JMortensen

I have two issues with this iteration of this cage. One is the dash bar. I think a straight across bar would be better in terms of protecting against a side impact, and there isn't anything to brace right there in the cowl. The second issue is the supports from the main hoop to the floor on the deck. Seems totally needless since you already have the ones going to the strut towers.

How hard is it to get those engines to spin to 7K? Looks like you'd be over the hp hump a little farther and could really stay on that top power peak if you could get the extra 500 rpm. DAMN NICE looking dyno graph regardless. Look at the freakin torque curve!!!

Pick up a copy of The Stranger when you get into town. It's a free newspaper you can find at any hip restaurant or store. Then look for a band that you like and go see them. I don't know what its like in FL, but when I used to go to concerts in LA it was a bunch of idiots who were too reserved or too embarrassed to have any fun, they (WE) all just stood there quietly and watched a band play a set with only a golf clap in between songs. In Seattle it's a much different scene. Shows are fun to go to here. Also keep in mind its bound to be between 40 and 50 degrees here around that time, raining probably most if not the whole time, and it will get light about 8:00 and dark around 4:45. Even when it's light out, its pretty dark. Sounds like fun, huh? Yeah, there is a lot to do here, it just kinda sucks doing it in the cold/wet/dark (IMO). Gotta get out of this ****hole. Other than that it's kind of an expensive place to have a good time especially that time of year, so bring $$$. It's too damn cold and wet and dark to hang out at Gasworks Park in November, so you're likely going to be in a restaurant, a bar, a museum, you know, indoors somewhere where they're bound to charge you admission. The Bodies exhibit is in town, and will be while you are here. I'm probably going to go this weekend. That's just too cool not to see. http://www.museumtix.com/venue/program.asp?vid=678&pid=178008

Response #3: Jon corrects your misspelling of Cheseboro.

Haven't we done this before? A couple times? I call my car "Anthropomorphized" and I read her bedtime stories at night...

OT - Do you ride Cheseboro Canyon? I used to ride there all the time. We just rode to Shepherd's Flats usually, but occasionally went out that way and then down the hill and came out at Malibu Canyon Rd. I've got a friend who rides practically all the way to Simi on these 8 hour excursions back there, but that's way more adventurous than I ever was...

Yep. http://www.betamotorsports.com look at services and then hybrid engine swaps, and you'll see both of his cars.

Yep. Turbo 20B. Same guy that had the blue SR20 240Z that John Coffey did the engine swap in. He'd likely blow the doors off of a mild V8 240Z...

I did not use a jig when I welded my control arms up, and that may come back to haunt me. Terry increased the need for precision by the way that he set his strut housing up though. Rather than use a smaller ~.618" (5/8") bolt, he used the larger .631" spindle pin. In order to fit the outer rod end to the .631" (~16mm) spindle pin, he used a 5/8" thread, 3/4" overside rod end with a spacer turned down to .631 for a nice tight fit on the pin. In the thread that started both of our projects, the main issue for Terry was that the spindle pin was "loose" on the polyurethane bushing sleeve. I said at the time and I still think that the slop poses no issue, because once the spindle pin is tightened down the sleeves would be captured and would not move. I'm counting on that being true, because the ~.013" slop, I'm hoping, will allow my control arms to bolt up without putting a side load on the strut itself. If not, I have a few options. One is to get the same rod ends that Terry did and have offset bushings made. The other, and I think I'll try this first if I need to, is to take a 5/8" bolt, cut a section out, and drill a 12mm hole offset in it, then use this to space top of the strut within the monoball at the camber plate without any preload. The last is to cut the tube with the threaded tube ends off and start over. The first two seem like it would work, so hopefully the third will not be needed.

I don't think the quick steer knuckles would have any effect on bumpsteer. Ackerman yes, bumpsteer no. Have you checked out the bumpsteer FAQ? It might help you out: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=103886

Maybe it was Amir...

Maybe it was Amir...

