JMortensen

It's a matter of personal preference. I put about 40K on a similar setup with camber plates up top with no complaints, but I never installed a stereo either...

OK, so the hyper-conservative guy gets his panties in a wad because a comment was made about the stingy "western countries" and the hyper-liberal guy assumes that it was the comment that got us to increase our donation amount despite the original statement that the $35M was an "initial" pledge. Welcome to the New Year, same as the Old Year...

That is exactly why I didn't use them on my car in the front. I did use them for a couple years in the back, but I can only imagine that in most Z's adjusting camber in front with offset bushings means that you have different bumpsteer on the LF and RF wheels... ick. Unless your chassis was so straight that both bushings were in exactly the same spot... unlikely at best. LCA=lower control arm

Thinking about going to see Jello Biafra and the Melvins show. Wondering if the eco-freaks will trash my SUV if I park anywhere near the venue...

http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=93343

The adjustment you suggested worked BTW. Thanks!

Here's some info for you: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=87758&page=6&pp=10

Hey I did remember something else for you. If you turn the TV volume up over about 30 my wife can hear a high pitched whine. I can't hear it at all, it's out of my frequency range, but she can hear it and it bugs her. We have a separate volume control on the digital cable tuner, so we just crank that up and then we don't have to turn the TV volume up that high. We have the DVD player hooked up through an audio tuner so that is never an issue.

Thanks John. Just what I wanted. BTW, if you make a 1x1 table and put the code inside the table then you can move the table and it doesn't have to be right at the top of the page. See: http://www.thepetdoorstore.com

My wife and I have the 46". I did notice the delay you mention, but I thought it was a function of my crappy DVD player. Sometimes it's noticeable, other times not. The only other problem I have is that you can sometimes get trails when you have a really jerky action scene going on. My sis-in-law says she can see the trails more often than I can, her eyeballs must have a higher refresh rate than mine. Supposedly plasma doesn't have that problem, but it was about $2000 more for a good name brand plasma TV. I like the TV though, and the price was unbeatable. We got it on sale at BB with 18 months no interest, they gave us about $300 in rebates and BB gift cards, which we used to buy a bunch of DVDs to watch on the new TV. Worked out pretty good. One other thing about the new TVs is that they really don't have good stands for these yet. We looked at all of the TV stands and hated them, so we went to a furniture store and found a "sofa table" which sits behind a couch. I'm not much for furniture shopping, so I had never heard of this piece of furniture before, but it fits the TV perfectly. It came with feet that we removed to bring it down about 4", but at that height it's just about perfect. I just drilled a bunch of holes so that I could hook up the stereo and DVD wires and that was it. Worked out perfect.

Kinda hard NOT to lower it that far when you're trying to make it look good with 27" tall tires...

This may sound really selfish, but it's the truth. I'd shell out some cash for this thing to help my fellow man, but I'd like to find a charity that would accept my donation then NEVER come to me again for donations. Is there a "don't call me, I'll call you" charity???

Be careful here! You start talking about road racing and people who ACTUALLY road race are going to answer and tell you to put some Konis and some 300 in/lb springs in. That's going to be brutal on the street. For a VERY aggressive street feel I'd go 225 in/lbs with Tokico Illuminas. If you REALLY want road racing stuff, then go with the Konis and a 300 lb spring. IMO that is not streetable. As far as kits go, search and you shall find. Probably http://www.modern-motorsports.com is the most common and very good quality. I think his stuff is the same as http://www.ground-control.com. http://www.arizonazcar.com has some really nice suspension pieces. But search, and you'll find all kinds of info.

Just wanted to point out that having a locker in the front is different than a locker in the rear. Since the rear doesn't turn, you can run a spool or a locker with a lot less hassle and breakage, and when you go around a turn the inside will chirp. If you have a locker in the front, then the locker itself wants to drive the wheels straight. So your Birfield joints or U-joints, which aren't anywhere near as strong as strong as a solid axle are fighting the locker anytime you turn the wheel. Anyone with a locker in the front end bought it because they're pretty serious about rock crawling or mudding, and invariably they're going to turn the wheels, and try to drive the front end over an obstacle all the while fighting the locker. THAT is when axles break. Datsun axles may have U-joints, but they still won't be under anywhere near the load that a front axle would be, because they aren't turning left or right.

I tried a pickle fork and I screwed up one pin out of the four I had to pull. I got the puller and pulled 3 in 1 hour, then went to try that 4th one and totally ruined it. The puller is the only way I would do this job again, IME a pickle fork is a good way to waste a pin. Of course Terry would probably build his own special fork that fit just right, but for those of us mere mortals, leave it alone and wait for the puller...

I know a couple guys who drove spools in the back of their 4x4's on the street. It's not so bad until you get in the rain or snow or ice. Then you're pretty much screwed. Lots of road racers use welded diffs or spools. I've known a couple people who have tried a welded diff for autox, and they've all gone back to LSD. You can't beat it for drag racing. If it is a fair weather car that just gets driven to the track and back, I say go for it. As far as keeping the stocker for long trips, I can't imagine that you'd want to change that out too many times. It's a big PITA. Not so bad if you have a ZX, but I hate pulling the diff in my Z. I'd sooner pay the extra $$$ for an LSD at that point.

