JMortensen

Make that three. I actually had a shock tech guy suggest a slightly progressive valving might be advantageous for the rear of my car. Since I'm using the 30mm Bilsteins and they are linear he thought that would do fine, since the progressive part of the curve was really not a very sharp knee. He did the shocks on the CSR car that placed 4th in the 2007 Runoffs, so it's not quite so easy to disregard him out of hand.

That's a new one. It's good, because the 280 hubs are a couple lbs heavier as I recall. The difference in the hubs should be obvious. The 280 hubs are round where the wheel bolts up, the 240 hubs are scalloped.

Have you ever driven a car with floor mounted pedals? I wouldn't use them unless it was absolutely necessary. YMMV.

Putting a cable on triples is EASY. Just need to modify the stock pedal and then I ran the cable directly from the firewall to a clevis that I made from a piece of angle aluminum that bolted to the middle carb. Actually my clevis was a bit on the hokey side, but it would be really easy to do a nicer job than I did. Others have left the bell crank on the firewall side and run a cable off that. Either way it's really not hard to do and I think it's a lot smoother and better than linkage. Mine was certainly better than the early SU linkage.

John was saying that YOUR suggestion of the Mustang II suspension was the bad one. You can do a lot with the Mustang strut suspension. I used to race against these guys: http://www.maximummotorsports.com Trust me, they're pulling more than 1.1g on their strut setup and they haul ass around the track. I was significantly faster than them when I left CA, but they are now significantly faster than John's ROD, which was a DAMN fast 240Z. Why anyone would bother to go from Z struts to Mustang struts is a mystery to me, but that suspension has potential, just like our Z strut suspension does. The Z and the Stang both suck donkey balls out of the box.

AZC brakes require 280 hubs, I'm pretty sure.

Stock is 5/8 I think. It says right on it. You should use a stock size unless you're not running a Z clutch. It's not just the size of the master that matters, it's the size of the slave. Too much master volume will hyperextend the slave. Can't recall if it would fall out or if there is a snap ring in there.

I think you forgot your link Cary, but if it is intended to be a link to Tom Holt's brake worksheet, that worksheet isn't correct. I can't remember what exactly is wrong with it but it was something pretty blatant, like rotor size didn't change the results.

Get all the rulebooks before you do anything and always double check specs. I think John, who builds a lot of cages and would be a good person to consult on the design of the cage, is wrong on the mounting plate thickness requirement. I believe it is .125" for NHRA. I could be wrong too, as I'm going from memory, but I thought it was thicker than .100" which is the standard for SCCA as I recall.

Yes.

The MSA valve springs are Schneider springs. I ran them with no problems. I'm not sure if the retainers come separately from the springs, but I'd get both. What to reuse is a bit of a tricky question. I have no problem with reusing the rocker arms, others think you absolutely cannot reuse the rocker arms. The lash pads will almost undoubtedly need to be changed because the cam is not stock. If you read the stickies in this forum there are threads on how to figure out what thickness lash pad you need. Low compression .460 cam with 4 barrel sounds like a pretty crappy build. You might consider changing out the head at the very least. It shouldn't be too hard to find a smaller chambered head.

Since we're using anecdotal evidence to prove our respective points, there are probably some people who have been around the Z scene for a decade or so who remember a friend of mine Tory who towed his Z to the MSA show, with his other Z. He then sold the towee at the show. The tower was a triple Mikuni'd ported head, cammed L28. The towee was a stockish 240Z. It was pulled on a tow dolly. I thought it was a really stupid thing to do because of the complete lack of brakes and the short wheelbase of the tow vehicle, but he came back telling me how great it worked out, and that he was able to climb the several grades between our city and the MSA show ~150 miles away at 65+ mph. As for knocking that lip off the combustion chamber, looks like about 1/2 hour's work with some emery cloth and your finger, if that.

How are you going to relieve the gas pressure, and re-pressurize when you're done?

