JMortensen

I also have a MM135 that I'm still learning on. I think the variable voltage is DEFINITELY a plus for sheet metal welding, which is pretty much all I've done. I don't think it's nearly as critical for welding 1/8" plate, but when you're working with the really thin stuff it sure comes in handy.

Just did the Picklex thing. A rotisserie sure helped here! Sprayed down the seam and brushed it in. Let it sit for about 5 minutes. Looked from underneath and sure enough you could see the Picklex coming through very nicely. Spun the car rightside up and hit the top side of the seam thoroughly. Made a paint brush extender so that I could brush it in all down the sides and in the corners. I think it's good to go as far as that's concerned. I'm going to let it dry overnight since it is 50º and raining here. Tomorrow, I will weld. The next day, paint in the Zero Rust.

Weird. I thought I replied and its not here. Anyway, I did a little research on Ospho and Picklex20 and it turns out they have the same active ingredient, phosphoric acid. The Picklex is less concentrated so it doesn't have to be washed off and it's thin. This is nice for me since the car isn't getting out of the garage until it's off the rotisserie and the thin liquid should get into the crevices better. Rufus, I'd love to sandblast it but I really don't want to do that in the garage. A friend of mine blasted a long joint where he was welding a trunk on his 510 and sand was forever in everything in the garage. Even today a couple years later you can move crates or boxes and there is sand outline around everything. I have my entire drivetrain in the garage, not to mention all of my tools. Just don't want to risk it.

Mike is right IME. I had 4x4 calipers and early ZX rear disks. Last time out (granted it was 114º) my brakes lasted 5 laps. To be fair I wasn't conserving them. But I did boil the ATE Super Blue fluid in the front within 5 laps. I had figured on bleeding between sessions. But they wouldn't even make it to the end of a 20 min session. The vented 4x4 setup has an enormous advantage over the non vented rotor. A lot of the VARA guys running CP3 and CP3M are running the vented 4x4 brakes with 300 hp L6s and staying on the track. I think tires has something to do with it too. With my slicks I think I can put quite a bit more heat into the brakes than somebody on street tires or even a narrower DOT. Still everyone was having problems with brakes that day as I recall, and my friend put a hole in a piston, I mean it was the worst day at the track I've ever had. Never again will I go out in heat like that.

Well after several more hours in the garage I have more pictures: I scraped all the seam sealer out of the other side under the dash. That was the easy part. Then I looked in the cowl. I could see that there were a couple of big tarry globs in there. Everywhere there was a big tarry glob of crap, there was rust. Remember that area around the cowl vent that was all rusty? On the other side was a gigantic glob of tar that was about 1" deep and went all the way across the vent on the firewall side. It was REALLY hard to get off, but I did. So now I think the plan is to start with some Picklex20 to neutralize the rust. Weld in angle sheet around the vent. Stitch the rest. Weld a plate to attach the strut tower bars to. Brush in the Zero Rust on both sides. That's pretty much it. I think that should be enough. EDIT--Re seam seal the seam using Austin's 3M stuff. I did figure out that one of my old strut tower bar mounts was connected to a vertical brace in the cowl. The other wasn't. You can see the outline where it was welded on in one of the above pics. Oops. Well I guess I'm learning about all of my previous mistakes.

Very Buster Keaton-esque! You've got my vote!!!

Well the other option is to bend up a couple of angles of sheet and attach to the good metal away from the rust. I did stitch some mildly rusty areas in the back of the car with pretty good luck and not too many blow throughs. I kind of focused in on the bad area. Around that one spot the rust is pretty light. I have my strut tower bars connecting in there so I would like it to have SOME strength...

