JMortensen

Do not, DO NOT install the proportioning valve in the front line. If a proportioning valve were truly proportional, that would work fine, but they aren't. They actually have a "knee" in the pressure level. So they'll work linearly to a point, then they hit the knee and the pressure drops off from there. So if you REALLY stomp on the brakes you'll have less front brakes with the prop valve in front. That means a spin is more likely the faster you go and the harder you stomp the brake pedal. BAAAAAD IDEA! Info: http://www.stoptech.com/tech_info/wp_proportioning_valves.shtml

Matman has a whole buttload of 240 doors. He's in CA, but I bet he'd give you a deal.

Phyxius pretty much said he wasn't going to make them. If someone else did, I would definitely up for buying 4 1.65mm clutches.

Yeah, my brother in law lives outside of Sac in Greenwood. It's nice, but his place is $400K and is about what we want, so that's about $150K out of our price range. Sac has it all with regards to motorsports, that's for sure. Surprisingly Boise has 11 autoxes a year, although there is no big track around, and I was just starting to really get into the big track thing. One track day is like 1000 autoxes all in one day.

Can't remember seeing a stock cam with a red stripe. My current cam has a yellow, white, and orange stripe IIRC. I'm sure that's the way the cam grinder kept track of it when it was reground, so I would guess that it might be an aftermarket cam. Good luck figuring out what it is from that red spot though.

Well I got back from Boise Thursday evening. The drive from Seattle to Boise is about what the drive up the central valley of CA on I5 is like. Theres a couple hundred miles of NOTHING. Enough about the drive though. The bad news: Boise is flat. I thought it was going to be mountainous terrain, trees and all that. It's in friggin Idaho, right? Nope. Flat as a pancake except the North and East sides which get into some foothills, and housing in these areas is $400 to $600K and up. No trees except where they've been planted. The city of Boise is tiny. Coming from Seattle I expected this, but it was even more tiny than I expected when I got there. Boise is an older city, but I'd guess that 80% of the homes in the greater Boise area are less than 30 years old. So there is this core of old homes downtown, then basically it sprawls out into the flat, featureless farmland to the west. Subdivisions and tract homes and strip malls stretch out from Boise for about 20 miles to the south and west. So in the flat, featureless farmland they're building boring cookie-cutter houses, which is what we'd likely be buying. There is a suprising amount traffic to and from Boise in the morning and afternoon rush hour, although everyone was telling us that to get from Nampa (farthest west suburb) to Boise took about 35 minutes. It's probably only 10 miles, so 35 minutes means you're moving slow, but still moving. I think we saw the gay Boisean and the black one too. Not a whole lot of diversity. Not a whole lot of rock music either. Lots of country, which ain't my thang y'all. The good news: If you are willing to live in the sprawl and commute to work, you can buy a 2500 sq ft house with a 3 car garage that's a couple years old on a 1/2 acre lot for about $250K, probably less if you looked farther from the city than we did. The people are incredibly friendly. The restaurants had universally good food. We went to a restaurant right downtown about 6 blocks from the capitol building, I got a large filet mignon and mashed potato dinner, my wife got beef stew and mashed potatoes, we walked out with a bill for $25! Gas was $.20/gal cheaper. Food was cheaper. Hotel was cheaper. Just the general cost of living is better. It's easy to find your way around town. Coming from Seattle, which is a nightmare to navigate with bridges and tunnels and streets that meet at weird angles and change names for no reason, I found trying to find addresses in Boise incredibly easy. LOTS of nature. Get into the foothills and there's all kinds of mountain biking, hiking, fishing, hunting, etc. Apparently the forestry roads are pretty popular with the moutain bikers, so within 30 minutes drive you can be on any number of logging roads having a good time. The home prices are appreciating very quickly, so buying in Boise looks to be a good investment. So there it is. Boise is still on the short list, but we're thinking hard about other places too. Still want to check out Albuquerque and Colorado Springs has been mentioned a bunch lately too.

