JMortensen

Just in case you're thinking you need that transaxle to get 50/50, Z's already have really close to 50/50 from the factor. Mine is currently 49.5/50.5.

Go get a big air hammer (~$20 to $30 at Sears or Harbor Freight). Put the pointy tip on it and stick it in the dimple on the inside of the axle. Lean into it and pull the trigger. Or get a bigger slide hammer and fight with it for a couple more hours...

Mine rides great. It's a Toyota 2wd P/U with JC Whitney traction bars, a rear sway bar, and the sliders. It's got Bilstein shocks, and I think the shocks were the biggest thing in making it comfortable. The stock shocks were useless, I tried KYBs and they were WAY too harsh, then I got some Bilsteins... just right. Used to routinely place in the top 1/3 at the local autoxes when I was running it. The problem with shackles is that they are supported with bushings which have a lot of flex even if you go to polyurethane. This allows the axle to move side to side under the car. When you eliminate the shackles, then the axle can't really move side to side. It allows you to use the long blade of the leaf spring to keep the axle in line. Also this might not matter for your drag car but the shackles stand up when you hit the brakes on a car with leaf springs, which makes for a lot of nose dive. The sliders totally eliminate the shackle which REALLY cuts down the nose dive aspect of hard braking with leafs. I've been trying to get my friends with a 510 wagon to do this to their car, and can't quite get them to do it. Really made a heck of a difference in my truck though.

I used to autox my pickup truck and the one thing I did to that truck that made the biggest difference in the rear was to eliminate the shackles with a circle track slider setup. That and some traction bars kept the wheel hop to a minimum and really kept the back end under control. Worked great and I've got 100K miles on the sliders and they're still in the truck. Here's one that's kinda similar to what I have, except mine has ball bearings instead of plastic blocks to slide on: http://www.racecareng.com/RCE/index.php?action=3&UID=2004032820224564.68.82.165&part_no=UBM35-2105

I really hope I'm not coming across like an ******* on this one. I'm not trying to denegrate the idea. I DO appreciate what you guys are trying to do, I just think that if you're 90% of the way there, you might as well go the last 10%. Or just buy the right part first and not have to mess with it. But if you're going to the trouble of doing all the machining, make a slotted top piece and make it a camber plate. It's not that much more hassle (almost no work at all) and now the adjustment is there IF you want it. You could drill a couple offset holes in the ones Tom made and make them work like the EMI plates and use them to adjust caster too. I just think back to a post that John B made a while back and he was modifying the rear strut towers so that he could take out negative camber because his bias ply tires don't like lots of neg camber. With camber plates that might very well have been a 2 minute adjustment (for both sides). I know I can adjust out quite a bit. I had mine down to ~1.5 in the back and still had more to go IIRC. You start trying to align a car that is a little tweaked with control arm lengths and I think you might have a hard time getting the thrust angles all correct. If you can adjust top and bottom you can fix just about anything on an alignment rack. Tom Holt's stuff is freakin awesome, BTW. That car is just incredible. As to RPMs concerns, I'm more worried about the sway bars cracking the frame rails than the camber plates damaging the strut towers, but like John B says, it's a race car. If it breaks, you fix it and make it stronger.

Poly bushings.

OK, maybe I'm just being dense or something, but why would you go through all that hassle when you can just buy camber plates and you also get the adjustability in addition to lowering the car and getting rid of the huge rubber insulators? Seems like you guys are reinventing the wheel here. The camber plate kit has a total height of 1 1/8" from the bottom of the spring perch to the top of the camber plate. I don't think you're going to get a whole heck of a lot shorter than that even if you make your own. The upper spring perch also has the needle bearings that John mentioned before, and I think that is a pretty important part of the whole assy. If you don't have the separate needle bearing then you're relying on the monoball to take the load from the suspension and the twisting load as well, and monoballs really aren't meant to spin in their races like that. EDIT-- yes they are designed for that. Thinking of a rod end used in a control arm, and it spins just fine. What the hell am I thinking? Still, asking the bearing to spin with a huge sideload might be asking too much. The needle bearing definitely spins easier... How much time are you going to spend designing this thing and machining it, when you could have just bought a camber plate and been done with it. I understand some people like to do it for the experience, or the joy of making something, but this seems like a big waste of time and energy to me... or am I missing something???

