RebekahsZ

Sunny Z. I have tons of pics of cages and roll bars that I can send to you. But this is the only discussion I have seen that addresses pre-thinking the conflicts. And only pics available that are taken with the doors closed (or even installed)! Not much out there for knee bars or cross bars either. Have you thought thru placement of a chute for your car? I wonder if your tow bar receiver will work, or if it is too far above your CG?

Thank you. Looks great.

I was just kidding around about the wires-you've got a cool car, no doubt about it. From the sound of your questions, I'm going to say (not meaning to down you-we all start somewhere) that you don't know very much about handling or technical driving. There are a ton of things that go into it. I don't know the name of the best book (perhaps someone else can help with this) but there are some great books on autocrossing that talk a lot about how to enter and exit a corner, and what to do in-between. Just telling us that your rearend is loose doesn't tell us anything at all. You can build/modify a car to handle better, but bad driving can make a great car spin out. Conversely, a good driver can usually drive even a bad car really fast. When you are first "setting a car up" you want to do just what johnc said: spend some time on a skid pad-but you even have to know how to do that! You have a car that has enough power that you can slide out the rearend just by goosing the throttle, and that may be what is happening. Skid pad: As johnc said, find a big, smooth parking lot (where you won't get a ticket-that's the hard part) and MARK OUT a 200' diameter circle (takes a damn big parking lot). You can mark it with spray paint (vandalism) or baking flower (will wash off at next rain). Start going around the circle and smoothly shift up to about 3rd gear while driving pretty slow. You want the engine to be lugging with very little engine rpm so that you are testing the balance and suspension of the car, not raising hell spinning tires with the engine. At this point, your car should be going about 10mph or less. Try to find a steering wheel position that will allow you to maintain the 200' circle without changing steering wheel position very much. Once you have that, little by little, start adding power and speed. Do this very gradually, several times around the circle before making changes. As you add power little by little, either the front or rear wheels will start to slide sideways and make more and more noise. Slowly increase speed until you feel like you are going to wreck. Don't counter steer or "drift", don't juice the throttle, keep it pretty steady. With sidewalls as tall as yours, please don't cuss me if you ruin your tires. If you look at your tires after doing this maneuver several times, you may find that you are putting a lot of tire wear on the sidewalls. Its OK cause those tires suck anyway. Then report back to us and we can advise you further.

First and foremost, slow down on the street. Do all your fun driving at a track or autocross event. Second, always start with tires. Your tires specs are completely inadequate. Look at something like a 225/50 tire in a sport compound. Look at nittos N01, and Dunlop Durezzas for lower priced tires that are more worthy of your power to weight ratio. Finally (for now), if the back is sliding out, remove your rear sway bar. Cool car. Just looked back at that photo. Consider spending an evening with some zip-ties - wouldn't want to get your feet tangled in all those wires when toe-heeling it thru a slalom! And, I wouldn't drink water in that car till you knew which of those wires are still hot! Once you get things straightened up a bit, get some 16 or 17 in wheels and hit the used tire store.

Yeah, instead of a purpose-built car, my z is more of a compromise-built car! Next year, my big project will be pulling the dash, new gauges, welding and re-drilling pedal pivots and organizing wiring. At that time I also hope to add a cross bar from one set of door bars to the other, probably passing under the glove box (AKA the "timeslip box, reading glasses box, shock adjuster knob box, flashlight box, 2-step and shift light adjuster screwdriver box, 9/16" pedal switch adjustment wrench box, and 7mm and 13mm clutch pedal adjustment wrench box, and tire gauge box") behind the radio in front of the heater and under the steering column.

You might just be the best dude on the planet! Wait-you don't have a FULL cage?? And Ive been somewhat ashamed of wanting only a bar and reinforcement.

Thanks, 74_5.0L_Z. Can you shoot a photo of the inside of your passenger door (with the passenger door shut) from the driver's window (or open door) so that I can see how those x-braces criss-cross across the door panel? I haven't had an arm rest in years, either!

Thanks, Turbo Meister. But, so far, I've been able to control the "just a little bit fasters." I'm gonna limit my power mods to a cam and spray in the years ahead. If I really wanted to do better at the track, I'd put a power glide in it and win some bracket racing money. The guys winning money most regularly at my track are a heck of a lot slower than I currently am. They are just better than I am.

