RebekahsZ

Glad you are OK. Scary. If we get to ride together at AMP, Im fine with the concept of driving my car at far less than 100%. I'd like to NOT be cut out of my car. Please bring your commo device and keep chattering in my ear. If Im not doing EXACTLY what you expect, send me straight to the pits.

That's good art work. Really good, actually. Why not 155s in front and 185s in back? If you want to stretch, why not stretch hard? But if you are trying to achieve the look in the sketch, I would go with 315/18 all the way around.

Ya gotta drill holes for any of the kits. Better get used to it. It's hard, kind of like your first, well, you know....

The tokicos droop farther, but I like my konis better.

I don't have Velocity. If this ever goes to YouTube, somebody send me a link.

Every diff I ever had was pretty noisy-that's kind of a roar.

Did you get to sit in it? Those thigh bolsters looked like hell. My feet would go to sleep in no time.

BTW-damn your car is awesome!

I have a gopro and it is great when put inside the car with the vented rear cover. But all I get is wind noise when put outside the car. If I put the sealed cover on the back, I get no sound at all! What to do? I'm doing some events soon and I don't know how to get good "vroom, vroom" noises with an exterior video-any suggestions? I need good engine sounds at 150mph with the camera mounted on the roof.

The Z car is simple. If you are good with a Chevy, you will be good with a Z. Lefty-loosy, righty-tighty. Buy some metric wrenches and you are good. Make friends with someone who had been a Z guy for a long time and make him/her your mentor. Pick someone who has built a car like you want to build. Stay away from mean people.

How about a "this is how it sits now" thread? I'm sure there is tons we can learn from it!

You are welcome to come borrow my 26x9s anytime! You will need to pick up some 1.25" 4x4.5 to 4x4.25 spacers of eBay first. $44 for the spacers gets you a ride with about $800 worth of wheel and tire. Deal? First chance we get after Z Nats-be ready!

It is what it is.

Looking good-2 months of scrambling to go! I smell rubber and brake dust in your future.

Tony D, somehow I always imagined you...taller. And with a bunch of Datsun tatoos.

No lie! Two really tight spots with JCI are the steering rack to crank pulley and the oil pan to ground clearances. 1" higher mounting would fix several issues.

That's one classy chassis!

Texas300, you have a 240z, right? How are their headers for your car? The mockup car they show looks to be a 280z from the turn signals.

Do you know how do they define street tire? At our tracks, a street tire is anything that is DOT rated. That opens up drag radials and DOT bias ply tires that have a couple of grooves in the tread: Hoosier Quick Time Pros, Mickey Thompson ET Street, which is their ET Drag bias ply carcass with a couple of grooves in the tread. Would I drive these tires in the rain - heck no, but they are technically street tires. On those "street" tires, there are street-legal turbo mustangs running low 4s in the 1/8. Check it out, you might find that street tire is defined pretty loosely. A 2-step really helped my launching, if you aren't familiar with a 2-step, give it a google. It lets you floor your gas and concentrate only on clutch. Otherwise, with daily driver grocery-getter tires, the only way I know to control wheelspin is with less power, which means less rpm. The 2-step really helps with this: you can set your launch rpm. You can start at 2000rpm and adjust from there: if you spin, lower the rpm. If you bog or kill it, then raise the rpm. The 2-step gives you reproducibility-it lets you control one of the hardest parameters to maintain when you are nervous at the line and distracted by the lights.

My aluminum camber bushings were silent on a smooth roadway. But run over a plastic reflector when changing lanes and "bam!" It sounded like hitting metal on metal like putting a rock in a tin can and giving it a slap. On a gravel road it sounded like someone was shaking that tin can with a rock in it giving it a "crunch, crunch, crunch sound. It wasn't a roar.

