JMortensen

Yeah, cause what the world really needed was one more freakish pedophile. From another forum: What's the difference between MJ and a grocery bag? One is white, plastic, and dangerous for kids to play with, and the other you carry your groceries in.

Situation Normal All F'd Up = snafu You really need to measure the backlash. Should be .005" to .007" if I remember correctly. Nothing wrong with the bushings, I did that myself.

Actually it negatively affects Ackerman. Maybe not a big deal in a drift car, but might be something worth considering for an autox or roadracer.

Not needed.

I believe two Dans have those. Dan Juday and 74_5.0L_Z. Need to get a set for Baldwin...

All looks good to me. I think the rear diffuser is impractical for anything other than a race car because they have to be within a couple inches of the ground to really work. I don't know which is better strictly speaking, I'm sure it would depend on how the rest of the car is set up, but I like the idea of sending the air through the radiator and then out the wheel wells. I don't see why that wouldn't work just as well as having it go up and out the top of the hood. If the airdam were designed right I think it side radiator exhausts could be more effective than top exhausts on a car with a poor aerodynamic shape in front like the Z. You could still use vents in the hood to create more downforce by dropping pressure under the hood further still as the air flows over the vents and sucks air out from underneath.

Nevermind my last post, saw your pic and you're not pointing directly at the center of your target, so you should be good to go on the U joint angle issue.

Just to be sure, you are aware that you don't want the diff and trans directly in line, right? When you say "perfectly aligned" I'm thinking just that, directly straight in line. U joints need to rotate in order to stay functioning, so you want the front and back offset from each other but at an equal number of degrees. If I were doing this I'd start over (sorry to say) and design a cradle that holds the diff in and make it attach to the chassis maybe at the mustache bar and the front diff crossmember points. Then I'd integrate the lower control arm mounts into the cradle.

Agreed, those just look like a really bad idea to me.

I looked at the picture again and saw the flaps UNDERNEATH the air dam. I thought you were talking about flaps on the side of the body covering where the wheels stick out. You don't see wheels sticking out very much anymore, and for good reason. I think your underneath flaps would be useful if you have a car that is relatively high off the ground and relatively streamlined underneath (splitter). If you don't have that, then I think John is probably right.

I disagree with John. Even with no other mods, they'll still create more low pressure at the wheel wells which will reduce pressure under the car, and as your diagram shows that is one of the places that air exits the bottom of the car. It won't be as effective as if there were ducts venting underhood pressure to the wheel well, which could then take advantage of the lower pressure, but it should still suck more pressure out even if it is from under the frame rails. I don't see any flaps on your diagram oddly... I don't think they need to be small either. EDIT--also the leading edge of the tire is a PRIME source of drag and lift. Covering it up is a good idea.

I think they changed it a long time ago. I bought the original set of plates that I sold to you about 15 years ago. Jay over at Ground Control said that he didn't even remember selling the flat set (which I find a bit hard to believe). The difference again is fairly minor, but the new set allows the spring to change its angle relative to the bottom of the camber plate. Since on the old style the top hats and perches change angle relative to each other, that bends the spring in addition to compressing it. Here are the pictures: Old Style: Flat top of spring hat and bottom of plate. The torrington bearing goes in the recess in the top hat. New style: Rounded bottom of plate meets concave steel bearing thingy on the spring hat, which allows the spring hat to change direction respective to the plate. Torrington bearing is under the concave bearing thingy:

Ground Control makes the best plates available in my opinion. The weld in plates from AZC use the monoball as the bearing to turn the strut when you steer the car. This setup has more inherent friction than the ones that use a needle bearing between the plate and the top hat for the spring. That style sets the weight of the car on the Torrington needle bearing, and uses the monoball to allow for the strut angle to change. The monoball might twist as well but it isn't twisting under the weight of the vehicle. So there is a reduction in friction. The good part about the AZC design is that the spring perches stay parallel to each other as the suspension does its thing. The TTT design uses a Torrington bearing, but it doesn't allow the strut top to stay parallel to the strut bottom so it is inferior to the AZC setup in that respect. The newer style GC plate has a pivot on the bottom of the plate so that the spring perches stay parallel, and this reduces friction a little bit more, as well as keeping the spring from rubbing the threads off of the coilover sleeve. It also has a torrington bearing between the plate and the spring hat. So it really is the best design. It's not that the other ones are useless, but the GC design really is better, enough that I sold the old style GC plates and bought new ones. Whether this matters to you or not is another story, mine is a quest for friction reduction in the suspension, and that's the rationale for the GC ones being best. Old Style: Flat top of spring hat and bottom of plate. The torrington bearing goes in the recess in the top hat. New style: Rounded bottom of plate meets concave steel bearing thingy on the spring hat, which allows the spring hat to change direction respective to the plate. Torrington bearing is under the concave bearing thingy:

God those stock tachs are a nightmare. Can't help you with that part, other than to suggest an aftermarket gauge. Wiring diagrams for the distributor can be seen here: http://www.jrdemers.com/280ZX/distributor/distributor.html. It's a super easy two wire hookup. Yes, bypass the ballast resistor.