Dale is right. It's the reaction disk.

One more thing Mike. I'd go big on the monoball then use a spacer to fit the strut. The stock 240Z strut would take a 10mm (I think) monoball, but I sure wouldn't trust a tiny 10mm monoball to handle the loads at the top of the strut. 5/8" is what most (all?) of the aftermarket plates for Datsuns use. I wouldn't go smaller than that, so basically it boils down to a question of whether your sleeves that fit in the monoball to take up the space go from metric OD to metric ID or whether they are SAE OD and metric ID. I'd just stick with SAE stuff to keep costs down and use a 5/8" or if you want bigger and stronger a 3/4" monoball, but that's just me...

I won't ever allow the govt to put a GPS in my vehicle. Bad enough my new GMC truck has OnStar. I'm sure that even if my subscription lapses GM can still find my truck whenever they want. Maybe I should put a lead plug in where the antenna goes when the subscription runs out... They are already using OnStar and other GPS devices to determine fault in accidents, they used it in the Scott Peterson case to figure out where he had been in the days after the murder, we had that post about the insurance company installing GPS into cars and offering discounts if you were a "good" driver... Scary stuff. Just remember, it's all being done for your "safety"

Mike, I haven't heard any mention of camber plates yet, but that is basically what you're making. There really isn't a lot to the camber plates that are available. Look at AZC's, it is really close to what you're describing, with the weld in piece of steel, etc. I know installing my Ground Control "roadrace" plates my car lost ~1.5" of ride height. With respect to Terry's idea about 1/4" piece of rubber, I can say that with a reasonable spring rate and Illuminas on 1 I don't feel that they are excessively harsh for street use without any insulators at all. If you were running 400 in/lb springs with Konis might be a different story...

Yes, that would work.

Your ZX has the later style shifter. Here's my suggestion: go to the junkyard. Get a Nissan truck shifter out of any 70's or 80's Nissan truck. The truck shifter is WAY too long for a Z, so install it in the Z, mark off how much to cut off to make it comfortable. Pull it back out, cut off with cut off wheel (hacksaw would work here too I suppose). Install a simple MOMO type shift knob. If you have a press you can bend it too if you need, but it's probably not necessary. The trucks have a very long shifter so they have to have a shorter throw, otherwise you'd have an extremely long throw on the end of the 2' tall shifter. When you cut it down and install into a Z, the throw is about as short as you would want to go. Any shorter and it would be very difficult to tell what gear you were in IMO. I bought my last shifter from a jy for $5.

Check the head. If it is a P79 it will have flat tops. If it is an N47 then it won't.

Both of these statements are wrong IME. How many emulsion tube choices do you have for Mikunis??? 3? OA, 8, and OB (and I don't think OB fits in the smaller carbs, but I could be wrong on that one). How many choices do you have for Webers? 10? 20? Webers are more tunable, even if you only consider high rpm tunability. As to the mains and airs controlling 95% of the fuel curve I've found that the pilot jet has a much bigger effect than is stated in any of the books I've read and is making a difference up to about 3500 or 4000 rpm on my car. As to the narrow band criticism, if that's your experience fine. I know my stance on NB vs WB is not the most popular, but I have my own experience to back it up. I took the advice of a friend and installed a NB. It helped enormously. Several guys I know have now had their NB on the dyno and had a chance to check it against the WB. They've all had the same results: the NB was accurate compared to the WB, and it is always a shock to the dyno operator as well. I know the NB is not AS accurate, but that doesn't mean it is useless as you hear so often. The people who told you that NB is useless are probably the same people that want to sell you a WB for $300. My Bosch non heated one wire O2 was $30, my voltmeter $6, and I had some wire laying around to connect the 2. I made more progress in 3 weeks with the NB installed than I had in a couple months trying to read plugs. Jake, yes you could do that, but if you have the same jetting in every carb then you can just run one O2 and have 1/6th the equipment to buy. Plus I don't think you can run them right up next to the flange, and getting 6 sensors onto the primaries down by the collectors is going to be hard to do. Again I think the amount of hp you're going to free up by tuning each cylinder individually is going to be fairly negligable unless you're really trying to squeeze EVERY LAST HP OUT, in which case you probably shouldn't be using carburetors at all.