Works better than you might expect. Shoot for .8V at WOT, get a QUALITY sensor. I used a one wire Bosch. Some people have had trouble with cheaper sensors.

A drop spindle would move the spindle closer to the top of the strut. Terry's mod is more like the "bumpsteer" spacers we use in the front. It doesn't change the position of the spindle, only moves the control arm down. There is another guy, JAMIE T, who really did something similar to a drop spindle. I looked and couldn't find the thread with the pics, but he was using Z32 spindles, and he made his own strut housing which the Z32 spindlle bolted onto. Very trick setup, but I seem to remember that he gave up on his project, or at least shelved it long term.

You only rotate the outer piston (that faces the rotor). The inner piston cannot rotate. If the piston is rotated all the way in, then that is not your problem. The other likely issue is that the top huge part of the caliper is seized up and won't slide on the bottom part. You should take the two sides apart and then clean the groove where they slide on each other and put a little anti-seize on there so that they move smoothly. I bet that'll fix it.

Mine was an "RPM Super Kit" that I got through the Volvo dealer I worked for many years ago. One other option on the roll pins is to keep the stock ones and run safety wire through them. I got that trick from Dennis Hale, he said that the issue with the stock roll pins isn't that they shear off, its that they slide out under vibration.

Hehe, yeah, Daytons... that's the wrong kind of 13's there Crispy. Don't kid yourself and think that you'd never see a fast Z with 13's on it though... I know that I'm on the losing side of this argument. Always have been. I think I was getting a little defensive early on in this post too, sorry about that Duke and Brad Man. But here's the point I was trying to make: look at the ANGLE of BRAAP's rear control arms, and look at how LOW the body of the car is. Compare that to Terry's car, where he just did this modification: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=114994 just to get the roll center above ground again. Don't get me wrong, Terry is a SMART guy, but he's also the ONLY one that I know of who has gone to the trouble to "fix" the roll center issue caused by running the bigger wheels and lowering the car enough to make it "look right". If you're going to run big wheels and you want your car to be REALLY fast, like on the road course or autox track fast, you're going to need to do a lot of little things to get it there. I've got LOTS of mods to fix roll center on my car which will run 23.5" tall tires on 15" rims. If you just want to slap big wheels on and take pictures and impress your friends with how huge your wheels are, or if you're only concerned about going in a straight line then have at it. Most, nearly all of the guys with the huge wheels just slap them on and run it. It's about looks more than about speed. Nothing looks slower to me than a Z with 10" of ground clearance, no suspension travel, and a wheel well stuffed full of a 60 lb combo of 18" rims with 30 series tires.

All I can tell you is I've changed quite a few tires in my life, and the general rule is that the larger the wheel, the heavier the thing is going to be. Ever changed a 20" rim back to back with a 16" rim on a truck? I have, and although they might both have a 29" diameter the the 20" combo is heavier by a good 15-20 lbs. All this plus size stuff is good to a point, but there is a point at which, like you say, the inertia from the weight of the larger wheel is a detriment to the acceleration and handling of the car. Rotational inertia is the worst kind to have, so putting big blingy wheels on a Z is about my least favorite modification. And again, even if the wheels are light, the RIM is larger in diameter, so a 15" wheel and tire combo that weighs 40 lbs will have less inertia than a 18" wheel and tire combo that is the SAME diameter. There's no getting around that.

