JMortensen

No it doesn't. If you don't change the shims between the bearings the pinion preload won't increase by tightening the nut. If you don't change the shims under the pinion head then the pinion depth won't change by tightening the nut. I think if anything you've experience the placebo effect. My feathers aren't ruffled either, I just want to make sure we're not giving out inaccurate information here.

Both of you guys marked the pulley on the backside. Kinda hard to read the marks back there. Looking at the pics, I think my Euro damper is a little simpler though and can be more easily marked on the front side.

Heh, heh. Maybe you might want to mark the other side...

Looks pretty damn sweet to me. Sounds like there was no step-by-step on this one. I'd be curious to see what kind of difference if any was felt by adding the splitter, or the diffuser, or the X in between the engine and the radiator. I see so many ideas that I've tossed around in my own head implemented there... wow.

Good photos!!! Wish I had shots like that of my car! Looks like you're in need of some more rear roll stiffness or maybe just stiffer springs all around...

One suggestion I would make to Cameron is to box the ends of the structure. I had mine open like John's, and then when I added bars down to the sway bar mount I closed the open ends off. Made the brackets a lot stiffer. Mine also stick out higher and farther than John's which meant that I could run a straight bar instead of having to bend it over the valve cover, but you can see where mine had to be shaped differently for air filter clearance.

Agreed. I know I've said all this before, but here it goes again: I did a tank slapper into a 360 spin at an autox once, and when the car stopped I smacked my head against the roof above the door really hard. Hard enough that I saw stars with the helmet on. This is the main reason why I don't feel like you're safer riding around with a full cage in your street car. There already isn't enough room for your head as it is, last thing we want is to encroach on the remaining space. I think this is also the reason why cars keep getting taller and taller. You might have "headroom" when your head is an inch away from the roof, but see what happens when the car flips upside down! The push for safety means that the roof and door pillars keep getting farther and farther away. I guess the downside there is the center of gravity gets higher and higher, probably more so because the windows are also getting larger and larger.

Don't do this. It won't work on a R180 since it has a solid spacer. Tightening the nut farther won't do anything at all, until you strip the threads off the pinion. If the R180 had a crush sleeve, and it DOESN'T, then tightening the pinion nut more would increase the amount of pressure on the pinion bearings, but pinion depth on the R180 and R200 is set by means of shims behind the bearings pressed onto the pinion head, so you'd have to disassemble the diff and pull the bearing off, put more shims in, reinstall the bearing, then the gears would not mesh correctly even if you reset the backlash and all the rest. Paz8, you might want to read the FSM and become familiar with the diff. I think you somehow got a bit confused there.

Double and triple check your vacuum hose routing. I had a noise very similar to this when I installed my new truck engine. It almost sounded like it was coming from the AFM. I screwed around with it for a couple weeks and finally took it to a shop and they found that everything was correct except two vacuum hoses were switched. Doesn't sound anything like intake/exhaust leak to me.

How exactly does that work? Is there something different about the R180? On all the diffs I've put together (probably about 10) the driveshaft is directly connected to the pinion. Any reduction in play means that the pinion and ring gear need to move closer together. Closer together means changing the backlash or the pinion depth, but you can't just change that to get rid of the play in the driveshaft, at least on the diffs that I've put together anyway. The pattern has to be centered on the ring gear teeth (pinion depth) and the backlash has to be correct or the thing will chew itself to pieces.

You might also check with some other autoxers and find out what they think about Quaifes. I'd rather have the clutch style myself.

I removed the radio when I bought my Z back in 95 or 96. Never reinstalled, it was my DD for 5 or 6 years.

Could you cut your A pillar bar and make a halo bar instead? The halo bar could then be more closely fitted to the roof.

It doesn't look like the best choice. Search "flux core" and you'll get more info on the non-gas mig setup. It probably could be used to do the bodywork, but it wouldn't be anywhere near my first choice.

Good job catching it early!

You're not measuring the backlash when you twist the driveshaft. I suppose you might call it frontlash. Anyway, it's a hell of a lot larger amount of movement then when you open the diff and measure the backlash. I wouldn't pull the diff for the movement on the driveshaft. If it were making some horrible grinding noise or something then I think you might have a reason to tear into it. As to rebuilding the R200, I'd just replace instead unless you have a particularly hard to find gear ratio. The clunk could be stub axle splines are loose, front diff mount is dead, mustache bar bushings are dead, control arm bushings dead, etc.

