JMortensen

Awesome. Thanks Sam.

I know that you can mig stainless, because I've done it on accident. Looking at making a stainless muffler, wondering if I should just mig it up, or if I should pay to have someone tig it for me. This is for the race car, so it will be garaged and trailered, and won't rack up many miles at all. I really don't care if it doesn't have the perfect stack of dimes weld on it, but I don't want it to fall apart at the track either. How about tack welding with the mig so the welder doesn't have to do all the setup?

Why waste time and effort to see what you can do with a stock cam? Those newer cars have 4 valves per cylinder. The two valve engines use HUGE lift numbers compared to the L engine. LS1 has about .500". That's a pretty big cam on an L. There was a guy some years back who made 400whp on a stock head turbo L28 who was claiming the most hp on unported head with stock cam. Great, but he could have been doing a lot better, if doing better was the goal.

You can find them for 12x1.5 which is what the ARP studs have.

There is already a strip of metal under the strut tower from the factory. I'd look to see if you can grind all that shit off the top and get to the top of the strip underneath and see if it's clean. If it got damaged, then you're pretty well screwed. FWIW, I don't think I'd worry about getting the heights to the nearest 32nd of an inch. I'd be surprised if they were that accurate out of the box (my steering rack was about 1/4" different left to right as an example, and the way these cars flex I'd be really surprised if many were within that spec after 40 years of driving) and you could have the welding done right and have the chassis fixed at a frame shop and I'd bet that would be cheaper than setting it up to the 32nd of an inch by the welder. Really not seeing why the angle of the strut tower matters that much either. You're going to use a camber plate, so the angle of the strut tower doesn't really matter, so long as the monoball will move without binding. Maybe I'm missing something. ???

For anyone looking for steel wheels - Bassett is about the same price as Diamond but they roll the outer lip (stronger) and they have larger vents, and are about the same price. EDIT--15x8 Bassett is 17 lbs.

Sunny, you have a catch can and then just have it routed to the intake, or are you running just a vented catch can? Thinking about running a catch can to separate the oil then vacuum from the exhaust.

70 and 71 have the straight piece. Unless something was changed a 73 should already have the curved one.

I'm going to limit my L33 (aluminum block 5.3) engine to 6250 as I've heard issues with them spinning faster coupled with g forces. Why not get a 6 liter? It makes 400hp out of the box. Cams/spring/pushrod combos make a big difference on these engines, so that should easily net your 450 hp goal. Overall, if the price is similar, I think I'd lean towards the BMW engine. While I haven't researched it, I'd guess that it is probably better suited to road racing. LS motors have oiling issues. You can fix them (I bought a trapdoor pan and accusump, others dry sump them), but that's hassle that you might avoid entirely with the Bimmer.

Just starting this to document how I'm doing side pipes on my autox project. Wanted side pipes so that I could do a flat undertray and looked at a couple different setups which consisted of shorty headers that had a J bend off of them with a 90 after that. They went through the frame rail right next to the TC boxes, which was something I didn't want to mess with because I'd already removed those boxes and made different TC mounts for my chassis. tube80z turned me on to Schoenfeld's IMCA modified headers: http://www.schoenfeldheaders.com/LS1-IMCAMOD.htm and I was tempted to buy ones with the collectors that point down, but I really don't know where they would end up so I ended up with the shorter ones that just have a plain collector at the bottom of that page. I told them I wasn't sure about spacing and asked if they would send the collectors loose, which they did for me. Just received them yesterday and bolted them up to take a look.I wasn't expecting this, but they also sent me some slip fit brackets so that I could just use the collectors that way rather than welding them on. Never messed with header construction before, but it looks like there would be big gaps between the pipes and the collector so not sure if slip fit on these is a good idea. Don't know how they normally get welded for that matter. Maybe this is SOP in cheap circle track header land. They are going to clear my custom motor mounts which mount to brackets on top of the frame rail. That means that the headers will go over the frame rail. This is a very nice surprise, I'm glad I won't have to mess around with notching the frame or any of that BS. These headers are thin and light, but I think that means that they'd die a quick death on a street car. For my trailered race car, not so big a deal. This is the second part I've gotten recently (Kevko oil pan was the other one) that was painted so badly I wish they hadn't painted it at all. Terrible paint job on these headers. Next step is to drop the motor in the car, get the motor mounts welded in, and cut holes in the fenders for the exhaust pipes. This is a cool little product that I'll add to these headers too. Called an "exhaust bullet" goes in the collector and smooths the flow. I saw some Cobra side pipe testing where they had added these and gained 10+ hp on a 500 hp engine if I recall. Might just spring for their whole collector kit and weld it up myself. Looks like real quality DIY stuff. http://www.coneeng.com/collector_components.html