While tuning per cylinder is possible, I know of no one who has actually done it. 99.999999999999% of people running triples run the same jets in all 6 barrels totally eliminating the need to try and figure out how #4 should be jetted vs #2 and so on. Even with much more accurate FI I know of only one person who has each cylinder tuned individually, and that is John Coffey. To most of us that last 1/2 horsepower just isn't worth it. Don't put your A/F sensor in the intake Wade. It goes into the exhaust and measures either the temperature of the exhaust gasses (EGT) or the oxygen in the exhaust (O2). I used a narrowband O2 sensor which cost me $30 hooked up to a voltmeter which was another $6 to figure out what was going on. If you want to make it easy, and you're cheap like me, you can get an A/F meter from Summit Racing and install that. Wideband O2 is expensive. Much more accurate, but much more expensive. Again, how finely tuned do you need to be? You might want to read up on Mikunis and Webers before you get too far into this. There is some good info in the "How to Modify Your Nissan Datsun OHC Engine" and there are numerous books on Webers that you can use to get an idea of what you're up against. Mikunis are easier to tune since they only have 4 sets of jets, where Webers have something like 8 or 10 per barrel. The downside is that the Mikunis can't be fine tuned like the Webers.

The ultimate non rice muffler IMO is the Dynomax Super Turbo. No frills, decent performance and sounds good. $29.49 from JC Whitney. No resonator, not stainless or polished, just works. You can hear mine if you go to Albums and download my little powerslide video. Of course, some of that noise is the Mikunis' sucking... 8)

The turbo pump is larger and provides more volume. There are comp springs you can buy if you need more pressure, but that is generally not necessary unless you're running a big oil cooler and remote filters or something like that. If your pump lost its prime you can take it off and pack it with vaseline then put it back on and that should provide enough suction to get the oil up out of the pan again. Put it on TDC #1 so that if you drop the distributor shaft out you can find #1 again.

I guess you've already tried removing the paint from the strut and honing the tube...

Tilton is great if you can find one. Fidanza is good. Centerforce is too heavy. AZC is scary thin although I haven't had any problems with mine in 5 or 6 years of using it. Whatever you go with, have it balanced before you put it on the car.

Hmm... should I move into the mansion that's paid for, or should I stick it out in the duplex.

You'd get a huge bump from some 44 or 45 triples in all likelihood. I know I did, and I know Dan Baldwin did. He's putting down 255 whp in his 3.1, and I'm putting down ~240 from my 2.8. You'd be looking at $1500 probably in carbs, jets, and tuning time. I swear my 44 Mikunis were worth a good 40 hp over my previous setup with headwork, cam, port matched manifold and rebuilt SU's with K&Ns and the stock airhorns inside the K&N's. 40 hp makes a big difference. RB can easily make 2 times the power of your stroker with triples, but it's going to require some pretty hefty fabrication, and last time I checked people were saying budget $10K for the swap. I never looked into it that closely so I don't know how much of that is the cost of the motor itself.

Interesting quote. Looks like I have no heart. I wonder if that goes with his other quote: Looks like I might have some learning yet to do. As far as the union goes, to me that was always just one more group who took a little cut of my paycheck. I'm telling you though, life is a lot better when you don't think you need your big badass friend the union standing behind you when you're negotiating with the boss. Nobody likes intimidation, employers or employees.

It was like 110 hp and 120 ft lbs. If you want I can dig for it, but that is pretty close. In the example, take the 470/3.9 = 120.51 ft lbs. I think a lot of the problem he had was that it was literally the first time the operator had used this dyno. He was a friend of the engine builder, and when the engine was done my friend called the machinist and he said, "I know a guy who just got a dyno" and it kinda went from there.

At the rear hubs. This was one of those dynos where you take the wheels off and bolt the 2 stands to the rear hubs. The car has a 3.90 rear end so when we factored that in everything looked fine. Those numbers (115 and 470) aren't the actual numbers, but it was something really close to that. I guess it was a brand new dyno and it was actually the first time they had a car on it, so the guy wasn't quite sure what he was doing. It really didn't matter to my friend, because he just wanted the wideband O2 readings to get his carbs jetted correctly, which he was able to do.