JMortensen

Stock L24 redline was 7K. I think L28 was 6500, but I think that is a bit conservative. The first thing to go is the harmonic balancer, I had a stock F54 block with a 280ZX balancer and I put 40K miles on it racing and autoxing and driving it daily. I revved it to 7000 all the time, a couple times a little over. Then the balancer came apart and F'ed up the snout of the crank. No problems with rods or any of that. New engine is balanced and has a Euro damper. This one gets a 7200 redline. There is supposedly a bad crank harmonic issue at 7500, that's why I'm staying below that number. Get rid of the balancer and get a better one and you won't have any trouble at all at 6800 rpm IME.

What's funny is that your head is welded up so that it looks more like a P90 than an N42...

I'm thinking that Tokico struts are going to require Tokico gland nuts. The struts vary in dimension, so I'd really doubt that a Nissan gland nut would fit a Tokico strut properly. I think the thing to do is contact them directly and see if they can send you a couple nuts.

That was my thought too. Maybe too slow...

Well, it's almost done. Haven't put in the shoulder bar yet, and I need to make tabs to connect it to the roof. Everything went pretty smoothly. Biggest problem I had was that I couldn't get the bar exactly centered, it's about 3/8" closer to the driver side than the passenger. I kept screwing with it and it wasn't getting any better. The more I messed with it the closer the bar got to the sides of the car (it's about 3/8" on the driver side and that's with that big bump inside beaten down) so I finally just said screw it and started welding. This was a really scary project for me to tackle, because I had a couple hundred bucks in the material and have no easy way to fix it if I screwed up. Hopefully nobody will find major fault with it. I started thinking I was going to duplicate John's bar design on his website, ended up with something much more katman-ish... Here are the pics:

If you flip the bar you'd waste the halfshafts in short order. What isn't lining up? Maybe if you tell us what the problem is we can help you out a little better. What year is your car? R200 diff looks like? What isn't lining up?

Yeah, that's right.

You guys are pushing a hell of a lot of power through a single 9" clutch. Any of the drag guys ever tried a dual or triple 7.5"? Seems like that might be the next step for the really powerful L6 drag racers.

That's a little overdone for my tastes. It looks like race "art" that nobody would actually drive on the track. Maybe that's why it only has dyno time... I have been talking to my wife about converting an NPR to an enclosed tow vehicle for quite a while though, so that part was really interesting. I'm guessing that the way he modded that one would mean that the height of a Z wouldn't fit inside height wise. I know they make another model with a higher roofline, and that one almost looks channeled. Great idea regardless. 4 cyl turbo diesel made for hauling thousands of lbs, just basically got to make those long ramps easy to tear down and your in business.

In the How to Modify book they talk about drilling out the restricted orifice in the block. In the later version of the book they also talk about not needing to do that modification. I've done it on my engine. Last engine I built idled at 18 psi when hot, new one idles at 12, both had really close to identical bottom end bearing clearances. I could be full of it, but I always blamed the pressure difference on opening up the restriction in the block...

After careful consideration I don't think it needs to be. The key is probably there to keep the spindle pin from spinning in the strut housing.

70's don't have seatbelt retractors.

Anyone know how to do a thumbnail???

I might set projects aside, but I always come back to them... 9 months later. I think I have most of this figured out, but I want to get some advice on attaching the bar to the rocker. I've decided to do mine like katman did the cage in the old ITS article. That's what will work best with the way the main hoop is bent I think. I just can't really make out exactly what's going on from this old article scan: I think he's made a plate to go in the corner like this: But then his tubing looks so tucked back in the corner there. What I don't get is how the hell do you weld this in with the roll bar tube right in the way? Only thing I can come up with so far is to shape the plate, then weld the tube to it, then weld the plate to the rocker. Even then I don't think I'll be able to get the plate welded to the body in the far corner. Is that going to be a problem? I've only got one hoop and no bender so I don't want to F this up. Advice appreciated.

I like em. Saved me a lot of hassle trying to cut tubes to the right length and angle, and I also like that they don't hang down very far below the floor, since the stock rails on my car were pretty scraped up I assumed that losing another inch of clearance there would be a bad thing. I modified mine quite a bit because of my TC rod relocation project, but you might get some useful info out of that thread. I've linked to the page that has the most to do with the SFC's. http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=106974&page=2

Ideally the balancer and the flywheel are balanced independently of the rest. Those parts might need to be replaced at some point.

Unless the balancer was adjusted as part of the balancing of the engine, you are correct.

Yeah, I understand what you're saying, and I don't think full droop is going to be an issue on my car since I have camber plates and sectioned struts. What I'm more worried about is that there might be some bind in the CV at full compression. I guess I'll have to test it to know for sure, but the whole point of doing CV's for me was to eliminate the bind that happens for the same reasons with stock halfshafts.

I thought the 280 housings were an inch taller than the 240s in the back. This thread may help: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=92213

The spraybar is the better oiling system, when the spraybar isn't falling apart. PM Matman, he has 4 or 5 good spraybars in his stash. You could run the N42 cam, but you'd need to swap in the N42 cam towers. What does "I'm not + that I can run this cam" mean?

Sectioning struts is actually pretty darn easy. Rebuilding the strut top would be a big PITA, and I'd be really reluctant to take on that project. But that's me with my current skill set.

No. Octane booster generally sucks. It's the right stuff, don't get me wrong, but the little bottle doesn't have enough of it to do much of anything. When they say that it raises your octane one point, they mean from 92 to 92.1. If you search online you'll find lots of home brews for octane booster using Tolulene and Xylene. I have used them with good effect. Don't bother with the little bottles of octane booster though. Same thing (check the bottle, they usually show what's in it), but $8 for 8 oz, vs $8/gal at the paint store.

Sectioning the struts allows just as much travel as raising the strut top would. When you section the strut, you use a shorter insert, but that insert should have the same or close to the same travel as the stock unit. So you don't give up 2" of travel to get a 2" shorter strut, instead the internals of the strut are the put into a shorter case. The whole idea of sectioning is to get the car lower while retaining the same travel. If the strut went through the same amount of travel from the same ride height the camber changes would be nearly identical. What would change them more would be if you could change the lower control arm angle. If you get that pointing down, then you have more camber change as the suspension compresses than if it's already level or pointing up. My understanding of this issue comes basically from Terry, but I think I understand it after his explanation and pictures. I had thought that the negative camber increased until the LCA went level, then it decreased. He showed me that the negative camber continues to increase all the way through the travel, but it slows down quite a bit after the arm goes past level. So if you just wanted to keep camber consistent then running the arms pointing up would be the way to go, but that causes other issues that then have to be dealt with...

This is for later, but you don't have to run 105 octane. You'd probably get away with 95 or 96 octane. So you mix the 105 1:1 with 91 (CA, right?) and that gets your around 95.5. That's a lot cheaper than 105 octane.

Am I being dense, or does that basically mean that the CV shaft is going to bind at some point in the suspension travel? And if it binds when down, would it not bind when up too? The whole reason I did the CV conversion was to get away from binding the stock halfshafts. Haven't assembled and tested it for bind yet, now I'm hoping I didn't waste my $$$...