I ran the rear plates and eccentrics and couldn't get more than ~3 degrees negative. In the front I struggled to get even 3 degrees, although I didn't run the camber bushings in the front control arms. I ended up making new arms and that's how I got there. And I ran my car LOW. Don't know what rxsleeper has, but I would think that you couldn't possibly get -6 degrees without arms that are 1-2 inches longer than stock along with the camber plates. I am also running the GC plates (which I think are much better than any of the weld in plates).

The short version is that there is no ability for the strut to change angle relative to the camber plate because the control arm is an "H arm", so if the two are misaligned you get a side load imparted on the strut. If your adjustable arm is an H arm, you'll still get the side loading. If you want the full explanation this should explain the whole issue and a couple possible A arm with toe link solutions: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=129154

I see you figured it out, but there is another issue you touched on here which should be explained while we're at it. Not all 10 tooth pinions are the same. If you have a 3.70 and a 3.90 with 10 tooth pinions and 37 and 39 tooth ring gears, the 3.70 pinion head will be larger than the 3.90 pinion head in diameter. The tooth pitch will also be different. In short, keep the ring gear with the pinion gear, NEVER swap one ring for another in a differential (even if they're the same gear ratios, it's a bad idea as a ring and pinion are a matched set that are "run in" with each other on machines before installation). To confuse things it is possible to change the pinion head size arbitrarily and run a more severe pitch on the teeth, but in general the ring gear gets thicker as the ratio gets lower. Maybe Nissan did that on the 4.375 to keep the pinion head stronger. You see warnings against really super low gear ratios sometimes because the pinions break.

You can adjust a lot farther with a plate on top than you can with an arm on the bottom, and it's easier to make the adjustments because they don't change the toe settings. I would guess that you'd probably have 2.5 degrees of sweep on the plates, with arms it depends on which ones you have, but if they're using rod ends and you want to keep to the 1.5x the diameter within the threads then you probably have .3 or .4 degrees of adjustment. When you weld in plates in the rear it is pretty important to make sure that the top of the strut is perpendicular to the control arm. If you weld the plates in towards the front or rear on accident this puts a lot of load on the strut and the control arm.

F1 has some pretty ridiculous rule changes from year to year though, and I think the FIA screws with the rules too much. I understand there is a need to keep the cars slow enough that people aren't constantly dying driving them and that passing makes for better racing, but for all of it's rule changes in the name of promoting passing, there still isn't a lot of passing in F1. And they do KERS, but then limit the amount of power they can get from it? Isn't the point that they would try to further the development of kinetic energy recovery by allowing them to use it to it's fullest potential? And they got rid of ground effects cars and active suspension cars too. It just seems like the FIA spends an awful lot of time stifling the advancement of the race car in their premier series. Not saying I want a split, but I think that the current situation isn't ideal.

I didn't do anything to the forearm. I wanted to try it like this and the plan is to bring a stack of business cards to the range and add a little pressure and see if that helps. In retrospect I probably shouldn't have taken the wood on the stock as far back as I did. You warned me of that but I was worried about the effectiveness of a really thin layer of epoxy on the sides of the action. Unfortunately the Mortensen family came down with the stomach flu (I haven't gotten it yet, so tonight may still be my night to puke my guts out, yay) and it's been raining a bit here, so no shooting this weekend. Next weekend is supposed to be sunny, so I suppose it will have to wait until then, unless I can get to the range after work one day during the week. I'm itching to test it really bad.

No spacer. The LSD has a 2 piece case, and the seam where the two pieces meet is what you're seeing. The lower the gear ratio the smaller the pinion head and so the ring gear gets thicker so that they both meet. American cars have something called "carrier breaks" where the offset of the carrier is different so that you might need one LSD for gear ratios up to 3.55 and then another carrier for gear ratios of 3.73 and up. This is so that they can use less material in the construction of the gears themselves. Japanese manufacturers don't do the carrier breaks nearly as often, which makes it easier to figure out what parts you need, but makes the ring gears thicker and thicker on the lower gear ratios. If you set the two carriers on end and measure from a table to the back side of the gear, you'll see that they're the same and there is no carrier break. The 4.37 gear will work on the LSD because the pinion head in that diff is smaller. EDIT--I missed you flipping off the LSD the first time... good stuff.