Thanks so much for the photo. No, those bars need to angle up more toward the rear of the car. NHRA requires that the bar be closer to the shoulder (I can't recall if it is between the shoulder and the waist or the shoulder and the elbow). Otherwise, that looks like a nice cage, and it would take very little to make it into an 8.50 cage. It looks like you have worked on the seat mounts?? Do you hit your head on the front leg of the cage when seated?

We want a blow-by-blow of the racing! Tell us all about it. And a video?

I'm more into everything. I use it for holding my position on a hill at a stop sign or my driveway and loading on a trailer. I use it when bumping up to the second staging light at the strip. Now that it actually works, I may use it for some parking lot horseplay. I use a solenoid for locking the fronts for burnout.

Just "eyeball" it using a couple of 2X4s and go straight to the alignment shop. Or, if you are worried about tire wear, just leave on front wheel off.

Yesterday, I got the koni adjuster un-stuck. Got call from Jegs tonight: the bellhousing order is messed up again-cancelled order-so frustrated. Will try to order direct from Quick Time tomorrow (my wife is gonna KILL me). It's the inspection window modification that keeps goofing up the order. Ordered one Kirkey Intermediate Road Race seat in the 17" width with cover, mounting brackets and an AutoPower adjustable seat back brace specifically for rollbar mock-up. NHRA has no specific seat spec, autocross doesn't care, track day has no spec, but I don't want to be flopping around going around a sweeper; ECTA only requires that it be a metal racing seat. Considered a containment seat for safety, but there appears to be zero rear visibility with those, so I called the Intermediate RR seat "good enough" - the best compromise. Going with black covers-the old red ones fade so fast and show every little speck of dirt. Called the rollbar builder and got on his list for as soon after Feb 1 as he can get started. Can work on plastic interior panels and fitting flares in the meantime. Lower radiator hose seems to be leaking (again). I have SO much still to do before spring.

Sounds like a case of "down pipe envy." Its not the size that matters, but rather what you can do with it.

Thanks, johnc for the clarification. Do you think that any of those door bracing strategies has ANY more chassis stiffening promise than the others? Or do you think they are all kind of pissing in the wind? I can see from jacking up my car that the chassis is a noodle, and I was hoping to help some with the accessory bars to the firewall in the area where the front inner fenders join the firewall using as large a footplate as possible (pretty crowded up there). If all those options seem pointless, I might stay with a simple 6-point and save weight and entry/exit difficulty. I do plan a knee bar passing thru the radio portion of the dash, but that addition will be staged, probably next winter. Now that the brakes and shocks are done, it is full-court press on the roll bar-I expect to fire off a seat and seat brace order tomorrow after work. Once that arrives, it's off to the chassis shop.

Nice shop. Hey, who stole all my clamps? Post a picture of the adhesive bottle please-I have some holes I'd like to cover and it sounds good.

Installed my new konis over the last month or so, fighting thru all the little obstacles slowly but surely. When done, everything seemed well, but I didn't try to adjust the shocks and didn't go for a test drive. Ride height was low so I changed springs and increased my ride height with some pre-load. Before the test drive decided to set all 4 shocks to full soft but found one of the four shock adjustment tabs seized. The tab is a very delicate looking flat-sided pin that you put an equally delicate-looking plastic knob on temporarily to do the adjusting. The knob wouldn't budge, but knowing how delicate it all looks I didn't get all gorilla on it. Instead, I googled it. All I found were stories of folks in the same situation who called koni tech, were told to force it, and they broke off the pin. Didn't find anybody who had successfully solved the problem. I do not know if the adjuster was jammed right out of the box-I stupidly hadn't checked. I carefully put a crescent wrench on the pin and felt and watched the action of the pin and found that the pin was not stuck at the top. I could feel a spring tension build when I twisted it, suggesting that the pin was part of a thin rod that perhaps reached some distance down into the shock to actuate a rotating valve of some kind. Back to google. After reading more stories of attempted remedies resulting in broken shocks, I finally found an old article in a Volkswagen forum that suggested that the air impact wrench was the culprit; that the impact tightens the valve (indirectly via inertia) at the same time that it tightens the shock to the camber plate. I had no way of knowing if the valve was tightened in the firm or soft direction, but got a hint when I noticed that the shock had compressed. I pulled up on the strut rod and boy, it was tough to pull up. Concluded it was stuck in the firm direction. Looked at things and decided that impact in the loosen direction would loosen any valve inside the shock that might be stuck in the firm direction. I used the strut rod nut and lock nut and a good bit of torque to lock them up good and tight on the rod. Then used the impact wrench in the loosen direction a few brrrraaaps, checking the adjuster knob after each, and eventually YEAH! it loosened up and could be moved throughout its full 2-1/2 turns from firm to soft. Now it is time to re-install (and avoid the same mistake). I set the shock to full soft. Brraap to tighten shock to camber plate, then re-set the shock to soft (it had tightened in the firm direction as expected), then brrraap to set the lock nut, then re-set to soft (the adjuster had moved in the firm direction again). How did we live before Al Gore invented the internet? On to the next z-car challenge!