Just get a cheap $6 volt meter and measure the voltage. Hook a wire up to the O2 and up to the red wire on the volt meter, then hook black to ground. You want ~.8V. You can also buy an O2 bung from a muffler shop and have them weld it on if you want. Takes about 5 minutes for the O2 to warm up to start reading right. Of course you'll be ruining that O2 mighty fast if you start running leaded...

I think that should bump you a little higher than 95, because the Xylene is 118 octane and Tolulene is 114 octane. FWIW Tolulene seems to work better for me than Xylene, but like I said AVgas or racing gas worked the best in my engine. I wouldn't worry about soot on the pistons. If you have big oily crusty buildup then worry, but powdery black soot will blow right out of there when you get it running right. You're running the car on 20% solvent, so I wouldn't bother adding anything to the tank to clean it up. You can retard the timing a bit to help with the pinging, that's one option. You'll lose some power with that one. Another is to try another different octane booster. You could get some race gas and mix it, or try the AV gas. I did have a problem once where I added a gallon of octane booster to 5 gallons already in the tank and the two just didn't seem to mix up. I was at the track and it just kept pinging. I took the car down a side road and jerked the wheel back and forth a lot to slosh the fuel in the tank. Even that didn't seem to help. Then I said screw it and added 5 gallons of 100 octane unleaded and it finally stopped pinging. On other occasions that exact same mix of booster and 92 worked fine. You really have to mix in the booster well IME. I suppose if you wanted to see if that was the problem you could drain the tank into a couple of gas tanks and shake them up really good and dump them back in... Have you put an O2 sensor on there to see what your mixture is like?

Sounds like Boge struts. They are a European company that makes very good quality struts for Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, etc. Good struts, I don't think their Z stuff is all that aggressive, more of just a very good quality street replacement IIRC. It sounds like yours are dead, so you'll be getting something else anyway.

This is a new one to me. The ID of the ring gear changed on the R180s??? By 5mm??? Seems like a waste of tooling to make a 2.5mm change on the length of the tooth. I was just shimming my R200 LSD, and my ring gear was not tight on the pilot part of the carrier at all. Mat73GNZ, another member here, had the same situation when he got into his R200. I'm thinking you could just carefully bolt it up with a gap between the ring gear and carrier and probably be just fine. Just measure the ring gear runout with a dial indicator to make sure you got it on straight. The R200 ring gears apparently aren't a press fit onto the carrier anyway, and I've never heard of anyone shearing ring gear bolts as a result, which you would think would be the danger of not using one. Aside from that Nissan trucks from the mid 80's pretty commonly have R180's with 4.11 gears up front, so maybe you could get one and get the right ID on the ring gear that way and not have to mess with machining anything or worrying about it. You might be able to have a spacer made, but I would think that it would be cheaper to get a truck differential than pay a machinist. Don't know for sure that the trucks have the 110mm gear that you need though... Or buy a gearset from Nissan with the proper ID...

I had these in for years in the back and they were a PITA to move! Really a PITA. I've heard of people using the sandpaper trick like Terry suggests, and I removed/inspected/regreased mine like John suggests. Never had a problem with them moving on my car though, and they never cracked despite years of torture with slicks. They were definitely noisy though, you could really hear them in the back over slight road imperfections. One trick that I don't think is stated in the installation instructions is to file down the end of the control arm so that the arm is just slightly shorter than the bushing. If you just slide the bushing onto the arm in the back, the end of the arm usually pokes out about .005 or .010. So if you just bolt it in, then theoretically the A arm can slide fore to aft that far. By using a large flat file you can take a little off the end of the arm so that the bushing is LONGER than the arm by the same .005 or .010. Then when you tighten the big 24mm bolt on the end the bushing will be compressed instead of just sitting there loose. Now that I think about it this might be part of the reason why these have a reputation for cracking like Mike experienced. Maybe his A-arms were beating the bushings on the washers as he accelerated, then braked, then accelerated.... Jon

Did you cut out the shells? The stock bushing is 3 parts. The outer shell which is a thin steel cylinder, the rubber, and the inner shell which the spindle pin goes through. If you cut out the rubber and didn't remove the shells, you are never going to get the new bushings in... Take a hacksaw and cut through the shell (cut straight towards the control arm so that any groove you cut isn't in a sensitive area). Once you cut through the shell you can just pop it out with a hammer and punch.

Here's a quick way to distinguish: The Z has strut suspension front and rear. The ZX has front strut and rear semi-trailing arm. Also the front is designed very much like the 510. I do not think the ZX was heavier than the 280Z, in fact I've heard that it is slightly lighter. In my mind the ZX will always be a big fat 510, or if you prefer, a sporty version of the early 80's Maxima sedan.

Pressure plates are balanced individually so that they don't upset the balance of the rest of the engine.