RebekahsZ

The only other vendor I know of with the wide flare is the one in Japan Maugan (sp?). (I missed a set in the classified forum last week!). I have a lot to do on the car, so for now I can afford to wait. I think I can get my money back via Paypal dispute if I need to. Will just be patient for now. Really want the big flares because I might go all the say to 315s before I say "enough." Do you know of any other dealers for the extra wide flares? I eventually got my order from Modern Motorsport by being patient, so I will do same tactic for now. Thanks for the encouragement.

Good morning! Some have had luck with The Driveshaft Shop. They are on line. I know Sunny Z got some custom axles from them. I think all you need to know is your desired length from flange to flange. You send your CVs to them and they will assemble with new boots, etc. try sending him a PM for details. Don't be offended by short answers, Sunny Z is usually not as long winded as I am.

I got some new fexible brake lines and cut the fittings off of them. Took them to a welder and had them brazed closed. I now use those as test plugs to isolate components. I also use them to cap lines if I have a component like a caliper off to keep brake fluid from drip, drip, dripping. Takes a couple lunch hours to get all those errands run, but they are great.

You asked what we think of this plan, so here goes: The early Z is not a good DRIFT car. The front end setup is all wrong for the high steering angles that you need to really hang the tail out-wide tires rub on the T-C rod. A 240sx is better for that. If the lower part of the body is not rusty, you should probably try to sell the Z to buy a different car that has better drift potential, otherwise you will spend a lot of money and basically waste both your money and a chassis that somebody else could use. On the other hand, the Z does make a fun drag racing car. It is light and has a large engine bay for engine swaps. The rear axles are the weak link in the drivetrain, but if you run an automatic even the stock rear driveline will hold up pretty well until you start making some serious horsepower. The girls at the drag strip are usually fatter and they are usually non-Asian and dental care is optional, but the beer is cheaper and you can drive drunk, so long as you stay in your lane. Even with the drunks, wrecks are much more rare than in drifting (which is really just glorified smash-up derby), so your car can last for decades, so it is cheaper. Hope this helps. I would make a drag car out of it if it were mine.

Then that is what I will try when I decide I want to give a pile of money to my chiropractor. Thanks for the review.

Can you show your front droop limiter pics? Wait till spring to get your A6s and make the vendor tell you the production/date codes and buy his newest stuff if you can find one that helpful. They gas off really quick. Storage conditions make a big difference. You might loose some grip just from letting them lay around all winter.

Can you show your front droop limiter pics?

How instantaneous is the GPS speedo? Sometimes I check speed before rolling into a corner to know if I'm coming in too hot. Will it keep up with a car traveling at 100mph or more, or is there a few second lag? Does it take a while to find 5 satellites, etc? Tell me to search if you like.

heavy85- Johnc turned me onto some TC rods two years ago that use a tie rod end. Not a lot of miles, but almost all of it racing-some tracks with rough pavement. So far so good-car goes straight and doesn't wander on the highway, drag strip or under threshold braking. Hey, have you gotten my PMs asking for a review on your driver's seat?

I would think so. Thanks for posting the link. And as the zstore says: replacing only one shock could kill you dead, so you better buy at least 2 or you are taking your life into your own hands, and its not their fault-they told you so. It could happen. Maybe. Probably not.

