RebekahsZ

Amazing! You will make mistakes working tired, oh wait, how old are you? That's right, you are still at that indestructible age where you can eat anything, do anything, heal-up from any injury and last on no sleep or food for days. Well, just in case you really are human (and most of us are), be sure before your put electricity and fuel pressure to it that you re-check everything. Leave your connectors off (disconnect) your computer until you are really ready to burn something up, so you don't fry your computer or the wiring. Have a trusted buddy go over it once even after you have, kind of like proof reading and peer reviewing a paper before turning it in. Look for new or used JTR headers in the for sale forum. Mine fit perfectly with only one exception: I had to grind a little off the back of the long JCI mount on the driver's side, then it fit like a champ with NO other conflicts. I used MSD wires with the gumby-like flex in the plug end and I'm having no trouble with the wires burning. It seemed to me that the closer I got to the end of the project, the more difficult it got, kind of like shoving your head thru a funnel. mnoel did the swap in one month, you may wind up being the new champsion. Can't wait for pictures! And I'll give you $20 when I come race in Little Rock.

It is funny how we work so hard to shave weight on our cars. I've gained 40 pounds since high school. That is like 4 horsepower lost. Look at Tony Stewart and John Force, those guys aren't worried about a few pounds. More horsepower covers a lot of sins. One of mine is the inability to push back from the table. 15 horsepower is the cost of a passenger. For now, I'm gonna throw the fat chick out. She doesn't like smelly, noisy cars anyway.

I relocated my battery so that I could put an engine wiring center in the location of the old battery. I have a bad back and while lots of guys want their engine wiring center on the inside of the firewall, I didn't want to spend that much time under the dash-I can't walk for two weeks after installing a speedometer. It is a little messy, but someday cleaning it up will become a priority and I will combine some of that squirrels nest into fewer wires and connectors. What are you doing fuel tank wise? If I had it to do over again and could weld, I would trash the spare tire well and build a recess in my rear hatch for a fuel tank and another for the battery leaving room on either side for dual exhaust. That way, my tank and battery would drop in from the TOP instead of having to lay under the car and lift the tank up while trying to attach it. In this day and age, a cell phone pretty well makes a spare tire optional. I have the battery in the rear hatch, electric fuel pump powered directly off it thru a relay, main cables traveling thru unibody over inner fender along passenger side rocker panel to a pair of bulkhead connectors from Speedwaymotors.com at the firewall. The bulkhead connectors now become terminals that the rest of the wiring system is built on. If you don't have EFI motor, your firewall would be really clean with just the bulkhead connectors and your power cables coming off of them just like a battery. Put a battery cutoff switch of one style or another in the system - mine has already saved me once from letting a small electrical fire turn into a big one. I had my battery cables made at a local truck parts store, they crimped the 3/8" terminals and heat-shrinked them for me. About $100 just in the cables (copper is expensive). Get BIG gauge cables, this isn't the time to try to save weight. You could probably just use one cable and ground your battery to the chassis, but I have had grounding problems before and just want my system to be bullet proof. Aren't cell phone cameras great? For some reason, the pictures posted in reverse order of my description above, view them from right to left as you read.