Mike is right on about the pay scale. I have my own small mail order biz and I net about 10-15% of the total sales, and I don't even have a brick and mortar store! So your previous employer was actually being pretty generous giving you 27% of the profit on your computer repair job. About your location, I can't speak to IN because I've never been there, but there is also a reason to move AWAY from the more populated areas. My wife and I could buy a house here in Seattle, but we'd have to live out on the outskirts of town and her commute would be 3 or 4 times longer than it is where we rent, and we'd probably be in a crappy little house. Crime is high here, and we pay $500/yr for car registration. Sales tax is 9%, gas is expensive, etc. We really wanted to move back to CA, but the home we owned there 5 years ago is now WAY out of our price range, and we don't want to buy in a gang infested neighborhood that we can afford. For that reason we've been looking all over the country at possible places to relocate. I certainly wouldn't move to a depressed area, but there's plenty of small town places across the country that aren't depressed, and moving to the big city just reduces your buying power. For example, if you make $8/hr I certainly rather do that in Indiana than in NYC. In NYC you'd be extra screwed with that kind of money coming in. Compare rent in Indiana vs NYC and take a look at the cost of living indices for both and you'll see what I mean. If you look on the internet you can find all kinds of statistics about this kind of thing. We just visited Boise, ID. Unemployment under 4%, cost of living is less than the national average, crime is low, etc. Not commited to moving there after visiting, but visiting was worthwhile and it is still on the short list. If you do decide to move, check sites like these: http://www.city-data.com/ http://www.findyourspot.com/ http://www.homefair.com/homefair/calc/salcalc.html

Yep. Like SpeedRacer it's never been a problem for me finding a windshield, and never expensive either. I've had my Z windshields replaced 3 times in various cars. In one I got it replaced and less than a week later caught a big rock from a 4x4 right in my line of sight. That sucked. Anyway, I also had the seal, and I think I paid less than $150 for the windshield with the blue tint at the top, which was slightly more expensive than the non tinted kind.

Get a wood baseball bat and a friend you trust. Stick the bat between the tire and the wheel well. Depending on your tire to fender gap you might have to put the small end in first. Put it in far enough that the bat hits the tire and the fender. Then have your trusted friend SLOWLY roll the car forward so that the bat rolls between the fender and tire as the car moves. It will bend the inner edge of the fender in. You can do this several times, bending a bit more each time, and that is much safer than shoving the bat way in there and trying to get it all at once. You can also push on the bat to change the angle of the bend if need be. I should point out that I've never actually rolled fenders myself, but I've been the trusted friend 2 or 3 times. It really didn't look that hard and if I needed my fenders rolled I wouldn't hesitate to give it a shot at this point. Or buy one of these: http://www.eastwoodco.com/jump.jsp?itemID=6159&itemType=PRODUCT

Buy from the station that everyone goes to. Their gas doesn't sit in the tanks as long. Also don't buy premium from the Arco in the bad part of town, because even though that station might be busy, chances are not too many people are buying premium there. I like Chevron and Mobil brands personally. In CA I ran into a random octane and pump meter checker a few years back. I don't think it was a federal thing, just CA, but I saw this guy doing a test and asked what it was for and it was to check octane and make sure that the meter wasn't overclocked. Did a search and found this: http://www.ocagcomm.com/wm_petroleum_products.asp That is more elaborate than the rig I saw, and it wasn't in Orange County either, but there's one example of how it is checked anyway. Now you got me curious so I looked and found another tester for a different county, Sonoma, CA: http://www.sonoma-county.org/agcomm/weights_measures/qanda.htm So apparently it is by county in CA anyway...

It's also a lot nicer for the engine if you don't start it with the clutch depressed. If it is, then you're pushing on the back end of the crankshaft. There is no oil pressure, so the crank is basically riding on the thrust bearing while you start it, until the pressure comes up. If you can start a car in neutral with the clutch out, you should.

Good to know!

Mill scale. I see. It definitely wasn't rust. I also had some plate with a bluish tinted coating that really resisted a grinder with a flap wheel on it. Any idea what that is?

