JMortensen

You can't do camber plates without coilovers, and you'll need camber plates for any real autoxing. If you get the "biscuit" style camber plates, you don't have to cut up the car, but the adjustment is more limited. Design Products Racing sells them.

My money is on angles.

We're looking at possible modifications to the design. If we modify the design, the shafts will be remachined and heat treated again before they're shipped. Stay tuned.

No chance at all.

I think you want LSD, as open diffs will surely have some play there.

I believe I did 1 5/8" and then put shims under the strut to get it tight. The important thing is that you shouldn't be able to tighten the gland nut all the way down to where it hits the strut housing. You want a couple threads showing when it is TIGHT. In the rear you need spacers for sure. Use a 2" spacer for a 240, I think you need a 3" for the 280, but that's old memory so anyone with a 280 should double check. If you section the rear struts until they fit a short strut, you'll find that your car is way too low in the back when you reassemble. Saw a Z at an autox recently that had made that mistake. It looked OK in the front but was dragging its ass around, and was a real handful on course. I think the fastest driver may have had a run with no spins, but he had several runs with more than one.

Not sure what to say about that. The material is stronger and the axle is beefier, so I'm not sure why that would happen. I'll talk to the axle manufacturer Monday to see if they have any insight.

The Z sucks out of the box. Fox bodies and SN95s suck out of the box. The nice thing about Mustangs is that they have a MUCH bigger following and there are a LOT more parts. I used to autox with the guys from Maximum Motorsports. Take a cheap fox body, add several thousand dollars worth of MM parts, and you now have a Mustang that was close to if not faster than my Z was at that time with less effort and probably less money when it's all said and done. Newer Mustangs are actually pretty good out of the box. There was a Motor Trend video comparing the M3 and the Mustang a year or two ago at Streets of Willow. The Mustang was .1 seconds slower. Not too bad for stick axle. Ultimately they all have a lot of potential. We have a CP fox body that is regularly in the hunt for FTD, and at the last autox I went to there was a stockish looking new Mustang that was faster than an XP 914 and a DM Lotus Elan, although not quite as fast as a Z06 Vette that was there.

Any lap times to compare with the L24 car?

About 4 pages in: http://www.gordon-glasgow.org/lsd1.asp

I hear you. On my bike the steer tube on the fork was folded and the actual forks came disconnected from the frame. The swedge on the tube failed, so the theory is that the fork failed as I hit a jump, but it could also be that I endoed really badly. I do remember immediately after, laying on the ground, but just about 10 seconds, then the next bit was the smoking hot nurse in the hospital. It bugs me too, but don't beat yourself up too badly. Your driving record is pretty stellar from the sound of it. Just to give you an idea of what I went through with the brain injury, in the hospital I told my wife to call my ex-boss in CA to tell him I wouldn't be in to work the next day. We had moved to WA state about a year previous. The doc came in the room and I shook his hand and said: "Hi, my name is Jon and this is my wife Melissa and my friend Jaxon." He left and came back and I shook his hand again: "Hi, my name is Jon, and this is my wife Melissa and my friend Jaxon." He left and came back, hand shake again. "Hi, my name is Jon..." Apparently I did this 3 or 4 times, and it scared the crap out of my wife. The lingering symptom for me was starting a sentence and then not remembering what I was saying 1/2 way through. Very annoying. For several months I had to write down everything as people were saying it at work, and had to stumble through awkward conversations where I couldn't remember what I was talking about. Over time it got better then finally I think I was pretty much back to normal after about a year. Side note: if you get hit really hard you lose inhibitions. When the paramedics strapped me to the backboard I asked if I could get my own backboard at a sex shop, to which they apparently responded "Oh yeah, he hit his head alright!" Later when I went in for the CAT scan my wife was waiting in the hall hearing the nurses exploding with laughter, and they came out and told my her: "Your husband REALLY loves you!" then went on down the hall laughing their asses off. I have no idea what I said to them, but apparently it was pretty funny...

I've had a couple inquiries, shafts are looking like they're going to get to me late next week or beginning of the following week.

Head trauma sucks! I don't want to jack your thread too bad but I had an experience hugging a tree on a mountain bike and it took me at least a year to recover my short term memory. I never lost consciousness from what I'm told, but I didn't remember 3 days previous to the accident.

One thing about aluminum seats is that you really should have a seat back brace. FIA approved seats won't fold in an accident, but AL can and once the seat gives your seatbelts might not be doing what you want them to do anymore. Any aftermarket seat that you put in a Z will have a weird seating position because of the slope of the stock seat brackets. The front bracket is quite a bit higher than the rear, so if you put in Recaros for example, you end up with the thigh bolsters way too high. I tried Recaros with their mounts and found my calves going to sleep after a little bit of driving. I ended up moving the rear of the seat as high as possible and modifying the sliders to lower the front, and then it was livable, but again, that's going to be a bad choice for a guy looking for helmet clearance. With helmet clearance in mind I think John has the right idea. I made a 1" tall frame and attached the seat to that and it looks like it will work well with my UltraShield Rally Sport. For 6'2" you might want the 20 degree layback.

