JMortensen

It's not the caster that causes the front end to wander. It's the camber and toe. In fact lots of Mercedes run 11º of caster, which is why when you see one parked with the wheels cranked they look broken. More caster makes it harder to steer and when you come out of a turn it makes the wheel return faster. Harder for you to turn = harder for bumps in the road to turn. For a street car reducing negative camber and running 1/8" toe in will all but cure the wandering front end. Not the most racey setup, but that's what works for the street. I used to have two lines painted on my tie rod for 1/8" toe in and 1/8" toe out. I'd go to the autox and jack the front end up and move that one tie rod. Should have been using more toe out than that, but that's what I was doing.

You have to consider how the valve is going to breathe when it is jammed right up next to the cylinder wall too. Even when the valve is fully open the cylinder wall is going to be right there. I would think that a smaller valve might actually breathe better than the larger valve unless you notched the block. What I'd suggest is that you lay the headgasket on the block and see how much you can take away before you get to the fire ring. I haven't done a L24, so I don't know how its going to turn out. If you can take a good amount out, like 1/16" or more then do it. If not, then it probably isn't worth the hassle. I'd also unshroud the valves in the head as well. If the chamber is the same size as the bore and both are opened up then you'll give the airflow a smooth path around the open valve. That's what you're shooting for.

I like an upright seat so it was an easy choice for me. 20* seems pretty reclined. You could probably measure where your seat is now and see which is closer for you.

10º layback. I got a 15" and I am 6' and ~190 lbs with a 34" waist. The main thing is how broad your chest is. Have someone help you measure. Stand against a wall and have the other person measure the distance from one side of your chest to the other about 1" below your armpits. I held two rulers under my arms and my wife made sure they were squared to the wall and then measured between them. I think I came out 14.5", but when I asked the guy he said go with the 15" because of the padding thickness. He was right, it fits like a glove.

Here's a link to a thread about my new Ultra-Shield seat: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=103817. Cheap and good support.

Have you tried fitting your seat in there and sitting in it? Normally the main hoop follows the curve of the car a little closer so that you have room to get the seat in. You might be OK depending on how tall you are, but that isn't the way they're normally done. I know my seat sticks out about 3 inches behind the hoop in a comfortable position for me and I'm 6' tall. How did you cut the pipes in front to fit the curve of the rocker? What type of saw? Going to be doing that type of cut pretty soon. I was trying to figure out what to use and had come up empty so far. Looks like yours turned out nice.

Mongo, that sounds more like improper maintenance than a "bad" lift. Sounds just like the screw was never lubed. You'd figure that the screw should be inspected and lubed when necessary. If anyone had looked at the thing I'm sure it would have been apparent that the threads were wearing. Very similar sounding to the issues you see with screw type spring compressors. Every once in a while you'll see a thread that says that they only last one or two jobs then they're worn out. In that situation as well the screws were never lubed.

You almost never need to make the control arm shorter IME. Making it longer means more neg camber which almost anyone who wants a set of these is going to be after. Mine were made with the rod end all the way in at the stock length. Mine were also made with 5/8 rod ends so there isn't as much adjustment as there would be in the 3/4 end, so I may be splitting hairs a bit.

Increased effort isn't that bad. Nor is the twitchiness once you get used to it. The only bad thing I can say about them is that they reduce the Ackerman built into the front end, and I think that has a negative effect at autox in my car.

