RebekahsZ

Went by after work and there's a ton still to be done. The NHRA door bar needs to be placed such that it is in a perfect spot to hit that little boney knob on you elbow that hurts like hell. Should have the angle right to be able to get to door latch and window crank. I see removeable door bars in my future but not this year (I gotta get done). The one thing the door bar placement should help with is in giving me a place to rest my left elbow to keep the car gong straight better. But I'm gonna bruise that same elbow all up at an autocross. Wish I felt like gutting doors but I like my roll up windows. Like everything else, it's gonna take some getting used to. He swears it will be ready for pick up Friday night so I plan to go get it and settle up Sat morn. I will take pics then. Will probably put pics up while I'm at the beach freezing in my hotel room next week. Will load my phone with pics sat. I think I'm gonna be satisfied, but probably not totally satisfied. Life.

I love my TTT front LCAs-very happy. Be sure to cut the outboard end off them (everything distal to the outboard ball joint bolts) to avoid digging into your rotor. Keep an eye on your ball joint dust boot-somebody just had one melt when used in conjunction with AZC brake kit (the back spacing of that rotor is very close to the ball joint).

I think you will like working with those standard Chevy mounts. The JCI kit uses one of those and you can get to the bolts easily to loosen them up. The JCI kit uses an LS1 "clamshell" mount on the drivers side. I hate it. It is hard to get to the bolts to loosen in order to get a little slop in it when dropping the tranny or if just trying to get the bolts lined up. I like that Hawk's tranny mount better too. But, with it being weld in, you wanna get that crossmember in the right place on the first time! I would definitely only spot weld it until you have installed and pulled the engine a few times to be sure it is right before you weld it up solidly. And the clearance bend in the motor mount looks terrible in that photo-it probably looks better from a different angle. Pros and cons to everything. We are all super anxious to see how it goes, espcially with the headers.

When I do photos, I email them from my cell phone to my email, then I open some microsoft program that lets me save them. Before the email goes from my phone, it asks me what size I want to send. I usually chose "medium." It seems to work fine. Then, I use the browse function on hybridz to look at my photos in my desktop and I double click attach them into the message. Probably not the most efficient way, but it is the best way I know. The LS weighs roughly the same as your L24. We don't have to change the spring rate or shocks just because of the V8. My weight distrubution is 49% F/ 51% R. Sounds like your car will be a great recipient. Only thing to consider is running a 50 or 60-series tire and if you haven't changed your steering rack bushings and installed a hard plastic steering coupler, those really make a Z drive 100% better. You are gonna like it, and $10,000 should be just about right. One other thing: try to get your engine and trans together as a complete pull-out. Lately, all my friends who have pieced-together their powertrain have had problems. Spend more up-front to get low mileage and as compete a system as possible and you will save time and money in the end. There is no down-side to the available OEM drive-by-wire systems. The biggest hassle for you will be chosing a fuel tank. I had my 72 tank re-worked for fuel injection with an internal sump. Lots of guys use a camaro tank. If I could go back in time, I would use a cheap aluminum aftermarket cell/tank with an internal sump. Once and done. Now, get to work and post us up some in-progress photos!

I don't know what you mean by "feel" like a Z. If you do the motor/trans swap and do that alone, your budget is good. If you do a bunch of add on work, ie: brakes, suspension, paint and body; I think that budget is low. For example, I have a buddy with a stock, pristine 78 280z. If he does the swap only, he will have a nice LS Z for about $10,000 and about a month's work. If he decides he wants it to handle like something other than a stock Z, he needs to budget $5,000 to $10,000 more. The guys who start with a trashed, rusty, worn out POS will spend the $20,000 all at once to have anything nice and clean and it will take about a year to do. As to the "feel" of the car. It will look the same and handle corners the same. If you have a stock suspension, wheels and tires, you will still have a car that drives kind of like a boat. It will be great for straight line and the front will lift quite a bit and the rear will squat quite a bit on take off. It will feel like a regular Z, but with more power. It will not handle any worse because of the V8. You will have enough power to get yourself into trouble if you get all crazy with the go pedal. The exhaust note will be lower and the car will smell less like fumes than the Z-smell that we all know very well.

Don't go as a spectator. Register as a novice, do the novice walk thru and race. The guys will help you and I promise I will kill more cones than you. Go to run. You will be a spectator 50% of the time anyway. Total driving time for the day is 6-8 minutes. You will be standing around a lot! That's solo.

hwvigo-the pins arrived today. Perfect! Next time I pull spindle pins (no time soon I hope), your bolts are going in. Thanks so much for making that happen.

