that seeing a car built in a way you disagree with. Sometimes you just need a little perspective.

Safety Kleen is the company that I'm aware of that services parts washers. They will come out and change out your solvent and the filter. They have a maintenance program too, but they'll do it just once and you probably don't need a service contract unless you're working on a lot of cars. I bought the HF parts washer and filled it with Oil Eater and water as described on various forums. Worked pretty well and the Oil Eater is surprisingly powerful, but after a while it started to crystallize and ruined pretty much everything. The pump stopped working, the hose end was stuffed full of white crystals, I left some parts in there and they were all covered. It was a pain to clean off the parts, but I managed to salvage them. I just got rid of the washer after that. I'll probably buy another one eventually and I won't put Oil Eater in it. Dishwasher is a nice idea, but what are you going to do with the waste? Hot soap and water parts washers work great, but they filter and reuse the water.

The early 240Zs have the prop valve inside the right rear fenderwell screwed to a bracket near a frame rail. I don't know how the later ones work, but a bunch of people have put adjustable prop valves on those cars, so the answer is here, you'll have to keep looking for it though... EDIT--You guys really shouldn't be getting rattles. If you have a rattle something is wrong. Most likely culprit would be a gland nut that holds a strut insert in is loose, or it bottomed on the housing before it tightened down on the strut. When they're TIGHT there should still be a thread or two showing. After that you can start checking the bearings, but they're brand new bearings from the sound of it, so I'd be checking those gland nuts first...

Just for future reference, I know virtually nothing about electrical and much less about the stock FI setup, what is it K-jet or L-jet? There is a reason why my LSx will run a carburetor; because I am inept with electricity. Lots of good wiring/FI guys here, I am not one of them. Sorry. Good luck with your project.

Correct. Just grease the new ones up, install, reassemble and drive.

The shorter and straighter the brackets, the stiffer they'll be. Yours are long and curved. The brackets could be cut off and improved. The bar itself is also curved to clear an engine. This is a compromise that is made in the engine bay that doesn't necessarily have to be made here. A straight bar would be better if it would clear that backstays. Also the strut towers could be made significantly stiffer by attaching the backstays in the cage to them. Your's attach to the floor as shown in the NHRA rulebook as I recall, but that's really a design that's better suited to a ladder framed car and isn't the best for a unibody.

It IS the race that you can't get out. In he picture on the left, the outer silver ring of the bearing is the outer race. John is saying to find the spots around the edge where you can stick a punch in and rest it on the outer race and drive them out. These are not cone/cup bearings, so the inner race is the inside ring that the balls ride on, the inside of which is the ID of the bearing, and the outer race is the same, forming the OD of the bearing.

Nissan Comp. Probably 10 years ago though...

I've just gotta say that I searched for an old thread about dual masters and it came up. I tried that with the old version and with Google and got nothing. I'm impressed with the search function so far!

Porpoising is meant to evoke the image of a dolphin jumping out of the water repeatedly. Bucking bronco would be another way to describe it. The car gets into a harmonic where the front and rear start alternately undulating. There is a sticky thread where Dan 74_5.0L_Z did some pretty precise measurements and figured a bunch of the math out on these suspensions, you can read up on that more if you care to, it's pretty technical and not particularly useful for someone who just wants to build a hot street car. In any event, the motion ratio for the front suspension is .904 and for the rear is .882. This means if you ran 250/250 springs, you get a wheel rate of 204/194. If you drop it down to 225, you get 184/194. In either situation you're 10 lbs off from equal. 200/250 gets 163/194. My point is that if you really want to get a separation there, with lower spring rates you need a bit more separation than 25 lbs. That said, people have been talking about 225/250 as the go to spring rate since the mid/late 90s, and I haven't personally heard anyone complain about porpoising, but John's been the guy who they would come back to with a complaint, and I haven't.

Grumpy, are you a David too?

So what would you suggest on my 325 then David? 750?

Shouldn't be.

I think you basically have it right. This would give up on the idea of the speeding up of the air underneath, but you should still get a pretty good low pressure area under the splitter due to the air dam, and you still have the high pressure on top, hence a pressure differential to work with which would be greater than just the force on top pushing down. The difference I guess is that the air that doesn't go under the splitter has to go around the car, which is why I would think it would be less effective than a perfect splitter setup. I'd love to see that video, Cary.

Your splitter is what gave me the idea. Put a dam on the end and maybe it would have worked.

So I guess if you hinge it you need to run cables instead of rod ends at the front. I know about Dave's car. What was the other Z that you ran with a splitter?