Looks to me like the JCCJDM stuff uses a regular 5/8" rod end. The thing you have to look out for is the rod end bottoming out. That's why the SPL parts have the high misalignment ends, which would allow a lot more movement before binding. I have regular rod ends on my car which has a lot less droop travel than your run of the mill Z, and mine ALMOST ran out of travel at full droop. I have a hard time thinking that a setup with a regular rod end wouldn't run out of travel without a high misalignment rod end. It would be a good thing to double check before driving the car, that's for sure. Several of us have made our own ends. I know bjhines and I did, using essentially the same method, which was to cut the threaded end off of the stock tie rod and weld it to a 5/8" circle track style tie rod. http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=111435 Ride height has nothing to do with bump steer. Ride height will change what part of the curve the car is driving around in, but bump steer is created by an unequal angle between the LCA and the tie rod. I wrote up an article on it in the FAQs here: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=103886

Any machine shop can lighten a flywheel for you. I actually WOULD use TEP for that though. At the levels that they lighten them to I don't think they're that dangerous, although a lighter flywheel that is built to weigh 10 or 11 lbs will respond better than a stocker turned down to 16.

240 isolators by themselves will drop the rear of your Z about an inch. Swapping in 240 rear struts with the isolators will drop it 2" and make it look like it is dragging ass compared to the front. I'd do the insulators since that doesn't reduce any suspension travel. It's almost like sectioning the struts in that way. If that doesn't do enough, then I would cut the springs 1/2 coil at a time until you get it where you want it.

That does sound loud.

Not sure about the F1 engines, but I do recall finding a long list of NASCAR engines and their rod ratios, and they were all 2:1 or above. I think it is safe to say that the higher the rpm limit the longer the rod and the higher ratio you want. Not sure if/how bore size factors into that equation.

I tried to use the Eastwood spray gun for the inside of frame rails and spray Zero Rust through it, but it was a complete failure. My solution is going to be to paint everything I can see, and what I can't see (inside frame rails, etc) will get oiled. In Canada they have a service called Krown where they drill holes in all the panels and spray oil in there and they swear by it. I haven't determined what oil to use. So far I'm thinking Kroil because it's the oil that creeps or something like Wurth's HHS2000 because it turns into a light grease and would be less likely to drip all over everything. In researching this I heard of people using used motor oil and WD-40, so I think just about anything works. It's not a dumb question though, and you'll see it brought up a lot when people start talking about dipping a shell to take all the old paint off. http://www.krown.com/#default

That winch looks slow. A ratchet mechanism would be nice though, as the engine stand leaves you locked in one of 6 positions. I do like the counterweight idea better, although it would take some doing.

Measuring backlash at the pinion is different than much different than measuring it at the ring gear due to the pitch of the teeth. The pinion gear might have 1/4" of movement and the backlash at the ring gear might still be .005". I've seen this mistake quite a few times when guys are trying to diagnose their clunk. In fact there was a guy on classiczcars.com not too long ago that did the same thing. I warned him that the backlash was probably fine, he ended up buying another diff. He tested the backlash in the "good" diff the same way and found the same "large" amount of slop measuring at the pinion. Holding one of the shafts and turning the pinion will work the gears inside the LSD, so that is not a good way to test backlash in my opinion. Even holding BOTH outputs and spinning the pinion will work the LSD before the outputs move. All you can really do is try to carefully feel when the pinion hits the ring, but that's hard to do because of the pitch of the teeth. You checked backlash when you had the carrier out. Assuming the carrier was tight in the housing, I think backlash is not your problem. I also think that the more rigid the mounts are the more clunk you'll hear from an acceptable amount of backlash, and that at some point we'll all just have to get over it and deal with the fact that our diffs don't have fluid filled mounts to isolate all the NVH from the chassis. As far as the noise being from the helical gears, I'm doubting that this is correct too. On the true-trac units there are no springs at all, and the common noise complaint is a crunching sound from those (I think it is all the little helicals moving around and hitting the case inside one after the other).

I was explaining where the pinch weld was, not saying measure to it.

Shouldn't be a problem. I have a friend with a rockcrawler who welded his leaf spring perches to the frame of his truck with a 110V with flux core wire. It won't be as pretty and it won't be as strong, but the shell of a Z doesn't weigh very much, so it doesn't need to be. Are you going to use cut up engine stands or build your own from scratch? With the cost of metal right now, you might get out of it cheaper with the engine stands. EDIT--Did you see my previous post about putting the car on the rotisserie with engine hoists? Engine hoists are the shizznit.

I'm pretty sure Honsowetz was talking about a Nissan Motorsports sprocket.

Good point. This thread suggests an offset that worked OK for me: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=104151 You can also add a counterweight like zlalomz did if you want it to spin with little to no effort. Mine was bottom heavy at first, after welding in the cage it is now top heavy, and I can still manhandle it over without too much trouble, and I'm not a weight lifter or anything.