280ZXT had 6 bolt CVs. Those can work with the 280ZX companion flange on the 240Z's 25 spline stub axle, as described in the 240Zhalfshaftconversion link above. The 300ZXT's all had 4 bolt on the outer end AFAIK, but the inside is different because the VLSD has a larger stub shaft with more splines than the CLSD. To recap: So if you get the 88 SS VLSD, you have to have the VLSD CV shafts. I believe this works with the MM Z31 adapters. Check with Ross if you're going this way. If you run the 280ZXT CV shafts, you have to have the 280ZXT companion flange on the 25 spline 240Z stub axle with the mods detailed on Pete's site, or you can buy the necessary adapter from MM for either the 27 spline 280Z stubs or the 25 spline 240Z stubs. If you run the 300ZXT CV's, then you need the necessary adapter from MM. MM also makes the new billet 5 lug stub axles and companion flanges for all of the above.

Thanks, Larry. I'm looking particularly for something that will penetrate. I also have some Picklex20, which is thin and I think will penetrate too. It doesn't coat though. It stops the rust, but doesn't convert it into any kind of sealed coating. You can weld right through the new surface, and it is supposed to improve weld strength. About the Ospho or naval jelly... can you weld to the surface after you treat it, or do you then have to wire wheel it, basically removing the coating, then weld it. That would seem backasswards if you had to do it that way.

I was going to stitch weld the seam though. Suppose I should mention that...

It's pretty disassembled right now. The only things on it are the front and rear crossmembers and control arms. Everything else is off. The problem with sandblasting is that I have a pretty small garage, and I don't want sand in every little nook and cranny in the garage. Also the garage is on a hill and the concrete is not smooth so I can't really roll the car out, blast it, then roll it back in. I really don't want to sandblast if I don't have to. I have basically scraped and picked as much of the sealer out on one side as I could. Today the plan is to do the other side, then I was thinking about hitting it with a grinder with a wire wheel. I got a new wire wheel that has smaller knots that I think might get in there pretty good. Anyway, you'd sand blast it. Then what? I have Zero Rust, and I can go get naval jelly. I also have a lot of scrap sheet metal, but since there aren't any real holes I'm hoping to avoid any metal work if possible.

Nope. Not rotted through. What you see in the seam there is not the other side, it's the seam sealer that I was unable to pick out of there. So it isn't quite a hole to the other side. I'll take some pics of the cowl area on top and see what that looks like. Hard to see into some of those areas, but the camera should fit right in there.

I had seen that the seam sealer under the dash was cracking some years back when I did a repair under there, probably my clutch master replacement. Anyway, I have the car on the rotisserie now and I wanted to get in there and see what was up. Pulled the dash and scraped away some seam sealer and found some rust. It's really localized in the seam between the firewall and the cowl. My basic plan is to spin it upside down and spray some Zero Rust in there and hope that it seeps down in and gets everything, but I thought I would ask here and see if anyone has a better idea for me.

Must be a firefox bug. Opened it with IE and the pics came up fine...

Nah, ever since that thread a month ago I've been religiously wearing my bukake shield. Better safe than sorry!

Hmm... wonder why don't I see anything?

Did you forget a link or an image, or are you just telling us about your day???

I have the ACT 225mm clutch with a stock disk and like it. My stock setup was lacking with the SU's and cam and headwork, I'd guess putting down about 200 hp. When I switched to triples it was all over. The stock unit was way too weak. I like the agressive pp and the non agressive clutch because it is easier to drive on the street, and that was my focus when I got it. I suppose you'd reduce rotating mass a little bit with John's suggestion. Probably chew up flywheels and pressure plates too, if you care. Stock pieces aren't exactly hard to come by.