Send a PM to johnc or jmortensen. Johnc sells the conversion parts to put a subi diff in a 240z and JMortensen has a driveline business. They know all the ins-and-outs of the subi diffs. I have one in my car and I love it - it is the R180 3.90 CLSD, but I can't seem to keep the WRx and STi straight in my head. I bought the diff off ebay, so I don't know for sure what it came out of. With my L24 I like the 3.90, but with the V8, I'd rather have the 3.54. Betamotorsport half-shaft adapters are worth the price-it is a bargain. They are first quality and make this a bolt-in affair. Switch over your input flange from your old diff and use your old driveshaft. I would go to an RT front diff mount - I've had stock and solid and the RT is by far the best and they are pretty cheap: quiet and solid feel, but all mounting systems allow a little bit of movement. I am more firm than stock, but not slamming the driveline on shifts like solid mount. Budget 300-500 for the diff, 500 for half-shaft adapters, 100 for RT mount and a day for the swap. It might be the best $1000 you can spend on your z-car. If you tear-down before the big day (this job takes more than a day for me): replace your u-joints in your axles and your driveshaft and you will be using and loving this driveline until you are an old man. If you do the Wolf Creek axles, they come ungreased and it is a chore to grease them up. They come with really good instructions on how to avoid dropping all the balls from the CVs. Make sure you buy the correct sized tap and chase all the threads in the aluminum adapters before you get under the car and have to do it. Several of my adapter bolts bound in the threads until I cleaned them up - I ruined a couple of the included bolts, but the kit comes with a few extras (either that or I forgot to install some). This is a really nice kit ($950) be prepared to have to modify your rear swaybar end links to clear the CVs and adapters. The Wolf Creek kit is really hardware intensive and you can still have trouble with your old 240z stub axle and half-shaft adapter bolts loosening up if you drive hard. I have one friend on the forum who dropped a Wolf Creek axle due to a fasteners loosening. There are 20 fasteners per axle! That is a lot of loosening and tightening, loc-titing, torquing and safety wiring (and in my mind-worrying). If you only have a 6-cylinder, this kit (CV axles) is probably not the best $1000 you will spend your car. The Wolf Creek kit does not include the Datsun bolts, and they are hard to find, so keep up with yours. It IS some major eye candy. I have a friend on the forum with a V8 and an automatic on drag radials. He has broken stock, Wolf Creek, and Z31 turbo axles. Don't know if he has tried Q45 axles, but he is either going to have to change tires, modify his driving technique or go to a solid axle.

I'm sure it wasn't simple, but it looks so simple and clean - Great job. I wish I had your fab skills. I really like your trans crossmember- I have the 240z JCI cross member, and I while have no side movement of my shifter, but I do have some up and down shake. Trimming the stock shifter boot is working fine. I went on a 2 hour "reliability run" yesterday and had no issues. So far, no tickets from the straigh pipes, but I rarely "open 'er up." It really isn't any louder than a Harley, and I never see one of them pulled over for noise. Thank goodness I'm in Alabama and not some big city. I did high-center the car on the dump tubes once on a driveway, so I gotta re-think my side exhaust. Still want them, so I may c-notch my frame rails and bring the dump thru the lower part of the front fender. No matter what fuel tank you use, I recommend spending the money for a shut-off type fuel filter before your pump, so you can clean it out with a full tank of gas. Plan for some flex in the lines so you can service it. I put the filter in, but did not use the shut off type (so expensive) but now wish I had - gotta find a little AN6 plug that I can put in the line quickly. Little bits of welding flash and other trash gets in there - I've been SO careful to keep my tank and fuel clean, but I'm going to be cleaning that filter regularly for a while. Before I installed my tank, I cleaned it with soapy water, solvent, gasoline, blew it out with air and reached in and rubbed around with a tack rag, and I'm still getting trash in the screen! I also mounted my Corvette FPR in a bad spot where I can't reach it with the tank installed, so do a little more backward planning than I did. I think the screen is catching enough to protect my FPR (I hope). So far, that is the only thing I would do any differently.

Drove car for about 2 hours - no issues. Video sounds bad, but the in-car sound is awesome. It was a beautiful day, drove up with a buddy tailing his Daytona Coupe replica to a little restaurant across the border in Loretta, TN. Gas gauge shows 3/4 full when totally full with fuel in sight in the fill tube. No leaks. No fuel cutout or rev limiter this trip. Fuel level still above 1/2 tank (according to gauge) after 2 hours of driving around. I think we were cruising at 60mph. Got a red left arm and sore cheeks from grinning all day. Notice God's favor raining down on the Z in one of the pictures-not photo shopped. Walbro fuel pump is not too noisy, just quiet buzz, water temp sitting at same point on gauge as my L24 did, same with oil pressure. Close ratio of 2-3, 3-4, 4-5 gets you there in a hurry. I keep shifting into 4th when trying to hit 6th. In 6th, the car just sort of idles down the road. If there are any bad vibrations, they are drown out by the straight pipes. Dump tubes are getting a nice light gray soot in them. Even with dump tubes in front of me, this car does not smell like fuel fumes like the old L24 did. I wasn't dizzy from carbon monoxide poisoning like I used to be. Perched car on the headers coming out of a driveway. Saw that the drop from the driveway to the roadway was risky so I went slow and backed up as soon as I felt pipes touch and picked a different route to get out of driveway. Inspected headers and oil pan - all OK. Low cars are a hassle, but oh, I love the sound of the side exhaust. Considering different routing play, but I gotta keep them in concept. Porterfield R4S pads are VERY dusty. Accelleration.MOV