Pull the boot on the master and slave. If fluid leaks out, replace both.

Check it the right way. I'd think that once you get past gross errors, it's probably impossible to look and tell anything meaningful about alignment. It's like looking at steering arms and control arms to see what the bumpsteer is like. Can't be done.

The fact that the side stub moves indicates that there is lash somewhere. When you move the side stub around, something inside is moving. It's either lash on the splines (or loose splines if you prefer) or it's lash in the spider gears. Some amount of spider gear lash is normal. As John said, you can really easily feel it with an open diff, because the lash is fixed. On the LSD, the spring clutches compress the side gears into the pinion gears, so that's why I would think that you wouldn't be able to move it easily. I think your vibration is cause by a driveshaft misalignment issue. Look for the threads with the laser pointers and try that method to see if your angles are right.

Assuming the axles are all the way snapped into the side gears in the diff, the movement in the side gears is due to gear lash in the spiders or slop in the splines between the side stubs and the side gears. You're right that the side bearings can be perfect and there can still be some movement in the halfshafts, because the side bearings capture the LSD, and the side gears move around inside the LSD.The question is: do you have too much lash? That looks like a surprising amount to me because the LSD should be putting spring pressure which would prevent it from moving easily. If you had an open diff I would expect to see some movement there, but not on an LSD. I haven't checked for this kind of movement in a while, so I'm just guessing what it should look like. If you had someone else with a CLSD on the bench who could do that same test, that would be better. Regardless, this is a bit of a red herring, because the LSD isn't doing anything at all when you're driving straight or running the car on jackstands. It's pretty safe to say that the movement in the side stubs is not related to the vibration. If your problem is at speed, then the obvious issues to look for are driveshaft angularity and tire balance. If you're getting the problem with the wheels removed, then you're down to driveshaft angle. I don't think driveshaft angle issues are only to be found on engine swapped cars. I had a friend with a 70 that had a pretty bad vibration at about 65 that was obviously driveshaft related. She had swapped tires front to back and tried different wheels, etc. The only other thing I could see is something bent, like the pinion flange or something like that. On the early cars you could shim the trans crossmember down and I think she fixed it that way. Agree with John that you're not hearing backlash. http://forums.hybridz.org/index.php/topic/105207-the-dreaded-diff-clunk/

"C" cam is tiny. It might be the best option when you're stuck with stock cams. When going aftermarket is an option, there is no reason to stick with something so puny. Get an aftermarket cam, and go much bigger for triples. For triples, I'd suggest you start in the .500/300 range. I ran a .490/280 and thought it was too small. Worked really well with SU's but was too small for the triples.

So that's a 77 that has the same measurements as everything else. Thanks very much for reporting back. I am 99% convinced that all S30 Z's have the same dimensions back there, and that Josey's issue was due to a bent suspension piece or tweaked chassis. I don't think we have another customer with a 78 to check but it seems unlikely that they would change the dimension only on the driver's side for one year only. I really appreciate the feedback, and thanks for the support.

Might be the free play between the clutch pedal and master cylinder. I set this wrong once a long time ago and went to a track day with my BIL. Between the two of us driving the car, the clutch got hot enough that it was slipping a lot from gear to gear and finally he was complaining that it was slipping down the straights. If you set that adjustment too tight then the clutch can't release its pressure into the reservoir. The more you drive the hotter the fluid gets which causes more expansion, which partially engages the clutch, which makes it hotter and causes more expansion, etc. Catch 22.

Suggestion - don't rebuild the diff. If you want to put new seals in, all you do is pry the side ones out, pull the pinion nut and pry that seal out, replace, red loctite the pin nut and make it RFT (torque spec is something like 130-200 ft/lbs). You can pull the cover and reseal it too with some silicone. If your bearings aren't bad though, the replacement bearings are expensive and you won't get any benefit from it at all. Take it from someone who has been there and done that. Rebuild on an R200 is a waste of time IMO, even more so on a common ratio, where you can just go buy another good used diff for $150.

I see your points guys. I think I may end up just trying to get everything from the mustache bar to the front diff crossmember, as that is really the only part that concerns me now, and it is all very close to the torque box structure and the mustache bar is right on the biggest frame rail in the rear. I'm thinking if I don't cut out the wheel wells and leave the torque box whole that this section may be strong enough on its own to be separated from the rest of the chassis. I don't have room for the whole back half of the car, which is basically sounding like the other option..

Looked again and it seems like there are 2 ways to do this. Cut out the floor and the torque box and not the strut towers, or to take the strut towers also.

I've got a 75 that is stripped down and ready to go to the JY. Was thinking of cutting out the rear suspension mount points so that I could mess around with installing different differentials, suspension mounts, etc. Problem is that I'm worried about the whole thing twisting if it is cut out of the rest of the unibody. Maybe a solution might be to weld in a strut tower bar, a bar across the rear frame rails, and one across the front diff mount area, and then triangulate, and THEN cut away from the rest of the chassis. I think if I could cut this thing down to size it might only be 80 or 100 lbs and maybe 4' by 3' or something like that. It's either that, or wait until I'm ready to do something and then buy another chassis. What do you think? Crazy idea?