Oh, but that puts another project between me and going fast. Trying to avoid the domino effect.

Wow, looks awesome!

Hoping to get a few opinions on a few door bar designs I've taped up. Seats and old Autopower bar are pulled out, getting car closer to being ready to go to fabricator for a 10.0-certifiable NHRA roll bar. The main hoop will go to the floor and the rear supports will go to the strut towers. No strut tower brace in order to allow hauling tires to the track (I don't want to lose the cargo space). I have seen lots of photos of door bars in cars that either have the doors removed or at least opened. I'm going to run doors and close them when I race, so I want to be sure that I have access to the handles after the bar is installed. I am also curious as to opinions of the stiffening "bang for the buck" effects of door bars that have diagonal braces to the firewall. If the benefit of a bar to the firewall is minimal, I may just run a single door bar and screw it on any stiffening concepts/goals. I hope to add a dash bar / knee bar to improve side-impact safety next year when I have the dash out for a clutch pivot freshing and nicer gauges.

Got tired of crappy performance of my maxima based drifting brake and decided to re-do it with AZC components. I can now lock the wheels with slicks going down a straight road at 30mph (haven't tried faster). Used Wilwood's highest friction compound pad. Going to be a chalk-block man this year and perhaps do the AZC cable parking brake next year - gotta do some other things on the car other than brakes.

Finished the koni install today, but hit a snag: one of the adjusters won't budge. Didn't check it before I installed it-damn! Took car for a test drive and the new AZC brakes ROCK. It was great to drive a car that stopped at least as well as my wife's minivan. Did a big, smoky burnout for a buddy. The hydraulic hand brake locks the rear wheels WITH SLICKS! Didn't work on prop valve adjustment since I had "big-n-littles" on. Will do that with autocross tires after an alignment (months away). Got order for bell housing sorted out and it is now on order direct from Quick Time via Jegs. Installed the switch portion of the rear master electrical shutoff switch-wiring will wait until roll bar and flares are done. Gave her a bath to remove some iron filings from the paint before I lean against it and totally ruin the paint. Pulling seats today and rollbar tomorrow-getting closer to 6-pt roll bar install. Found a forum member nearby to take old roll bar off my hands. Was hoping to have a forum member from Mobile over for a visit, but the funeral that brought him into town was more involved than anticipated and he decided to spend more time with family and let the z-car stuff wait (I just don't get some people)! I'm joking-would have done the same thing. Maybe next time.

Did what you fellas recommended. Ordered thrust bearings and a Joe's short coilover wrench from Jegs. It showed up the NEXT DAY! Tore everything down and installed the 12" springs instead of 10" springs. Put is all back together and set ride height. I don't know how you guys can get hands on the lower seat with the car on the ground-I have to remove the tires. Droop is only 1-1/2 to 2". Anyway, I have photos of the supplies and a photo of the "final" ride height. The weather was great here today (shorts weather-last week was FREEZING), so I took it for a test drive and gave her a bath to get all the iron filings off the paint job. Now, to figure out how to get one of the koni adjuster tangs un-stuck - didn't check it before installing. Any suggestions appreciated.

No wiring yet, but I mounted the switch. I will probably mount another master shutoff switch near the driver before I do the wiring. Anyway, the switch I finally went with was the one from the marine supply shop that has a longer post (designed to go thru a thick transom) to allow me to pass it thru the double-thick panel at the rear of the car. Step bits rock! Anyway, the photos pretty well tell the story. Will add to the thread when I wire it, but that will wait until my ZG flares are done, since I will slip the wiring around thru the inner fenders.

MiKelly, I'm looking at your car and Sunny Z for reference on how high to mount these BAMF flares. For function, it looks best to "get'em up!" What wheels and tires are those in the photo? 315/18?