How often in life does EVERYTHING go right? 1)17X9.5 Rotas arrived today, no shipping damage, gun-metal paint lot is consistent and matches the 16X8s I bought 2 years ago and plan to run on front so I don't have to chop up front fenders yet. 2)A pair of 275/40/17 Hoosier R6s are here, nice and soft rubber, recent production date, ready to be mounted on above tomorrow. 3)Still waiting for used tire dealer to find me a pair of A6s to go on the other set of 17s. 4)Second set of rear AZC disc brake brackets arrived and look great. 5)Spanner wrench recommended by johnc arrived from McMaster Carr and fits the Konis perfectly. Need to get handle lengthened. 6)New and hungry welder opened up shop a mile from my house: has mig, tig, arc, mobile truck. Looked at an aluminum tig welding sample-looks good. 7)Konis arrived a week earlier than projected from johnc. Overall a great day. Stub axles are out and rear brakes are totally torn down. Starting to mock-up for modified AZC rear disc conversion, modified for second Dynalite drifting caliper/staging brake/hydraulic handbrake to make trailer loading safer. Will have bracket for cable parking brake and will save the stock handle/cable assembly in the event that somebody makes an easy to install cable parking brake system in the years ahead. Current AZC parking brake system looks like it still needs development to me. I got lots of chalk blocks laying around. Still waiting on rear carbon BAMF flares. It has only been three weeks and distributor has gone into the "black ops" mode (no email or facebook responses). Will give it at least another week, struggling not to cancel order, but also contemplating adding front flares to order (just in case) so I don't have the same delay later...I guess it is disrespectful to say so, but this is starting to smell like a re-run of my experiences with a certain Canadian vendor: accept money then go dark for an extended period...I still have a lot to do before I need the flares, but glad I didn't try to start this until the local drag strip closed for the winter. Already dreaming of 315s all the way around, perhaps next year. Maybe that will be my tire limit...

McMaster Carr link added to the original post above to make it easier for someone to advise me.

Yeah, but I don't understand what the different numbers mean. I like a big spoon and I'm not terribly self confident with machinist specs and materials. Now, if I could walk down an aisle and chose from stock on-hand, this would be a no-brainer, but McMaster Carr just has a spec chart and a million different meshes, and the stainless mesh is more expensive than I imagined. I'd like to avoid a bunch of returns. I may have to find somebody who does a lot of street rod/custom stuff to help me with the order.... I will try to add a link to the McMaster Carr page to try to help someone help me.

Atozone-I'm with you, my plan is to go to 4 hood pins, 2 in front and 2 in back. Johnc is correct, as usual, my hood does move around at around 100mph, but I'm usually so busy then that I have other fish to fry, like shifting and turning. But, I do worry about it. I also worry about my hood release cable snapping at some point, and that is a real pain to work thru. Now that my car is more race car than street car, I hope to soon go to pins. I will keep my hinges and prop/support rod-I've seen a couple hoods get run over or stepped on at the track-expensive. When I have my fenders repaired for the flares (assuming they ever come in from the vendor (3 weeks of waiting so far for something "in-stock"), I plan to ask the fabricator to put some brackets on the inner fenders for the front two hood pins.

That's what I meant by flop but I really meant what he said. Bolt it up and see what happens, the construction looks good, like all your stuff always does. You are one heck of a craftsman. I don't think anything will come apart, I just think you will have an unstable alignment over bumps and under transition from braking thru acceleration.

It might make the control arm flop around since there is nothing to stop rotation. What inner tie-rod did you use?

Yeah, ditch the torsion bars. Hood looks great.

What are dash lights?

I bought the MSD brand LS-2 step. It is literally plug and play into the coil wiring harnesses up on top of the valve covers. You just have to figure out how to activate it, where to mount the control box (the cables aren't very long) and how to power it. Because of the short wiring, I mounted mine under the hood on the firewall, so I have to pop the hood to adjust it. You need a little screw driver to adjust it, same as the little screw driver I need to adjust my shift light. An alternative is the Lingenfelter 2-step which is actually a 3-step. So you can set it to have a burn-out rpm and a launch rpm. The third step is factory PCM controlled. I try to limit my burn out rpm to 5000 because I've hit the factory rev limiter several times (once those tires start spinning, you can over-rev in a heart beat). I've seen lots of cars blow up in the waterbox. It must have longer wiring because I've seen photos of other folks' setups and they can mount it inside the car on the trans tunnel. It adjusts with knobs that you can turn without a tool. It also can be wired to adjust timing somehow, but the wiring looks more complicated, that is why I chickened out on it. Supposedly you can also adjust timing retard with it, but I haven't found anybody who could tell me how that gets wired into the PCM, or if that feature even works with an LS motor. It is more of a universal unit, whereas the MSD kit is specifically for the LS family. I have a thread out there somewhere that details the install of my line lock and another that details the install of my 2-step. When I decide that I need more driver controls, the next item is a switch operated hydraulic clutch release solenoid. The trick to that working safely is ensuring that my line lock, 2-step and clutch all release at exactly the same time. Right now, my line lock releases at the bottom of my clutch travel limit and the 2-step releases at the top of my clutch travel release limit. The idea is that it reduces the chances of my clutch dropping against locked front brakes, and it reduces the chances of my 2-step releasing before the clutch is fully engaged. The only malfunctions I have had are: 1) 2-step release switch out of adjustment, which made car launch and stay at 2800 rpm all the way down the track, and 2) my mistake of mixing up the 100rpm and 1000rpm pins which deactivated the unit and I nearly blew the engine when I went to the line and floored the car expecting a 2-step function that just wasn't there! Scary.