Hard to top the advice you've already gotten. Let me attack from a slightly different angle. I got out of high school and immediately started working on cars. The reason you like working on your car is BECAUSE IT'S NOT YOUR JOB! Ever hear the saying "the cobbler's children have no shoes"? It's true. Once it's your job, it looses it's luster real quick, let me tell you. You get to loathe LOF's on cars that are 200 degrees when it's 100º outside. And don't kid yourself about making decent money. First you have to "pay your dues" pretty much anywhere you go. Which means you're the shop bitch. Then there are the costs of doing that work in the first place. More than 1/2 my paycheck was dissappearing on the tool truck for the first several years. That will eventually level off, but it NEVER goes away. My boss at the last shop I worked for was 50 and his body was falling apart. He had serious back problems, gout, housewife's knee (fluid in the knee, really gross) and literally probably had another 30 years to go in that already broken body. I looked at him and said no friggin way, and got out of the biz for good. To those here that are mechanics, I suggest you be good to your body and use all the engine hoists and tranny jacks and all that stuff. You may think it's manly now to stab that transmission by hand, but you'll think otherwise when you're 65 and all your joints are shot. It took my wife 8 years to get her BS because we put her through night school while working full time for the first 5. Once she finished that and decided what her degree was going to be and really got motivated, I dropped out of school and worked full time to get her through school. She graduated cum laude from Cal Poly SLO, then went onto grad school here in Seattle. She now has the job she dreamed of years back. She is a Registered Dietitian at Children's Hospital. Unlike most I don't think a college degree guarantees you a good job or a promising future. What it does do is get your foot in the door, and it pretty much guarantees that you don't have to do manual labor anymore unless you want to. IMO college degree is a certification that you are capable of putting up with a large amount of bullshit. The point to your prospective employer is that you've gained the ability to reason for one, and that you have a certain degree of fortitude that many others don't have. I think there is a statistic that says that 80% of college graduates don't work in the field of their degree, so don't get hung up on what your major is. Just having a degree at all makes a big difference. Matman has a pretty good college experience story too. He has a BS in Materials Engineering, lost his job in the dot bomb thing, went back to carpentry and swinging a hammer, and now does cost analysis for a construction company. So your career path isn't necessarily a straight line and you aren't married to your degree. I worked a couple jobs in the mail order industry then started my own business. I still don't have any degree. The older I get the less I want to go back and get the degree. Especially being self-employed it just doesn't make a difference to me anymore. I make decent money now but I did it by taking chances, not by getting a job and working for somebody else. If you're not going to get the degree, you're going to languish in mediocrity unless you have some drive, which it doesn't sound like you have at this point in your life. I have known several self-made millionaires, one of which didn't even have a high school diploma. Takes a certain kind of person to do that. It is still possible to do today, but you have to have that spark, you have to be the kind of person that can sell ice to eskimoes. If you don't, you'll be MUCH better off getting that degree.

Jump the ballast. Just run a wire from one side to the other. That defeats it and if you do have other wires plugged in there you don't have to re-route anything. I got hit by my system with and without the ballast resistor. The one with the ballast was uncomfortable. The one without HURT. The ballast is there to reduce the voltage to the coil to save the points from frying. The more voltage to the coil the hotter the spark. The only thing to be concerned with is that original coil is only meant for 8V or whatever that system runs, so if you still have a stock coil you'll burn it up. Get a modern 12V coil from Crane or MSD or whoever. You won't be sorry you did.

The truck might have been included in the sale. You should just go ask the owner what the deal is. If they don't want it, they could probably tell you who owns it now or where it's going, or if you're lucky how much they want for it.

Ground Control makes nice stuff. I'm curious about the adjusters. Are they actually steel as it says in the ad? My GC adjusters are aluminum. Also the thing about limiter straps is questionable. Sounds like the age old "What happens if the springs fall off the perch" thing.

This is another dorifto thing, isn't it... I think he's thinking of the rack spacers that make the tie rods shorter than the control arm. Somebody brought them up a while back and what they do is fit in the end of the rack and they space the inner tie rod out so that the distance between the inner and outer tie rod are a shorter length than the distance between the control arm bushing and ball joint. This F's up the bumpsteer sumthin' fierce, but allows you to catch the *** end when it's way out there, and since drifters aren't going fast, maybe they don't care about the negative effects. The problem is that when you install a longer control arm, you have to lengthen the tie rod, otherwise you're going to have some massive toe in. So basically extending the control arm doesn't do anything to the relationship of the control arm to the tie rod, other than screw up the toe. When you fix the toe then you'll see that your control arms and tie rods are once again the same length. Longer control arms would give you more negative camber. That's about it.