I keep thinking about this pitch sensitivity on splitters and I've come up with an idea, and I guess I'm looking to see if anyone has done this before or knows in advance why it wouldn't work. Here it is: As an example, imagine a 6" deep splitter mounted fairly high off the ground, maybe 4" or 5" high, with an air dam skirt on the leading edge that hangs down basically on the ground. I was looking at Competition Car Aerodynamics and it's clear that with both an air dam and a splitter you have a low pressure on the underside/backside. In theory the splitter have less pitch sensitivity and still have a nice pressure differential between the top and bottom of the splitter. As a side bonus it would be a lot easier to load a car on a trailer with 4" of ground clearance in front. I know the pressure differential doesn't look as high for the air dam in CCA's diagram on p 65 so the splitter may be less effective, but I still think this might work reasonably well and solve the pitch sensitivity issue and might be an improvement over a traditional splitter on a relatively low speed car that is relatively softly sprung. I see guys putting splitters on cars with relatively soft suspensions, and I can't help but thinking that the splitter is probably doing as much harm as good as it bounces up and down at the front of the car.

I don't think anyone has said that either cage is unsafe. Just that they're inefficient and the Z cage is technically illegal. If you can get a waiver on the Z cage, more power to you. What is lacking in the Miata cage is some forethought about how loads get transferred through the tubes of the cage and into the chassis. My opinion is that if you install a cage and fail to make the chassis more rigid, you've missed a golden opportunity to make the car handle more consistently. I saw on the SM forum where a guy said the "rear shocks are not structural". I can only assume that he means that unlike a Z, changing the angle of the strut tower doesn't change the angle of the suspension, but they are definitely structural. Most of the load in the suspension comes from the shocks, even more than you get from the springs. If the chassis can be made stiffer there then it can use the springs and shocks more efficiently, with less of the vertical motion of the wheel being wasted in chassis deflection. In the Z car world you occasionally hear people say "I changed the sway bar and there was no difference" and that is because the chassis flexes and the sway bar change is nullified. The Miata's strut tower flexing could absorb some of a shock or spring change making it less effective than it would be if the chassis were more rigid. Mustang racers typically run their backstays to the shock tower, even though it's just a shock tower and any movement there also doesn't affect suspension angles, for precisely the same reason. It makes the shocks more effective so changes to the shocks are also more effective. If the desire was then to run bars from the strut towers back to the back of the car to eliminate the crumple zone, there's nothing preventing that either. In this case the car would have enhanced chassis rigidity AND less crumple zone if that was what was desired (although I think I'd prefer to have the car crumple and take less of that force with my body).

I'm not a big fan of GC's weld on washer rings, so when I did up a new pair of struts I found a piece of tubing that fit over the strut and just cut it into 1/2" long sections, slid them down and welded them on. GC has very good customer support, so I'm sure if that's too much hassle they'll return you call and get you set up with some of their washers.

Suggestion: get one of the admins to change the title of the thread to this. BTW did you want bigger brakes or JUST aluminum calipers? IIRC the stock caliper is 7 lbs, the Wilwood I'm using is 4, and that's not counting the pads. The Wilwood pads are larger and heavier, and the rotor is heavier for the wilwood setup than a stock setup. You will gain weight over stock with a Wilwood setup.

That's actually not true. Take a look here: http://www.tirerack.com/tires/Spec.jsp?make=Hoosier&model=R6&vehicleSearch=false&fromCompare1=yes&partnum=25ZR5R6&tirePageLocQty=%26partnum%3D25ZR5R6 If you buy this R6 (LIGHTWEIGHT) racing tire from Hoosier, the 225/45/15 size weighs 19 lbs. That's more than the 15x8 to put it on. The 225/50/15 weighs 22 lbs. So lower profile is lighter, but the tire in this case does weigh more than the entire wheel. Stretching tires to reduce unsprung weight is a little backasswards. The better way to handle that situation is to buy a rim that fits the tire. A 15x8 wheel will weigh less than a 15x10 and it fits the tire you're using better, so then you don't need to sacrifice the performance of the tire by putting it on a rim that is too wide.

The 4 pinion open diff has to have a closed carrier because the cross pin is shaped like a + unlike an open carrier which has a crosspin shaped like a | If you have the | shaped carrier you put a spider gear at either end and have a surface to locate the side gears, and the rest of the carrier can be an open window. A 4 pinion doesn't give you that option, the carrier has to bolt together like this one does in order to house 4 pinions inside and it ends up looking like a clutch LSD. The CLSD has an angled cross pin shaft. It doesn't really look like the VLSD either:

I've had that same unpleasant experience, probably with that same vendor. Some 15's fit over the Wilwood brakes, some don't, so you're better off asking "Do Watanabes fit over the AZC brakes?"or "Do Panasports fit over AZC brakes" etc. Don't know if you're into the look, but the Diamond racing steel wheels DO fit with a little bit of clearance, and they're surprisingly light when compared to some of the heavier cast aluminum rims like Panasports. Example, Panasport ULW 15x7 is 16 lbs. Diamond 15x8 is 18 lbs and you can get any backspace you want between 2-5 inches. http://www.diamondracingwheels.com/prochallenger.html Not sure on what offset is necessary with stock suspension, but I know you can get a 15x8 to clear the suspension and the fenders. If you go to coilovers you can get more wheel into a stock fender.

I had it checked right after we moved in a couple years ago, so if it's the same here in WA I should be good for another free service call. I'll give that a shot. I emailed GE and they suggested calling a repairman.