Try not to put $3,000 wheels on a $1,200 car. Do as I say, not as I do (sometimes this site is more hypocritez than hybridz). I try avoid pot holes and curbs just as much with my expensive rims as I do with my cheap rims. Expensive rims can be pretty tough on me (emotionally)-I recently took my new rims to my favorite tire shop to have some stiff sidewall Hoosier A6 mounted. I handed the wheel and tire to the old guy with the pipe in his mouth and sunken eyeballs, the one I always give a tip to, the one who has been mounting tires since Romans drove chariots, and as I was handing him my beloved equipment, I jinxed myself by saying: "Thank you for always being so careful with my stuff." Well, the tire machine had some wear in the little skid thingy that pulls the bead over the rim and he gouged the hell out of my brand new rim. I was glad it was a $225 Rota instead of a $600+, custom-offset CCW or something fancy like that. I have come to think of wheels as expendable, perishable items; and I think there is a greater chance of having the mounting dude wreck them than there is of a spontaneous failure at speed.

Put a plug in the existing hole and install a new sensor bung??

Best way to lower the 60' is with a set of Mickey Thompson ET Drag 26X8.5X15 slicks from Summit and a spare set of 15" rims. Get 15X7 4.5 backspacing Weld Draglites from the local speed shop used hoard or from Craigs list. You want the dual pattern 4X4.25 and 4X4.5 that the 4-lug mustangs use. They use special lugnuts that are available from Summit too. And get a spare driveshaft and a pile of u-joints and get good at replacing them. A trailer is nice for broken cars too. With the slicks, start with the air pressure at 20psi until you get used to the way the tires sway at speed (you just have to get used to the car using ALL of the lane). Decrease the air pressure until you get your best RTs. My best RTs with a manual trans is with just a little tire spin (not enough to make noise). If you dead-hook with a manual trans, you will break something. Auto trans cars do best with a dead hook of the tires and the torque converter does the controlled slipping. To get those times with all that tire spin, you have a good powerplant-nice job! Be warned, if you really try to lower your RT, you will find weak links in the drivetrain. And I would discourage you from trying to slip clutch a lot to avoid tire spin: you will just cook your clutch. Dump the clutch (quick release, not a side step) and let the slicks do the controlled spinning. That's my way, I'm sure others have good ideas too. By the way, I wish I had a nice girl in the stands cheering for me that way-nice catch! Sounds like a keeper. I tried to upload some videos but this website has changed and I can't cut and paste in the link, but go to youtube and search for RebekahsZ or Keith Thompson and you should find some slow-speed videos of my car launching. Mark a line on your tire and you can slow your videos of the tires so that you can start learning about acceptable tirespin. Maybe more than you wanted to know, but I love this stuff! Oh, BTW-my timeslip is from a 1/8 mile, so don't freak when the mph and times don't make sense compared to your time slip, but 60' is 60' on any track of any length.

My CF stubs are dual pattern 4 and 5 lug, but they are an early set-don't know if the product has changed. Joe answers the phone himself for questions. I told him I didn't like the baked oil finish he was using and now the stubs are zinc coated. MM made a couple of different stubs: some just had a different companion flange welded to stock 280z companion flange, so the stub was sill stock-I'm not sure what you had. I don't know if CF makes the 6-bolt companion flange for Q45 axles (should be on the site, or a phone call would answer it). My CF 39-spline stubs with their companion flange for Z31T CV axles are a work of art. 145 clutch dumps on slicks and going strong (as are my M2 shortened axle shafts)....the inner CV stub, now that's another matter, but I've only broken 1 so far.

Had a good talk with Rick at Bogart Racing Wheels yesterday. Will send him my measurements; he is a good listener and seems to understand the issues. I think I'm giving up on steel wheels. I picked up some 2-1/2" backspacing 3-1/2" wide front wheels this week at the local speedshop for $100 a piece. A machinist just quoted me $100 to have 4-4.5 bolt holes drilled. So that is a set of front wheels that should fit (can't be sure till they are drilled). One was straight as an arrow on the spin balancer, the other was not as straight, but I think it is still good enough.