I don't think the flywheel is the problem. You need to have the correct collar for the throwout bearing that matches the pressure plate (240 has a different height pp than a 280, but the flywheels are interchangeable). You mentioned that in your above post, but don't say what was done to fix it if anything. If the local Z shop couldn't tell you for sure if the clutch master and slave needed replacing before they replaced them, I'd take it to another shop. Clutch hydraulics are about as easy as it gets. The clutch actuation is pretty easy to verify. Step on the clutch and watch the pin push on the throwout fork. If you step on the clutch and the pin doesn't move or barely moves, then either the master or slave is bad. They usually get replaced as a pair. At this point I'd check the free play between the fork and the pin in the slave. You can do this by grabbing the fork and pushing it back and forth. If it doesn't have any free play that would be a problem, but that would usually show up as a clutch that won't engage. I think more likely you'll find that there is a whole bunch of free play, and the reason the clutch won't disengage is because the wrong collar is in there and the clutch hydraulics just don't have enough throw. Rather than fixing it by putting an extra long adjustable slave in there, I'd just get the right collar for the throwout bearing. Doing it the other way is like fixing a distributor that got installed a tooth off by rotating the spark plug wires around the cap. http://www.zparts.com/zptech/articles/trans_swap%20parts/4tobear_specs1.html EDIT--If the flywheel was too thick than the clutch wouldn't be able to engage, because the stack of the flywheel, clutch disk, pp, throwout bearing and collar wouldn't have enough room in the bellhousing. That would mean that there would be constant pressure on the pressure plate, meaning the clutch would slip, not that it wouldn't disengage. You need to find another shop IMO if they're getting confused by this problem and are thinking that the "thick" flywheel is preventing the clutch from engaging.

I used acetone on my DOM before welding that first time but it didn't take the coating off. I don't think mine was scale or oxidation. It was some protective coating put on by the metal distributor I'm sure. The other metal (sheet, plate, and tube) that I've gotten from various sources has all been greased. This one place doesn't sell it greased and you can handle it without getting your hands dirty, but it doesn't weld right unless you sand that top layer of crap off.

The first piece of DOM tubing I got had a coating on it. I couldn't figure out what the hell was up with it, but I couldn't weld it for ****. Then I finally wised up and used a die grinder with a sanding disk and took the coating off. In this case the coating wasn't really apparent at first, it almost looked like it wasn't coated at all. Once the sandpaper started cutting though you could see the difference though, and the welds were 100% better after removing it.

Z cages for road racing are usually .120, for drag I think they're .134. This is for the main structural parts. Other braces and bars can have less wall thickness.

I want to say your main hoop is illegal for SCCA racing. You're allowed 180 degrees with a max of 4 bends. The one picture is at a weird angle, but it looks like the main hoop starts inside the wheel well then curves out towards the side of the car, then I'd imagine it goes back towards the middle. Also, I think there was a thread a while back where we discussed a similar setup (maybe it was yours ???) and it seems like you lose a lot of side impact protection with the main hoop that far inside the car. So if you were to roll it and the car landed on the driver's side, it would crush you before the cage ever got involved.

My Z hasn't fallen off of the rotisserie that I built out of a mix of 1/8" and 3/16" tubing either, and I just welded up my rollbar the other day. Put voltage all the way up and did some test welds, looked like it penetrated just fine, so I just zipped it on up. Hopefully I'll never have to tell you whether those welds held up...

The main issue for me was also the 110V vs 220V. Especially renting, can't really justify the expense of the 220 and the electrician to wire up the garage for it too. And as a side note, I bought my welder to weld on my car, and nothing I'll ever weld for the car will be thick enough to justify 220V power. It could be that in a year I'll decide I want to weld a trailer together or something, but I'm not anticipating running out of welder anytime soon.

If you search there is a thread that shows the Timesert (like a Helicoil) that threads into the hydraulic head and allows you to screw in the manual adjusters. Then you can run whatever cam you want.

Why would that impair it? The big issue with swaybars is getting them to pivot freely without hitting the frame or suspension. Seems to me that this setup allows it to pivot a lot better. The twist can still happen, and when it does the clamps will rotate around the rod ends. At least that's what I think would happen. If you wanted to prevent the bar from twisting you'd need a bolt all the way through the swaybar and into the chassis. Then the bolt would take all the twisting load. That's what I'm thinking anyway. Regardless, I don't think you'd see it on a high dollar TransAm car if it didn't work. I know that's not the best way to determine if something is a good idea or not, but it's backup for my own idea of how this would work.

If this is an early car, 70 or early 71, then the strap is too far forward. This is because the early cars had the diff 1" forward from where the later cars did. The solution is to move the strap back, and bolt it into only the rear hole, or better yet mod the front diff mount mod so that the diff can't lift like Clifton did and then get rid of the strap completely. The strap is necessary if you are running the stock front diff mount, but IMO that whole setup sucks, and there are enough EASY solutions like Clifton's that messing with the strap is just a waste of time.

Step 1: Steal engine Step 2: ? Step 3: PROFIT

Lighter flywheel will have less inertia, so less acceleration after you let off the gas. That's why an engine with a light flywheel revs up AND down faster than a heavy flywheel. I would assume it would also change direction faster as well.