Oops. Forgot to mention taping up the recoil lug. I put 4 layers of tape on the sides bottom and front of the lug. Very important to do that.

After screwing around with my rifle trying a different scope, a homemade electronic bore cleaner after dr hunt suggested it (details on how to make one here http://www.surplusrifle.com/reviews/copperout/index.asp), and free floating the barrel, I still was getting 2+ inch groups out of my Winchester M70 Lightweight in .243. So I figured the next step was glass bedding. I had been looking at bedding my .22 when I put a new stock on it, but I found the accuracy of that rifle acceptable and didn't bother with the bedding. I did not pillar bed this rifle, just did the glass bedding. I did use the Devcon as suggested here and elsewhere. I hogged out the stock with a Dremel especially around the recoil lug so that there would be adequate room for the bedding to work. I left the rear of the tang area alone (you can see the glass in this area is so thin the wood shows through) and put 4 layers of electrical tape around the barrel in front. Then I made a dam from modeling clay in the barrel channel. All holes in the action and stock that weren't to be filled with epoxy were filled with clay. The trigger was removed as well. I waxed the action and barrel and anything that might get in contact with the epoxy with Kiwi shoe polish in a "natural" finish (no dye to possibly affect the color of the metal). The checkering on the wrist of the stock is REALLY close to the tang on one side of the stock, and about 1/8" away on the other side, so that made it pretty much impossible to tape the checkering off. I filled it with modeling clay instead, and that seems to have worked pretty well. Getting the epoxy in the stock with the action was more difficult than I thought. I had to tape the action into the stock pretty tightly just to push all of the extra epoxy out of the stock. At first I pushed on the front end and the back end came up, then pushed on the back and the front would rise. Finally I taped the front end down, then taped the back end down, then cleaned up the spillage, then pulled the front tape, cleaned what was underneath the tape itself, then retaped it tighter and pulled the back tape, cleaned, retaped, etc. I ended up going back and forth 3 times, it was pretty nerve wracking because I didn't want to screw it up. Each time a little bit more epoxy would squeeze out. I think this would have been easier with Acraglas or some other media that is thinner. That Devcon is THICK. Getting all the extra epoxy off of the top of the stock and the action was pretty difficult too. I had read somewhere online to use vinegar, so I did as much cleanup as I could with paper towels and then went at it with Q tips and vinegar, which does work pretty well. I dunked the Q-tip and then squeezed all the extra vinegar off of it, then used it on the stock and action. That took about 3x as long as I anticipated, but it worked. After 24 hours the stock separated from the action and I only had three real problems. One was that I couldn't figure out why the bolt release lever wouldn't function. Turns out it was because I had some epoxy underneath the lever, I kept trying to remove epoxy to the side of the lever. The second was that I had put a piece of clay in the slot where the bolt release lever sits and it had squished out and it ended up preventing the epoxy from hitting the stock in one spot, probably about 1/4" long. That's a bummer, but you really don't see it unless you're looking for it. The last problem was a little more difficult to overcome. It appears that I moved the action back about 1/16" in the stock, and this was just enough to make it so that the magazine cover on the bottom didn't fit. As it was before you had to have the bottom plate moved as far forward in its slot as it could get and then it would BARELY clip into place. My theory here is that they made these pieces as long as possible to prevent rattling. The way the action is moved back in the stock now there just was no way it was going to fit. I looked at the rear screws to see if the trigger guard was off, but it is really set perfectly into its recess and when the screw tightens down it doesn't pull the trigger guard one way or the other. That being the case I didn't want to move the trigger guard back, so I ground down the magazine cover. It only took about 1/16" or so to get it to clear, but it was enough that I had to grind the divit in the end of the cover too to get the button to work. No biggee to me since the cover had just a hit of rust from a trip a long time ago when I got stuck out in the rain. So now I'm going to take the initiative and fix the rust and just reblue that one part to fix it permanently. If I had used the action screws to hold everything together while the epoxy dried I wouldn't have had this problem. I also put a little Tru-Oil on the stock anywhere the wood got exposed, and buttoned it up. I might get a chance to shoot it this weekend, looks like it may rain though. Can't wait to see what it does. I have some Hornady bullets that just came UPS and 10 of the Remingtons left, might see if I can find some lighter weight bullets at the range too.