TimZ

...milli-candellas (1/1000ths of a candella). Candella is a measurement of light intensity. So, 3000mcd would be the same as 3 candellas. How bright is that? I dunno - probably 3 times brighter than 1 candella I just looked it up, and 1 candella is a universal (english and metric) unit that represents the luminous intensity of a 'theoretical candle'. I think that you can take this somewhat literally - 3 candellas would be about the same brightness as three candles, like you would have at your dinner table, for instance.

Well, here are a couple of pics of what I would imagine is the bumper in quesion: ...looks pretty do-able.

We just had a discussion fairly similar to this about a month ago: fuel pump thread Most of the information in that thread is pertinent to your question.

...sigh I'm going to hell.

Yes, the 1300 degree coating (anybody's 1300 degree coating) will flake off if you run it at temperatures higher than 1300 degrees, which pretty much all of us do. That's why they rate it as a 1300 degree coating. Choose the right coating for the application. If you want to coat a header, exhaust manifold or turbine housing, you should be using the 2000 degree coatings. I have been using the JetHot2000 coatings for quite some time, and it has held up very well. The 2000 degree stuff is not shiny like the 1300 deg stuff, though.

Far from popular? I thought I remembered it as being the best selling sports car of all time. At least at one point in time, maybe not since the Miata came out. Regardless that car pretty much single handedly put Japan on the map. That guy(?) was definitely a troll. Probably 12 years old.

Not with FWD it won't Davy Sure it will - in reverse.

I'm an EE - I work for Ford Motor Co. Research and Advanced Engineering on Advanced Safety Systems. I previously was a development engineer for the Active Yaw Control system that was implemented on the Lincoln LS and Jaguar S-Type. Before that, I designed Avionics Test Systems at McDonnell Douglas (F15E, F18E/F).

...oops - didn't realize that your story was in a Z - didn't mean to add insult to injury. Sorry

Well...I can't argue with that. At least he wasn't wrecking Zcars...

Joe - sorry I kind of singled you out, but I was seeing an awful lot of harsh critisism of this guy, but if you think about it, he apparently understood that his skills were not up to the capabilities of his new car, and was trying to improve his skills in as safe a manner as possible. At least he wasn't like many of the poseur assholes that buy these cars and just assume that they can drive fast. The message that I was trying to get across was pretty much the same as you mentioned above - IMHO, everybody should have looked at that video and said "Wow - look how quickly things can go bad - what if something like that happened to me?". But instead, all that anybody was saying was "That guy has no skills - what an *******", which struck me as being pretty arrogant. Things happen really fast at speed on a track, and the slightest lapse of concentration, or miscalculation can cause big problems. At first glance, it looks like the guy just downshifted for no reason. But if you read the report, and put two and two together, it's not too hard to think of a scenario where a 2 gear downshift at that point might have made sense at that moment in time to the guy driving the car. For instance - this was the first time down that straight at speed. Every other time through that section, his speed was regulated by slower traffic. So, it's quite conceivable that every other time through that section, he exited the turn in second gear. He was doing 100mph in the straight, but if he was braking for the entrance to the turn, he could have been well into the viable speed range for 2nd gear. His only real problem might have been simply a poorly executed heel and toe downshift. If the slide started after he had initiated his turn-in, then there was literally no time for him to recover - it took slightly more than 1 second for him to hit the wall. As I mentioned before - human physiology pretty much dictates reaction times for unexpected events to about 1 second. So yes - this (or something like it) could have happend to most of us. Also, I agree that there is a great deal of innate ability required to become a Fangio or a Senna. However, the argument that I was seeing was this guy will never be a Senna, so he had no business being there (a performance driving school). If that's true, then we all had better sell our Hybrid Zs and buy Tercels, because I'm pretty sure there aren't any Sennas on this forum, either. Sorry if I kind of went off on everybody, but this just rubbed me the wrong way.

I never said the guy didn't screw up. Also, the report states that he shifted 4-3-2, and this sequence makes a bit more sense. I did a quick search, and 6000rpm in 2nd gear in a Viper works out to 85-90mph (depending on model year), so it's not as outrageous as it sounds. The report also states that this was the first time down the straight with open track ahead. Before, he had slower cars regulating his speed. My guess is that every other time he went through that turn, he exited in second gear (remember that you downshift coming into the turn so that you'll be in the correct gear for the exit, not for braking), and mistakenly thought that was what he needed. Agreed, but again, the 'nobody told me that' statement was apparently only made once, and just after the incident, when the driver was still shaken. I'm just saying that a lot of people were piling on this guy, when I'll bet maybe 10% of the people on this board have skills that are any better that what was demonstrated in the report and video. At the same time, how many times has the 'Darius' video popped up on this site, and how many people thought that was the coolest thing ever? Let's see, guy makes mistake in expensive car while trying to learn, vs. guy lighting up his tires at 60mph on an undivided public highway with oncoming traffic. Who is the moron, again?