AeroZ got his from PSI and it even came with an instruction book. I saw his install and it was really neat and clean with the PCM under the dash on the passenger side. He loaned me his instruction book and it was really helpful for me, even though I didn't use their harness. When you get to the wiring point, you can PM or call me and I'll help you. It isn't that hard, but it is intimidating. Until you are holding the harness in your hands and have the motor installed, none of the terms and descriptions have any meaning. You just gotta go for it and follow thru and not give up. Whatever you buy, it won't be right and you will have to customize it to your configuration.

Great, thanks gentlemen. I made some last year, but I've been afraid to use them. I'll be of good courage.

Mike, can you actually use the red tie down/tow loops on the back of your car? I put a set on, really just to make up for the unused holes from my rusty bumper delete, but I'm afraid to use them for fear of bending the car's sheetmetal. I'd love to use them if it is safe.

How did you get home (you and the car), or do we need to send out a search party? I have used my AAA towing insurance several times since owning a Z. It is a pretty good investment at like $4 a month.

I'm sending follow-up PMs to responders. Any input from the drag race bunch? What ratio do you run and what gear are you in at the end of the track (1/8th mile)?

Any car can have lift-off oversteer if it is at the limit of adhesion and you transfer all the weight off the tires. Don't drive fast in dangerous places. Save it for the track. Slow down prior to turns and accellerate thru them. If you are on a track and you over-do it, you'll go off in the flat runoff area and you will just pull back on and try it again. If you run off and hit something or someone, you'll be busy for a while sorting all that out, then fixing your car. Sorry about the soapbox, but the track just frees your conscience and really makes driving fun and guilt-free. On the street, look cool, make some noise and maybe scratch out a little, but don't speed (very much). Keep all your tires the same size. The Z is roughly a 50-50% weight distribution car. In stock form, it pushes (or understeers) pretty bad. If your suspension settings are stock, you REALLY need to get slowed down before tight turns to avoid pushing the front end like a steam shovel. Then you can hit the throttle pretty hard coming out and maybe you can even induce a little oversteer, but you kind of have to do it on purpose. Keeping all your tires the same makes it easier to rotate tires. You are much more likely to be spinning one or two tires when you are fooling around, and that one will go bald first, so if you rotate that tire around, you will get more miles out of a set. You will also tend to roll the outside of your front tires, so you'll want to move those around too. Folks like to put wider tires on the back of lots of cars, but on z-cars it is mostly just for looks (it does really look cool).

Why the O2 ports on each 2:1 collector? At first I though it would allow you to tune each carb that shares a butterfly shaft, but I was wrong...I traced the tubes-you couldn't tune an individual carb from those, each pipe on the shared O2 sensor goes to a different carb... In this case, would you gain anything with this O2 sensor set up over just a single O2 sensor in the common collector?

Hey, can I buy your new shift knob really cheap? Better yet, if I can get your sweet z off the side of the road, can I have it? Really, from how flexible your shifter is, it looks like you lost your shifter c-clip and pin. You may have broken the "ears" off of your shifter mechanism on your shifter. They can be welded back on - my Z-had been repaired that way when I bought it 20 years ago. May even be able to do that without pulling the engine/tranny. Either that or the little ball on the end of your shifter handle broke off - I've seen a cracked one before. If that is it, a new shifter handle is pretty easy to source. Remove the shifter boot and send us a photo of what you find. I really doubt it is anything catastrophic. Shhhhhhhh...was that a wolf, I just heard howling? Looks pretty lonely out there. Better smoke some of that medicinal cannabis to treat your anxiety!