Looking great. Where are you on the motor? One of my buddies is putting a 350sbc/T350 in a RX7 for the sole purpose of running XP against me at Huntsville. We hope to be present at the May race. You gonna be ready?

Recently had a second meeting with my informal business mentor. This is a long-term project, if anything more than a pipe dream. I currently have two types of rear flares and a full set of Japanese flares on the way. I need to know as much about currently available products before I try to reinvent the wheel.

I am going to ECTA standing 1-mile at Wilmington, Ohio in June to put the car thru tech inspection only with the purpose of returning home with a to-do list to run in 2015 with safety mods to allow me to run up to 175mph. By 2015 I hope to have the car set to run in the C/GMP class, the corresponding Fuel class (NO2), and the related street classes. I have read the rule book, but there are still some vague areas that I can't seem to get straight answers on, thus the trip this year just to tech. Hoping to meet Mr. Burton Brown there and scour his car and brain for ideas. Going to wannagofast.com 1/2-mile at Clayton, GA this September for some chassis/tire shake down runs. Proving my sincerity by registering and showing up. ECTA is not requiring me to pay registration and they say that they are happy to tech the car. Clayton, GA registration is April 11 and I plan to be standing on the send button at 12:01 midnight in order to get registered. I have read every post in this thread tonight. I found it interesting that the coefficient of drag is roughly the same for the z with the windows up and the windows down. Am I reading the wind tunnel chart correctly? Seems hard to believe. I would like to ask Tony D and LVSALT some high speed tire balancing and true-ing questions. After months of research, I haven't found a bit of info on how to ensure tires are balanced and true up to 200mph. Is it appropriate to ask them on this thread, or would you prefer direct contact by PM?

No, I just scrapped the whole stock set up after the pain I had with the HPS pads. Seriously, I stomped them until they were smoking hot and glazed but I could never get them to stop my car. I did my damnedest to get them to bed, turned and hand sanded my rotors-everything. They might be fine for street cruising, but they didn't stop my car well at all, and I have the cone stripes on my airdam and the orange rubber burned to my headers to show for it-I just plowed down wall after wall of cones on two separate race days-I had to use engine braking to slow down-on an autocross!!. The race officials came over to me and tried to explain: "you know, you are supposed to go AROUND the cones, don't you?) Now, for stock brakes, johnc recommended Porterfield R4S, and they were great; but you want to talk about dusty! The front wheels needed a bath after every drive. I currently have AZC brake kit newly installed so I can't really report on it yet. I have the street pads that AZC supplies, which, according to Wilwood's brake pad dyno graphs, are pretty lame in comparison to their race pads. But they are head and shoulders above the braking I had with those sorry HPS pads and I can tell you that even on the maiden voyage without them bedded. Street/production pads are engineered to last a long time, stay clean, stay quiet, not wear out rotors and stop the car eventually, if you are into that sort of thing. Race pads are dusty, noisy, eat rotors and stop the car hard and fast. Its all a trade off. Once winter mods are done, I plan to order a couple sets of Wilwood pads from the dyno chart they have on line and give a review to the forum.

Holy crap, that looks like work!

Can I add your cam specs to the LS cams thread I have going?

My stuff is trapped in the roll bar shop. Will send you pics and measurements of my seat when I gain access to it. I have mentally designed brackets to drop the seat an inch from where I have it currently. I will also flip the stock Datsun adjuster slide rails up-side-down. That should give me an inch between my helmet and the ceiling-more if I recline a bit more. Will see if the mental design translates into reality. Will require the help of a sheetmetal brake and some tig welding, but should be pretty simple. I will consider the production cost of the brackets for a possible for sale product because the brackets they sell at Kirkey are kind of kookie. Target date for prototype is middle of April. I better be in the staging lanes by May 1st or I'm gonna go nuts!

I ran HPS on my stock brakes and I hated them. Basically, they wouldn't stop the car. They didn't make much dust, but they didn't stop the car, so they were kind of pointless. I think they were made for low dust; I tried to use them for autocross and it was a disaster. I guess there is a trade-off: stopping vs. dustiness.