I want to order a 24"X36" sheet of stainless wire screen from McMaster Car on-line, but I don't know how to interpret their screen mesh specifications. Can somebody give me some good advice on a stainless mesh part number that would work well to stop those big hard-shell beetles that fly around under the lights at the drag strip from destroying my new aluminum radiator? My plan is to get something with a pattern that favors the grill sections on high-end sports cars like the the grills on the Cadillac CTS-V. I'll take it somewhere and have it welded to a frame then bolt it to the orginal radiator mounting bolts on the forward side of the radiator support of my 240z. I'm imagining something like a 1/4 to 3/8" box weave. Here is the McMaster-car link that shows a bunch of different options http://www.mcmaster.com/#stainless-steel-mesh/=p61s1j CTS-V grill.bmp

That is consistent with my experience.

With the 2-step, I can vary the rpm based on traction conditions. Real sticky track=4500rpm. Slick track=as little as 2000rpm. The problem I have on slick tracks is that when the 2-step clicks off, the tires spin and the weight transfers back forward even after a good initial bite and squat. I wish I had some sort of automated 2-step progressive controller, but I guess that would be called a real driver who can launch old-school off a clutch. Problem with slipping clutch is heat and flywheel warp-been there and done that. The difference between your street tires and your slicks is too little-you should be almost a second quicker just by driving the car for the next year and learning how to launch it. I don't know anything about launching an automatic, but I was under the impression that you should be able to launch just by lifting the brake pedal off the floor (foot braking). If I had an automatic, I'd be wiring up a delay box and doing the whole thing, because money racing depends on consistency (which I'll never have). There's still likely a little more speed/ET in your car as it sits, although a 1.66 is nothing to cry about. That is what I 60' when I'm spinning like crazy, so I know you can do better.

Time to change your screen name to Fast78z,

Maybe yours, duragg, but for most L6 guys, who put sidedrafts on a stock motor and don't spin them to 8,000rpm, no. I would like to get 8 of those screens for my dummy velocity stacks (to literally keep the bugs out-I had a moth in mine the other day), but they are too expensive-those are a major rip-off, price wise!

So, I drove 5 hours to my 75 year-old mother's house to help her clean out all my dad's old tools in prep for putting my boyhood home up for sale and moving to our town. Mom opens her home to house adult international "students" on cultural exchange from eastern Europe to the US. Staying with her this week are a couple of Georgians (not from Atlanta, but from the former Soviet Republic). One of the guys didn't speak English, but had visited Cuba for a month where he was immersed in the Spanish language. I don't speak Georgian, but I spent a week in Costa Rica on a mission trip and I try to chat with some of my Spanish-speaking patients. So, by both of us meeting in the middle with broken Spanish, I learned that he knew what a Datsun Z is and that he is a member of a 300-person Georgian Subaru club and that he has an Imprezza that has undergone an engine swap from 2.0 to 3.5 turbo with NO2 to the tune of 350hp and zero-100mph of 7.3. He says there are no drag strips in Georgia, so all racing is done on the street! It was a fun weekend.