I made a pledge to clean my pre-pump fuel screen after every tank of gas until it was clean for two checks in a row. I almost talked myself out of it, but when I had some higher rpm cut-out, I couldn't be sure that it was my rev limiter and not that sandy tank again. So, I mustered up the strength at 11pm to go and put on some sexy 240z cologne before climbing in bed with my lovely wife. Pulled fuel screen and it was filthy again. See pictures. Even though I have been very careful with the tank, there was even a little paper towel fragment in the screen. I think I just kept myself from being embarrassed with the Cobra boys on tomorrow's reliability run. Saved again! By the way, as a board certified ophthalmologist, I can also attest that, while it hurts like hades, a healthy volume of $4.07, 93-octane gasoline directed straight into your eye will not permanently blind you. Should be fine by morning...I hope... She loves the smell of 240z - gonna get some action tonight, for sure! Note healing left thumb-add that to the cost of the build.

I've got 225# in front, 250# in back. Had them for 10 years and love them. I'd drive them across the country. I'm having a little trouble with them in my LS2 swap though-when I take off at part throttle, the car will sometimes buck a little and I get an oscillation from front to back like a bucking horse. Then my big foot on my light-little drive-by-wire pedal gets to bucking in synch and next thing I know, the car is like hopping down the road and I can only stop it by either getting off the throttle or flooring it. Weirdest thing. Anyway, the ride is stiff but really nice-the suspension does work at these spring rates and it is not rough. I am running 225/50/15 or 16 tires at 30psi with Tokico Illuminas. I'm wondering if I just need to be smoother, put a stiffer spring on the DBW pedal, or go to Konis (not this year). Are the 500s just awful on the street?

Loved the video. Interesting to learn about the alternator mounting problem. I need to learn more about issues that one runs into when trying to mount a T56 to the 4.8, 5.3, and other larger iron block variants. You've been a great help to me in my build - thanks for posting your work.

Suspension and tires first. Consider re-thinking permanent flares. The ZG flares rock because they give you such flexibility. Either way, if you increase caster or go to wider wheels and tires, you need to trim your front fenders and airdam forward an inch or even more. You may then find that you need to eliminate your front side-marker light. Little problems like that come up, so the larger the wheel opening the better. Plus, what if you decide to lower your car only to find that the molded flares aren't clearanced enough??

I've been working on my brakes too and have made some progress and learned a lot. Here are my pointers, you can call me if you like 256-366-4685. First, did you bleed your master cylinder before going to the wheel cylinders? The master can hold a lot of air. I use plastic tube between the master cyl bleed screws and the reservoirs to recirculate the fluid and vent the air. This technique is really quick. I am always surprised by how much air the master can hold. Second, does repeated pumping of the pedal cause it to become higher and more firm? If not, then I really wouldn't suspect air as the culprit and I would suspect that you have a linkage adjustment problem. For linkage adjustment: 1) Your rear wheel brake adjusters may not be working. Remove your brake drums and take a 1/2" drill bit and drill right thru the face of the drum where a rubber plug is currently located. The drum is soft aluminum and it drills really easily. Then take an adjusting tool and tighten your rear brake adjusters until they scrape a good bit when you turn the drum. If you have panasports, RBs or any other "open face" style wheel, you may be able to adjust this way without removing the wheel and tire. You can run your rear drums adjusted a lot tighter than the e-brake adjuster can accomplish. Source: johnc 2) If you still have the same problem, get under the dash (actually you may want to do this before #1) and make sure that your linkage is adjusted as maximally as possible. In other words, make sure that your adjustable stopper up near the brake switch is loosened up to allow the pedal to come all the way up. Then adjust your push rod (this is a pain) to ensure that it is pretty much maxed out. 3) Now it is time to get wet and nasty. Use a syringe and paper towels to suck the smaller rear brake reservoir dry. Remove the brake line from the master cylinder under the port marked "R." Take out the larger steel fitting that the line screwed into. Take a look with a mirror up inside of the port and you will see a male flare fitting. Carefully pry that out and if you have drum brakes, a little rubber check valve with a spring should fall out. If you have changed your master cylinder, this check valve could be missing. If you need one, I have one that i don't need that I'll mail you for free. There may be a check valve in your old master cylinder if you still have it. If this is the culpret, remember to bleed the master cyl and the rear wheels again. You shouldn't need to bleed the fronts again, the two systems are isolated from one another. Source: Cannonball88 4) Think about cutting your metal lines and installing rubber front wheel flex lines into the brake system where it screws into master cylinder. This will allow you to someday change your booster without having to drain and bleed your brakes. It also will make the next step easier. 5) You may need to adjust the length of the pushrod that goes between the vacuum booster and the master cyl. (#4) is designed to make this easier too. There are a couple of forum authors who have tried to describe this process, but I'm going to use trial and error (I can't add and subtract). You will find all these tips with the search button, but sometimes it is difficult for me to search because I don't know what specific terms to search. I hope I've made it easier for you. If you go to my content, you will find recent threads with this info. I didn't come up with any of this on my own, rather I got all these tips from other members of hybridZ.