Well maybe you have a point tannji. To me Alb was new and different. The houses are a lot different looking than I'm used to. The food was great. The mountains were pretty. I didn't look at the crappy parts of town, only the nicer areas. The places that I went to and the houses that I looked at and even the people that I talke to were really nice, so that left me with a good impression. Like I said my wife's take was that it was an economically depressed city, but we were mostly focused on Tijeras once we found that house. That would be really perfect for us, too bad we can't just drop everything and move right now or I'd do it. I think you're right about CO, and maybe 12 years ago I would have been more excited about a "new house in the suburbs" but damn, I was so turned off by the never-ending seas of tract homes that I just don't think I could do it. I think I'll let you keep Iowa all to yourself... Mike, that's kind of what I'm thinking. Buy in an inflated market, sell in an inflated market. I mean even if the housing values go WAY down, it's still a better deal for me to have a mortgage and get the tax bennies from owning the home. I can't imagine rent would drop precipitously if the housing bubble were to burst, so what I'm really gauging is how my mortgage would comparte to my rent. If the two are close (and they are), and I get the big tax break, then it's still a good thing. And bottom line is that everyone needs a place to live, so as long as the population of our country keeps growing the value of a home should continue to trend upwards as more people eventually need a house to live in. That may be a really long term perspective, but that's my own "worst case scenario" Plan Z type of thing. I hear quite a few people talking East Coast and I appreciate the invite, I just can't get the woman to want to get out there. I was pretty excited about North Carolina, but she just doesn't want to budge, so that's that. I think that's the reason she isn't very interested in Texas. Too far away from the Left Coast.

I appreciate the post denny. The problem is I'm getting royally screwed on my taxes because I'm currently renting. I pay $1350/mo rent, so why not buy a house and get thousands back in taxes at the end of the year? The main focus is going to be finding a house that I want to live in for a while. I don't mind if it loses some value in the near term so long as I can stick it out long enough so that the value rises again and makes me some profit in the long term. In the near term I'll just enjoy the fat tax return at the end of the year. None of this is going to happen for about 6 months, so I'm kind of hoping that if the market is going to tank it will just hurry up and tank. Then maybe I can move closer to family and still afford the mortgage. We'll see.

Hey guys, I'm not calling you all ricers for having a strut bar. I'm not calling myself a ricer either. I'm just saying that the first 50 or 60 strut tower bars that I ever saw were on Honda's which also had CAI's and usually the $300 Nology wires. I'd say a good 90% also had a fart can on the back, and that was about the extent of their modifications. Strut bars are icing on the cake, they're not the main course, if you get my drift.

Not really. It doesn't change the height of the car, instead this lowers the outer pivot of the control arm. In simple terms if the control arm is level and the car gets a large lateral load, no jacking effect is produced. If the control arm angles up from the inboard to the outboard pivot, and you introduce the lateral load, the side load will compress the suspension. If it angles down, it will extend the suspension. That's the simple version. In reality there is weight transfer that compresses the outside suspension, so what you get by having the control arm point down is the effect of slightly reducing the body roll that you would have with the control arm level, or maybe more significantly reducing it from what it would be with the control arm pointing upwards. The other ways to combat roll are with larger sway bars and stiffer springs. So you can get the same amount of roll in a car by raising the roll center, not raising the roll center and adding heavier sway bars, or by lowering the roll center and adding stiffer springs and/or sway bars. If the roll center is REALLY high, like an old Baja Bug for instance, the suspension might extend drastically with a side load and tend to want to make the car roll over. But Zs, especially the ones with really big wheels like Terry has, generally are lowered to the point where the roll center is underground, and that, plus the fact that they're now running low in the travel, means that seriously stiff springs must be used, or you're driving around on the bumpstops.

You've got this backwards I think. Rims weigh more than tires. Aluminum weighs more than rubber. Same diameter for same diameter the one with more tire weighs a LOT less, unless you're talking about super high dollar racing magnesium rims.

Sounds like a stroke of luck to me.

What are you going to do with the car? If you're drag racing you'll want a larger wheel in the back. If you're just driving on the street, you'll want close to the same or the same size tires front and back. IMHO the 225/50/15 is the perfect size tire for a street Z. Fits under stock fenders with stock suspension and does the job just fine. Get anything wider and you'll start having to roll fenders or go to coilovers, flare the car, etc. Get anything taller and you'll have issues with getting the car low enough to "look right". You'll end up severely compromising the suspension geometry and available travel unless you do some pretty intense modifications to fix these issues.