Man - you guys are a tough audience. The guy screwed up for sure, but he only had a little over a second between the start of the slide and contact with the wall. Things happen pretty quickly at 100mph. Normal human reaction times are rarely better than 1 second for an unexpected event. It's pretty easy to say he's a moron from the saftey of your keyboard. At least he was trying to learn, and was doing this at a track under somewhat controlled conditions. ...can you say the same? You don't have to look very far at all to find people trying to build a 500hp car with little or no limit handling experience. A hybrid Z might not cost $100k, but it'll kill you just as dead.

A couple of things should be mentioned here... First, all rod ends have a limit as to their range of angular travel. You need to make absolutely sure that your rod end does not bind anywhere in the suspension's range of travel. I can't emphasize enough the importance of this. Okay, maybe I can - otherwise, TIE ROD FAILURE WILL RESULT. Generally, the geometry of the Z's front suspension (at least on mine, which has nothing terribly unusual in this regard) does not result in the rod end being in the middle of it's travel when the suspension is in the middle of it's travel. On my car, I had to introduce a bend in the middle of the tie rod in order to allow it to be in the appropriate orientation to prevent binding throughout the suspension's range of travel. There are heim joints available that have an increased range of angularity - they generally use an undersized hole - i.e., the rod end is the same size as a normal 5/8" end, but uses a 1/2" bolt. Regardless of what rod end you use, you really need to make sure that it isn't going to bind. Second, I don't particularly like the idea of using a bolt in a tapered hole - this just sounds like asking for trouble, especially when we are talking about a safety critical component. Apparently it has been working okay for Terry, but that is not a configuration that I would recommend. Maybe if the spacer had a chamfer machined into the end that contacts the knuckle to keep the bolt centered, but I'd still prefer a straight bore hole.

Find another way. I would never recommend this - way too risky.

Aviation fuel, maybe - Jets don't run on gasoline. Jet fuel is more akin to diesel fuel or kerosene.

It's been a while since I messed with carbs, but I'm pretty sure that a bigger carb will just make this worse. Carbs rely on the Bernoulli effect to draw the fuel from the jets. The higher the air velocity, the more fuel gets drawn through them. This is why the venturis are there - to speed up the airflow and aid the fuel delivery. Going to a larger carb will just slow down the airflow even more, which means you will need an even larger jet to supply the same amount of fuel.

The URL is: South Florida Performance

As I recall, the turbo pump still has an internal pressure relief, which limits the ouput pressure to 65psi (90% sure on this value). So, this will put a very real limit on the boost that you can run (regardless of flow), depending on your base fuel pressure, and whether you are using a rising rate FPR or not.

Yep... That's probably why nobody picks that option. Just thought I'd throw it out there, anyway...

That's what I did. If you don't what to fabricate heim-jointed tie rod ends, you could achieve the same thing by changing the steering rack height. This will also require some fabrication, though.

As usual, an excellent explanation from John. I do have a couple of comments, though. First, there is another solution adjusting the bump steer chacteristic - change the height of the steering rack. This will achieve the same effect of the tie rod end mod, but will not require heim jointed rod ends. It most likely will require some fabrication wizardry to make the rack height adjustable reliably, though. Second, I have mentioned this before, but there is NO guarantee that blindly applying the bump steer spacers (or the JTR mod for that matter) will improve your bump steer characteristics. The only thing that is guaranteed is that the characteristic will change. On my car, the bump steer curve got worse when I installed these. As I have also mentioned before, this was most likely because at some point in the past an alignment shop had relocated my inner pivot points inboard in order to correct the camber change that came from lowering the car. Point is - this was common practice for alignment shops on these cars, and after 30-odd years, you have no guarantee whatsoever that the pivot points are in the stock location. The only way to know is to measure it before and after (which I did). Finally, my car had about 1" of toe change, measured at one wheel only (so double this to get to a traditional toe measurement), through it's travel when I first checked this. The car was only lowered about an inch.

The angle between the strut and spindle is fixed, but the angle between the strut and the ground (hence the spindle and the ground) is not. This is specifically the reason that the strut has to pivot at the top. Remember that the bottom of the strut is attached to the LCA at the ball joint. Since the LCA is constrained to move in an arc, so must the bottom of the strut. Just to bend everybody's brains a bit farther, we must also consider that the arc that the LCA travels in is also constrained by the compression rod. Because of this, the arc is not perpendicular to the body. The arc travels through three dimensions, not just two, and the caster changes along with the camber. I haven't sat down and checked, but this also should explain why the camber doesn't change by the amount that you think it should. Interestingly, when you adjust camber by relocating the pivot point in or out, only about half of the distance that you moved the pivot point results in camber change. The rest results in caster change. This is because the compression rod is at a ~45 degree angle (probably more like 60 deg, but you get the picture) to the body. So, moving the inner pivot point out results in moving the spindle both out and back, decreasing the caster. Anybody's brains exploded yet?

No flaw in your logic, Bob. This was my whole point in saying that the JTR 'Bump Steer' mod was still useful in improving the camber gain characteristics - it locates the arm such that the camber increases (instead of decreasing) for the first inch or so of suspension compression travel. BTW, I think that the term 'gain' in this instance does not refer to gain vs loss, but rather it refers to a mathematical gain function, like the 'm' in y = mx + b.

...Oops - I thought TimO was using the stock knock sensor - my bad. Thanks, TimO