The guy who racked the Saab is evidently a moron, and it has proven pretty much impossible to make a moron proof ANYTHING. Never seen or heard of a mechanical failure other than the little safety things on the arms and the cable release mechanism. Never seen a car fall off a lift personally. I've only seen one lift accident. That was a Porsche lifted with an open door and the door caught on a piece of metal that stuck off the lift. Ended with me yelling at my boss to STOP and the resultant damage was that the door was sprung.

When I did mine I put a washer coated in anti-seize on the stud then followed that with an acorn lug nut put on backwards so that the flat face of the nut hit the washer. Then I pulled it in with an impact gun. It was easy to tell when the stud had bottomed, and they are nice and straight. I don't know how much torque it took to get them firmly set in place, but I would guess that it was more than 70 ft/lbs. You might want to either overtorque the wheels, then back them off and torque them again to 70 or whatever you use, just to make sure the studs are all the way in. My worry is that if they aren't all the way seated they might seat while you're driving and basically you wind up with a loose lug nut on some or all of them.

Both forks are straight and the same size. The manual adjust slave uses a return spring on it which you're probably missing, and the fork has a little hole at the end to hook the spring on, then it hooks to the slave cylinder at the other end. The end of the manual adjust pin has a big round head on it. The non-adjustable one uses a much smaller diameter pin. So the non-adjustable fork might have a smaller dented section for the pin to ride in. I know my brother-in-law Matman has a couple of the early style. Might be a good idea to just buy one from him.

OK, guess I was wrong on that one. I seem to remember my clutch disk fitting in the other way... it's been a couple years though.

Sounds like your studs aren't all the way in. Easiest thing to do is pull them in with a lug nut. Once they get seated they should be parallel unless something else is wrong.

Uh, I just want to make sure I have this right. Your springs were facing the pressure plate, not the flywheel? And when you pushed the clutch pedal it forced the pp spring weights into the clutch disk springs, then that forced the clutch disk into the flywheel bolts? Is that correct??? If so, you've got your clutch disk mounted backwards there datsunan... that's probably your whole problem. The springs go towards the flywheel. If you have them the other way, then the springs could be interfering with the clutch disk (like your old one) and that might prevent the clutch from disengaging all the way. You must have been flexing the hell out of the disk in the old setup to cause it to bend far enough for the flat side of the clutch to hit the flywheel bolts. EDIT- I don't think it's possible for the clutch disk to have hit the flywheel bolts if you had the disk in backwards. That would be a hell of a lot of flex. Leaves a bit of mystery as to how the flywheel bolts got hit and what they were hit by.

I believe the Datsun 710 has control arms that bolt up and they are a bit longer. I remember reading that a while back. Good luck finding a 710... Otherwise, redrill the holes or cut and lengthen the control arms.

My wife's first car was a '53 with the wraparound corner windows, the original flathead straight 6 and a 3 speed. It had no power brakes, no seatbelts, and a broken leaf spring. My wife (girlfriend at the time) was 16 years old and she would stand on the brake pedal literally butt off the seat to get it to stop. It was a GREAT project, for someone else. They are great trucks to update. 350/350, ps, pb, front disk and some new suspension and you have a very stylish truck to drive around. In original condition they are pretty crappy to drive. Some other member of the family got it and she wound up with a '74 Gran Torino instead, but that is a whole other story.

I think the clutch manufacturer would be fairly incompetent to put a clutch disk in that is so thick that it can't disengage. I still think you're looking at a fluid leak, broken fork, or bad synchros. I agree with Richard that lube can make a big difference. I assume you're using a T5. If it were a Nissan transmission I'd recommend SWEPCO 201, but I think some of the T5s take ATF???

I'd suggest a clutch LSD, especially if you want to autox. Seen a few people put in Quaifes then take them back out again because they spin the inside rear at autox. I think some would say that you're fine with the regular old R200, and that would certainly be the easy way to get it done. The R230 or shortnose R200 is going require a bunch of fabrication. Hopefully this give you some things to consider anyway...

I think you're taking him too literally John. I don't think he means the pp or the clutch disk weighs 20 lbs, I think he means that it has a lot of clamping force. The clamping force shouldn't change the way the transmission shifts, assuming the clutch linkage and hydraulics are working correctly. If the disk were heavier, yes, it would shift slower for the reasons you stated above.