I loved the sound of my Dynomax Super Turbo. They're cheap and they don't eat up hp on low hp applications. I ran without a resonator, but could see the argument for having one. Never liked Flowmasters on L6s, but YMMV. A lot of this noise is intake from the Mikunis, but you get a pretty good idea as I drive past the camera: http://www.classiczcars.com/photopost/member-galleries/p15578-dynomax.html

Very nice Dan.

Datsun is 5/8 IIRC. The aftermarket ones are pretty cheap and I think my Tilton came with AN adapters, which is nice. The issue with the smaller one is that you might not get enough throw on the slave. The issue with a larger one is that you might get too much throw on the slave.

Valve lift is valve lift. Stock springs will bind at that lift, but the aftermarket ones can handle it, at least the Schneiders can IME. FWIW, I was also using E31 with 280 valves.

No turbo, NA V8. Doing a radiator exhaust out the hood, and laying the rad down helps with that. Also have the cage tied into the front struts, so don't need the structure there for strength.

Just a pile of parts at the moment. Looking to figure this out so that when I get the motor in (should happen in the next week or so) then I can cut out the stock rad support and start work on this.

Just to clarify, whichever hose I use will have the filler as the highest point in the system. The question was whether to have the cap and filler on the hot side or the cold side, since I had already purchased the filler for the cold side. I decided to return that part and fill on hot side so that I could plumb the steam pipe into the filler and I think that makes more sense in terms of the rad cap opening up sooner. I will plug the rad cap bypass on the radiator itself and use the one on the filler to attach to the overflow.

Interesting, but I don't think it's particularly helpful to my case. I'm thinking maybe I should exchange this filler for the 1.25" version and put the filler in the hot side, then I could run the steam fitting to it and it would also be on the hot side.

Never relocated a rad before, want to tilt it forward. Questions are about 1) filling the system, 2) catch can, and 3) steam pipe on LS engines. 1. I bought an inline rad hose filler from Jegs. 1.5" diameter. This fits the bottom rad hose, which on the LS1 is the inlet. This is actually the lower hose coming off of the water pump, so I figured I'd just get some elbows and move the hose around so that this is the highest part of the cooling system so that I can burp it. Does it matter if you fill the system on the hot side or the cold side? Is there an issue with the rad cap not blowing off because it is plumbed in on the cold side? 2. If you put the catch can off of the rad and the engine gets hot enough to push open the rad cap, wouldn't the lower level of the rad cap allow whatever coolant was higher in the system to run down and out the overflow? Seems like I should plug the overflow on the rad (1/8 NPT pipe plug would do it on this rad) and then plumb the reservoir off of the high mounted filler. 3. The steam pipe on the LS apparently is normally routed to the hot end of the radiator. It would be a lot easier to route if I could just run it right back into the filler neck, which would be in the inlet hose to the water pump. Hoping that the small amount of heat in there wouldn't throw off the cooling to such a degree that it would be a problem when driving. Thoughts?

I know where you can pick up some sweet 280ZXT stub axle nuts: http://www.ebay.com/itm/271253803761?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

You can run aftermarket springs and retainers with .540 lift and not have coil bind. I seem to recall the Schneider springs and retainers that I installed were good to over .600 lift. You will need shorter valve stem seals though, because the retainer will hit the stock valve stem seal at somewhere around .500. There is a Ford V6 viton seal which fits, has a much lower profile, and is available at just about every auto parts store in the USA. It's the easiest solution on this side of the Atlantic anyway.

http://forums.hybridz.org/topic/105207-the-dreaded-diff-clunk/ Note at the very end that Arne from classiczcars.com replaced a woodruff key in his Nissan transmission to stop a clunk.

The 280ZXT axles have springs in them.

Worst case scenario is that the shafts slide out of the diff 1/2 way and then you put power to it and strip the splines off of the shaft. Seen that happen on CV cars where they weren't clipped in properly.

I do remember that. It is nice to have the toe adjustment, but yeah, easy enough to swap it out and see if it was the rod ends squeaking.