JMortensen

I've never really put too much thought into spring rates vs vehicle weights before, but now I'm thinking since the car and the suspension is heavier, why wouldn't you be able to run a heavier spring than in a 2000 lb Z. To state in another way, if the car is 30% heavier shouldn't a 30% heavier spring act the same as the lighter spring in the lighter car???

Lower the car, stiffer springs, bigger sway bars. If you're going to limit the roll with huge sway bars you had better beef up the mounting points. I think larger bars might help with the current setup, but you'd need some really big bars if you're planning on going to stickier tires as well. I would guess that the cheapest thing you can do is replace the springs. What's in there currently?

OK, then it would be a lot easier to buy an open 3.54 since it came in almost all (or was it all?) of the 280Z's with manual transmissions, amongst others, and swap in the LSD.

Pretty much any Porsche/Audi/BMW etc performance parts store should have it.

You can add strut tower bars, that stiffens up the chassis quite a bit. Then run near the max spring rates before the chassis twist starts to become an issue, say 250-300 in/lb springs. In order to make that stay flat in the corners you'll need some big sway bars. Then you need to make the suspension adjustable to keep the tires happy. Camber plates and adjustable control arms/TC rods gets you most of the way there. At this point you'll have a pretty fast car. I basically ran my car about like that and I had a couple 2nd overalls at track days and autoxes. I finally got tired of running a compromise setup and am in the process of going the full cage route and I'll up the spring rates considerably and get some real shocks on there. I've also reengineered the suspension to a large degree, and modded the sway bars and control arms quite a bit. You can see basically what I had and where I'm going on my project thread: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=117235 Don't get me wrong, the car was fun before, but I would have saved a ton of $$$ had I just done it right the first time or better yet I could have purchased an obsolete 240 GT2 car. Those might be harder to come by now that the Z has been reclassified to GT3, but you might start with an ITS car that needs some freshening up. Then you wouldn't have to shell out for the cage, and I've seen some pretty amazing deals go by over the years. I could have been driving for the last couple years instead of working in the garage, although I suppose you could argue that now I know it's all done correctly, or at least to my own satisfaction.

Swap the LSD into the housing that has the open carrier. Much easier than swapping the ring and pinion into the LSD housing. There is a FAQ that I wrote on what is required to swap it out. It's actually pretty easy to do.

How about venting the tank to the intake?

I don't know about that. Seems to me in the previous pics that it still had the stock tub and strut tower locations and most (all?) of the stock control arms, they were just modded on. I think it's a little less RX7 than 74_5.0L_Z's car is Z car. There is a skin on the NASCARs that vaguely resembles the original vehicle, but I think this one actually uses quite a few parts from the original...

Wasn't that car on ebay a while back for $50K? I'm surprised nobody bought it, it's an awesome car...

The nice part about using a longer arm to test the breakaway is that you don't have to pull so freakin hard, so you can measure a bit more accurately. The length of the arm was taken into consideration, and you are absolutely correct that you can't just add length to the arm randomly and expect anything like usable torque values. Austin and I both used this page as a guide, Gordon Glasgow gives lengths and their effect on the torque values on one of the later pages. Good info in that site all the way through. http://www.gordon-glasgow.org/lsd1.asp

I think if you made the strut tower part, you didn't need to buy anything from Cusco. Looks like nice work though.

You don't want a pressure release on the tank vent. It would not equalize the vacuum in the cell so the pump would work harder and harder as the fuel level went down and the vacuum in the tank increased.

Even if it didn't attach to a full splitter, just a triangular shape horizontal piece which attached the entire front section to the bottom of the airdam would be a good idea.

Again, not my experience. My Toyota truck had to be run without a thermostat when the thermostat failed (just for a day or two). It had an aluminum radiator and the needle would get maybe 1/8" off of full cold, max. One of my friends with a Z with a brass radiator thought her car made more power without a thermostat. I had to convince her otherwise after her driving for months like this. Her car also would barely register any temp at all. We both lived in LA, so there was plenty of traffic involved in both situations.

Need to be wider and hang down lower...

That is a damn good idea! Use the yarn like bj says...

Let's not open that can of worms again. Suffice it to say it went badly after the show and several members got banned.

I've never seen a car run hot due to no thermostat. Seen several which would never heat up...

That is the weaker version of the one that I tried that didn't work. Now that I've tried both, I really feel that it's necessary to have one that curls the tube around the die rather than pushing the die into the tube.

My understanding was that the turbo cam was advanced 4 degrees from where the NA cam is. You should check that out cause that's an old memory, but that's what I seem to remember. If that is the case you'd want to retard the cam timing because that would give you more top end. The turbo engines seem to peter out at about 5500 rpm. If yours is the same, check and see if you can move it to another mark on the cam gear to retard the timing and get some more top end.

That's weird. Cary also had a strange experience testing a cowl hood. He said up to 50 mph the air went in, then after that he said the air kinda looked like it was going in and then back out and then back in again. Not sure what to make of that, but it still seems to me like the most efficient place to vent the hood would be right in the middle. I think we can say for sure that there is a high pressure area at the base of the windshield, so even if the pressure under the hood is higher and the air does come out, the air wouldn't evacuate as well with the vent in the high pressure area as it would in a low pressure area. And then there is Scottie's experience where he closed up the hole on his cowl hood on his RX7 and his cooling issues went away. Maybe that's a bad example though since it is a different car...

That's friggin classic...

Well if that's the worst thing we have to deal with I still see it as a good investment. Mine makes really nice bends and other benders capable of the same are a lot more expensive, so I'm more than willing to deal with it. Just carry it the other way, so that the jack doesn't fall off the shelf. You'll figure out too that when you make a bend and you want to pull the tube back out you have to loosen the jack screw and compress it a bit to finagle the tube back out. Just spend a couple hours working with it and you'll figure out all the little tricks.

Nope, you're not missing anything. The jack does fall off, which is kind of a PITA especially when you have to move it from one place to another. I damn near dropped the bottle jack on my foot. When you bend something the spring stretches so the cable really is the right length for the job.

Check on the availability of the outermost pinion bearing. That seems to be the one that goes, and I think its NLA.