I didn't know that breaking a crank pulley was that common. Small world. There was a Warrant named Jeremy Frye who was a big Z-car guy at Rucker when I was there. He was a big help to me and did a little welding on my roof when it started cracking on the B-pilar. I think he's still Z-ing, but I've kind of lost track of him...that was back in the days when it was cool to put a Subi R160 LSD in a Z-car. I've got to hook up my tach! Went to the local Cobra club hangout to let Carol Shelby and Mr. K duke it out. They loved the car and one of the better fabricators volunteered to help me make my faux hilborne injection system in the weeks ahead. Admired a high dollar GT-40 replica build in progress. We shared wiring horror stories and planned a group drive for tomorrow after church. Convoyed with them back into town to try to drain my tank some more and I hit the rev limiter twice passing a 302 cobra replica with ease (he may not have been trying, perferring to enjoy the sound of my straight pipe dump tubes at 6000rpm). I hate that thing (rev limiter) -it is like throwing the brakes on. I guess it is better to save the motor. Maybe it is the lower tone of the motor vs the L24, but I sure don't feel like I'm taching that high when it takes effect. The L24 felt like it was just screaming at 6000 and this LS2 feels like it is just getting warmed up. I guess I won't know for sure whether it is just fuel starvation until I get a tach and shift light rigged up. Not really loving the T56 with the 3.90 diff and 26" tires. First is kind of pointless; I'm constantly cruising around town in 5th gear, and the rpm drop going to 6th is like walking around in snow shoes. What gears (diff and trans gear selecter) are you guys using when you are racing? I'm wondering if I'm gonna be autocrossing completely in 3rd instead of 2nd, as I did with the L24 with a RARE shift to third. I had this same diff last autox season and it was great with the L24....any thoughts? I'm thinking that if I ever do a track day on a road course, I'm gonna be reaching for 6th some and that is gonna suck.