Unless you've rotated your crank damper 30 degrees you can just line the timing marks up on the damper. No need to put anything through the spark plug hole.

First, please try to use proper punctuation. It makes your post easier to read. As far as the timing issue goes, you really need a light. Go to Harbor Freight, or order from them online. You can get a timing light for $12.99: http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=3343 As far as pulling the oil pump, that's something you should rarely if ever have to do. Timing should be adjusted with the bolts on the distributor. There is a 10mm bolt in the front and an 8mm bolt in the back. You can loosen them both and rotate the distributor to change the timing. You should have something like a 40 degree sweep, so that should get you where you need to be. On the rare occasion that it doesn't, then the oil pump needs to be removed and the distributor drive repositioned. Very rare that this would happen though, and it usually does when the engine is rebuilt and the shaft is installed in the wrong position. The ZXT had non-adjustable timing. The NA version had the adjustable timing as previously mentioned, so disregard the sticker from the ZXT. If you are running vacuum advance you'll probably want the timing at about 10 degrees BTDC at idle, if you're not then more like 17 or 18 degrees. I don't know why you messed with the cam timing, or how you figure that you got it at 20 degrees BTDC, but I'm actually fairly doubtful that either of those things happened. The cam sprocket only has 3 holes in it, 0 degrees, 4 degrees early, and 4 degrees retarded. You actually have to pull the cam sprocket off, rotate the gear, and hook it back up to adjust cam timing. If you did this and weren't aware of what you were doing, theres a 99% chance that you would have lost the tensioner and wouldn't have been able to get the sprocket back on the cam. You're not complaining about that, so I don't think that the cam timing has really been messed with at all. We don't email responses here, it defeats the purpose of the forum. The responses stay on the forum, that way if someone else has the same problem, they can look and see your post and the answer given.

I used a thermoswitch from the lower rad hose of a 240SX. It is set to come on at ~210 degrees and turns off again at ~185. It comes in it's own metal tube that you just splice into the lower rad hose, then I have a relay powering the fan itself which is wired straight to the battery and doesn't have anything to do with the stock harness.

Search Kameari and you'll find out all about the tensioner. I think one of it's biggest advantages is that you can shave the crap out of the head and not have to mess with shimming the cam towers, but that's not all its good for.

That's cool, thanks for posting the results. It is nice to verify what you believe to be true.

Weird. Well your AFRs look really good to me. I'm sure you're dialed in better than 99% of triple carbed cars out there. I think you might be right about the MSD or Crane or whatever you have throwing off the numbers below 3000. So maybe a leaner idle jet??? I have locked down a couple ZX distributors. I don't know if it's going to fix your problem necessarily, but I did it to reduce the possibility of timing scatter, and because the POS vacuum advance mechanism was already broken on mine (like all of them). When I pulled mine apart the reluctor had been hitting the stator for some time. The teeth on the stator were partway worn off. Not good.

Easiest/cheapest way IMHO to figure out what your tripled car is doing is to install a narrowband one wire O2 sensor into the exhaust and read the voltage with a voltmeter. I used a $25 Bosch O2 and a $6 HF voltmeter and a $2 O2 sensor bung from a local exhaust shop, and I learned more about what my car was doing in the next 2 weeks than I had in two months of trying to read plugs and smelling the exhaust, etc. It's not as good as wideband, but it will get you into the ballpark. .8V is about right for WOT at about 13:1 AFR, and I think about .5 or .6 is right for cruise AFR of about 14:1. I was always concerned about the WOT, and not the cruise. I tried to look it up online but couldn't find the narrowband voltage/AFR scale anywhere... TJ- "Can't get the idle down after its warm" is a familiar problem to me. When I first installed Mikunis I had a situation where I'd drive my car to an autox 2 hours away and when I'd get off the freeway it would idle at 2000 rpm. Drive around for a bit and it would suddenly drop down to normal again. The problem in my case was the carburetor synchronization was way off. In fact I had to shorten one of the linkage rods because I couldn't synch them the way they were installed on the car (I pieced together my linkage). Dan, the fact that you need to run premium is weird. At 9:1 compression you should probably be able to run 87 without any trouble. I was just at my brother-in-law's place and he was able to run 87 with 35* total advance on the ZX distributor with SU's. There shouldn't really be any reason that the triples would make your car more likely to ping. You might be very lean up top if you're getting pinging on 89 octane. But you'd know for sure with a ~$30 investment.