Is it the driver side or the passenger side with the bad tire? You can totally do a rear bushing swap yourself-no press required. If you can get enough adjustment out of the affected side, you could do just that side. You need a 14mm wrench to fit the bolts that hold the rear yokes under the bushings. Before you do that, loosen the bolts that hold the bushings on, that is either a 23mm or 24mm wrench, usually pretty snug, so you might need a hammer. For the front bushings, you have to drop the little crossmember that hold them up. Depending on the setup of your differential mount, you may have to loosen or take that off (I have been running modified diff mounts too long to remember how the stock one works/attaches). On the driver's side, the exhaust might be in the way, so that can make this a bit of a pain, so this is one time that a poorly fitted exhaust can be in your favor. No pressing required. I'm hoping you find a trashed bushing once you get down there. It would be a lot easier to just swap a stock bushing and you are done. If you have to use an offset bushing, you will figure out how they work once you have them in your hand. Look hard at your lower control arms: if one is bent causing toe-in, I would expect you to find the damage on the front edge of the control arm. If you have to swap a control arm, that is pretty hard, due to the spindle pin being rough to remove. Lets hope you don't need that.

It looks like that joint has a spot weld every inch and a butt-load of sealer to get out. I wouldn't bother welding that section (the pain to benefit ratio does not support the required effort). Since you have a 280z, I would really pick and chose where to stitch weld if at all. The 280z is like a 1,000 times sturdier than a 240z with lots more spots, whereas the 240z has lots of edge welding from the factory with large spaces between welds (the metal at the edge of the weld fatigues and breaks away from the weld), especially in the trans tunnel at the rear of the tunnel and at the firewall. But honestly, the pros would know better than I do; I'm only reflecting what I have seen personally.

Didn't know you were broke. How about you buy the bushings and keep the receipt. Then you have them if you need them on the spot (and you only pay $60 once). If it turns out you don't need them, return them for a re-stocking fee. I assume you have crawled under there and checked your current bushings? Have you inspected for a bent lower control arm? Most likely way to bend one of those control arms is to put a jack in the wrong place, or a fork lift if the car has come out of a salvage yard. Has the car been hit? The front bushings are restrained in little saddles in the floor of the car, unlikely to have damage there unless the bushings are totally shot. The rear bushings are kind of on little towers hanging down from the floor. Check that those hangars are parallel and that the rear bushings are not totally trashed.

Should I sand it before using etch primer? See prior post (hard to edit on cell phone).

I've heard of etch primer but have never purchased it. The concept sounds great. How does it "etch"-acid?? Where do I look for it on a middle-sized town? Parts store? Paint store? Lowes/Home Depot?

What compound of Hawks?

Yeah-I'm not going to try to do A/C so I may do a super small heater unit only. It really just need defroster for rainy race days. Heat on the feet is a bonus. My knee bar will most likely run under the steering column, thru the lower dash in the heater control/radio area, under the glovebox. It may have a rise to get over the stereo area or perhaps I might notch the tranny tunnel to get it under the radio-not sure yet. I'm trying to have it all: radio, heat, a roll cage with no overhead bars other than the main hoop behind the driver. Purpose of the forward section is to allow higher placement of a Petty bar and forward attachment of a right side interior window net/arm restraint. Lots to work out and deconflict.

Better be careful or you will be doing a paint job next! Get litman to send you pics of the rear "diffuser" he made from the back of an Altima. It is simple and awesome. Might save you some time and trouble on your rear valance and it really looks cool.

Thanks everybody. Thanks for the link, socorob. (Funny-my autocorrect wants so make you either "so iron" or "so prob" - take your pick!). They have that in stock. Future touch up is something that I'm sure will happen as I add brackets and things. Not terribly concerned about the gloss of it. I'm never sure about which paints need primer. I have always assumed that they all do ?? (Anyone?). Sounds like a no primer on the VHT stuff.

For your problem, I would get the alignment checked first before doing anything else. Just take it to a shop and spend the $60 to get it checked. I've seen more bent stub axles than bent spindles or improperly drilled hubs. In fact, lately everybody who has done a disc brake conversion lately has has bent stub issues. Could also be your camber (how is the tire wearing)? I slammed into a curb going backwards and sideways at about sixty in younger years. Totally destroyed a wheel and shattered the cast webbing between the spindle pin and the hub. The control arm was fine and the suspension pickups were fine. If you really are bent, like JMortensen says, the offset bushings should do the trick. But they are noisy! Just take them back to your alignment guy and he should know what to do with them. Be sure to get the little wrench that usually comes with them.