I DO ramble-character flaw. Sorry for those who are probably annoyed by it, but that seems to come with the package - my kids hate the lectures. I was at Rucker in 1989 for basic course and flight school, but got delayed by a disqualifying medical problem with my physical (hayfever); took me a year of "snowbirding" to beat that bullshi... Proved to the board that the DQ was stupid, UH-1 primary and did AH-1 transition and finally got out of there about '91. Off to AH-1 test pilot course TDY to Ft. Eustis then a tour at Ft. Ord (right behind Laguna Seca). Back to Rucker in 1993-ish for OH-58D and officer's advance course and OH-58D test pilot course and bought my z down there and autocrossed it with the Wirgrass SCCA bunch. Great guys, great facilities (the Cobra training field (Hanchey??) - high silica concrete - great tire bite. 3rd autocross broke a crank pully keyway, so I pulled motor down. Body "restore" was done at A1 autobody in Enterprise. L24 rebuild in post housing at Ft. Rucker while car in paint shop. Coilovers and 4:11 open R180 at Ft. Bragg. Punched out of Army from there in '97 to go home to Little Rock for med school where I met BlueOvalZ (Terry Oxendale) and got the V8 bug. Car into storage while in residency at Galveston, TX till I moved to Alabama where there is no salty ocean spray. Car out of storage for a year of teaching my daughter to drive/drag race. One to two years on LS2 swap. There is a AH-1 cobra on a post at Veterans Park here in Florence, so that is proof that I'm old. The old guys seem to have the best cars. It has stopped raining and my wife is nagging something about mowing the grass - off to drive the Z 'till cooler heads prevail. Gonna try to stay up late tonight getting the line lock wired back up. I owe you guys a good smokey burn-out. Maybe I can get that posted tomorrow. PS-Terry probably won't remember who I am, it was like 10 years ago. I would be hard to recognize with all the drool running down my shirt when I saw his car. I was just driving thru his neighborhood and saw his car thru an open garage door. I was pretty forward and just knocked on his door - he talked to me for about an hour. This was in the pre-cell phone days, so my wife couldn't text me a hundred times to find out what car I was climbing all over and under. The guy is a fabrication and composite part making genius.

My bracket wasn't the best. Go ahead and get your disc swap kit then get a piece of graph paper and a compass and scratch it out with a pencil-I'm not a genius or anything. I just saw that Datsun parts has a wildwood conversion kit on eBay. I thought the price was very fair. That might be a good kit to adapt as the maxima calipers are pretty expensive at about $120 each, and I used 4 and bought 2 spares. Try the inline system and if you like it use it. Plenty people do. I just didn't like it personally and I used it for a year. Other than drag race staging, what maneuver could I do with front brake control? I saw a friend's hand brake from Godspeed and it was a pretty nice unit, same design as my K-sport, but much better construction.

Add up how much you have spent bribing your wife to have sex with you: big house, nice new minivan, dinners, movies, cruises, assisted living for on-laws, roses, cards. It adds up. Driving this car is not as good as surfing central California in January, but is way better than sex, lasts a lot longer and is a heck of a lot more reliable. I never knew the whine of an electric fuel pump in the prime mode could get me so excited for what comes next. Get your priorities in order!

I have been using overtime checks from the hospital so I have a some idea but you should go thu my post to get an idea of what it cost. My overtime w2 says $9000. That is since jan so look back to see what I bought before jan of 2011 and after jan 2012 and you will have a rough idea. I pay more for things than a lot of folks because I have wanted to do this since I was about 6 years old and I am thru screwing around. My motor trans was $6500 & I have bought a fair amount of things I didn't use but was too lazy to return. I may have bought my motor the year before. Was it worth it? Absolutely. But this is not for the budget minded. You get what you pay for. I used to be an attack helicopter pilot and driving this machine makes nosing an ah1 cobra attack helicopter in to a gun run dive seem very mundane and I haven't even been to the track yet. I haven't even floored it because I am a little scared of it on the street. Others may be used to this kind of performance but it is very new and surreal for me. It may seem more tame when I have a muffler but for now driving this car is the best drug I have ever experienced. Check with the local coke dealer and see what a year of high grade white stuff would cost and if you spend about that on your build you will be more fulfilled at the end of the year than Charlie sheen by far "Winning! Tiger Blood!". By the way I am trying to burn off my first tank of gas so I can clean my fuel screen again before calling my tank clean. I drove around for over an hour and my fuel gauge didn't budge. Yes it does work. I'd have an empty tank with my L24 with triples. This motor gets great mileage. Use that to justify the cost of the swap.

Psi, various eBay sellers. Mine is from donor car modified and flashed by lane Colvart in Huntsville Alabama for $250.. Fired on second turn of key. I had to add fan relays fuel pump relay and fuse block. Some harness builders include those parts. You will need them. I bet I have $500 in wiring so if you get a complete harness with fuse lock & relays for that you are doing great.