I had two lifts in one shop I worked at. So I had a Toyota Celica on the one rack and I had ordered an oil filter from parts. Did a brake job on the Jeep on the other rack, pulled another car in, fixed it, you know, just working along. Then a couple hours later one of the sales guys asked if the Celica was ready. "Five minutes" I said forgetting that it had no filter on it. Dropped it down, put 5 quarts of oil in it, fired it up and started to move it out of the shop when I realized I had laid down a Exxon Valdez size slick all over my area, not to mention the mess it made of the car. I think the oil slick was worse than driving a Civic down the street with no oil, realizing what I had done, driving it back and putting oil in it. The Civic didn't seem to mind at all, and there was no cleanup on that one. Worse story, only 1/2 mine. The Porsche shop I worked at had an oil gun which you could use to fill the oil and it would tell you how much you had put in, kind of like a gas pump. My boss is doing an oil change, phone rings, he LEAVES THE OIL GUN IN AND ANSWERS THE PHONE. I'm doing a timing belt on a 944 so I'm not thinking anything of it until a couple minutes later when I keep hearing the pshh-clunk, pshh-clunk, pshh-clunk of the oil gun. 911's take a lot of oil, I think it was 11 quarts to an oil change. The gun had put out something like 30 quarts. THAT was a big oil slick. And slick it was. When I realized what was going on I stupidly RAN over to stop the oil gun. Oil + polished concrete + idiot running = completely horizontal 4 feet in the air resulting in head smacking on ground when landing. So my entire left side of my body was covered in Castrol 10W-30 and I had a nice headache going. I guess I figured since that thing had been pumping oil for 10 minutes, I had to run through the oil to shut it off as quickly as possible. Oil resistant soles my ***. If you want to talk driving when I was 17 I was taking my girlfriend to a dance. On the way to pick her up I bought a rose. The rose rolled off the seat and the thorns stuck my hand when I shifted. I looked down to see what was going on and when I looked up juniper branches were flying across the windshield. I had run over an island in the middle of the street and plowed through a bunch of LUCKILY only about 2' tall junipers. Bent the crap out of the rim but it still held air. Took her to the dance, dealt with the tire later...

I used to think the same thing, and it's a popular enough notion that it is something of an internet legend at this point. I proved myself wrong when I sat down and measured mine which came from a 280, and they were the same length as the ones johnc measured. Take a picture if you find one that isn't. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I don't think I am. Here's a link for more info: http://www.betamotorsports.com/benchracing/index.html Click that then go to R200 Handling Issues.

The big track is a lot harder to drive than autox IMHO. Autox penalizes for bad lines, but there is something about going 100+ miles an hour and seeing that turn coming up, and knowing that if you let off or brake too early you will lose time. That's the hardest part of the big track for me. Didn't help that I went to Buttonwillow the first couple times and they don't have any braking markers at all. Even trying to find a splotch in the pavement or a mark on the curbing can be tough there. The difference to me between race driving and street driving is not letting off. When I started I could drive pretty fast and not scare myself too bad if I let off and coast into a braking zone, but if I keep my foot in it until the last second then get hard on the brakes the scare effect is tenfold. The closer you get to running out of road the more of a dart throw it becomes. I had overcome this bad habit at autox, but when I got on the big track I found myself doing the same thing again. Much harder to get past it when the speeds were doubled.

Well coming from you that will be much appreciated! A lot of Jeromio and Terry in there too. I had thought of the same thing you mention with one of your little adjusters in the center. 5/8" threaded tube ends are readily available so it would be easy to just weld them right in. The only reason I ended up with what I ended up with was because I had that old strut tower bar right there, and I looked at those LH and RH thread rod ends and thought that they would work just fine. The only tough part for me as an extreme novice fabricator was aligning the threads so that the turnbuckle would work smoothly. I spent lots of time and ended up figuring out how to clamp both sides in a vise and weld so that they were pointed STRAIGHT at each other after I screwed it up the first time. Then I tapped my own aluminum tap tube for the turnbuckle and it worked, but not smoothly. Apparently I can not tap a hole straight. I finally bit the bullet and ordered a custom turnbuckle from Coleman for the center. It was ~$8 and with it in place everything works perfect.

http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=89111 We've each built our own toe adjuster that spreads the rear bushing mounts apart. Instead of making the rear part of the arm longer or shorter, we're pivoting it in or out. My concern earlier was that the carrier piece couldn't handle the misalignment, but as Terry pointed out that is not a problem. I was thinking of the angle of the control arm, but the carriers will remain parallel front to rear, and the toe change will occur as a function of the inner bearings, not the outer bearings.