Gollum

The easiest way will be to get a stock ECU and AFM and any other missing bits that might have dissapeared. Getting megasquirt running is no easy task. As long as you can get a good deal it should be cheaper too. A bare bones cheap megasquirt conversion can still be over $300 and you should be able to find everything you need to use the factory ECU for cheaper than that I would think. Well the P90A heads had a different cam, but that's probably about it. I'll dig up the link to the various cams used.

I'm also still curious. So if I can get some cheap dyno time I'm gonna make a mock rig of some ducting going to a huge 7000cfm+ fan and see if there's any difference on the dyno. I'm betting at most it will be a 5-10% increase from 0-2000 rpm.

I'd noticed that too. I wasn't up to correcting it. I wish we actually had hard fact numbers of how many P90A heads had solid lifters.

It's deinfately an 81' turbo. But it seems to have been converted to manual. The hood insn't stock. Hence the black paint and the wrong scoops. The rear left rim is the 81' turbo rim, good indication that it's a turbo car. The side emblem is turbo The center console as the turbo emblem It has the oil pressure AND temp combinted guage, that's a turbo only guage It has the factory boost guage, obviously turbo only. But it has the 79-81' bumpers, B pillar covers, lower valance etc. Definately a 79'-81' car. Thus, I'd put money on the fact it's a genuine 81' turbo. But it's not an auto, so it must have been converted.

I don't think it's because of emission standards. Here in CA right now there's no law that allows ANY change in required emission testing standards for ANY car 76' or newer. The S130 cars have to pass the same test they've had to deal with since they introduced the dyno test here in CA. As far as the rotors go. I wouldn't go slotted or cross drilled on a street car. In a street scenario, and even spirited driving the rotors dont' get hot enough for it to matter. It's more important that they've vented rotors (fronts are stock, rears aren't). You'd see a much greater impact on brake performance if you designed something to push air to the brakes imo. Vented brakes cool pretty well if you have good air flow. In my 81' I was able to easily lock up all 4 tires in the wet going 65mph on the stock brake system. The tires are much more limiting than the brakes in a street scenario.

This sentence contradicts itself. Please help us understand what we're dealing with here. If the car is really only worth $200 to you in it's current state, I'll fly out to where ever you are and buy it and get it running there and then. What color are the injectors? Why did you change them? Did you think the old ones were bad? Where they just not there? Are you getting spark? Are you getting fuel? Are you getting air? Have you checked the timing? The problem must be one of those. As soon as you diagnose which one it really is, then solving it doesn't take long.

Are you sure you weren't getting spark? It won't run because without the ECU the injectors won't fire, so there's no fuel. Looks like you don't have the power steering hooked up btw. No belt on it. As far as the megasquirt goes, there's some great info here on hybridZ, and we have a whole section just for megasquirt. As far as buying it, online is the best bet, and as for tuning it you'll most likely be on your own. Good luck though. They're great cars, I hope you bring it back to life.

I'd forgotten about this thread. I daily drive my 75' L28ET 280Z. I think it's getting about 16mpg but I don't care. No AC. I dont' care. No heat. I don't care. What are sweaters and jackets for if not for driving cool cars? What are windows for if not to roll them down? I might switch to daily driving a 80' 280ZX, but only so I can do some repairs to my 75' and get megasquirt running on it.

Though I agree the whole retro trend has gotten out of hand, you've got to see where they're comming from as designers. Most humans with a pulse will agree that the best looking cars have come and gone, and have been gone for a long time. There are countless classic cars that are just gorgeous. Very few cars of the 70's 80's and 90's will ever reach the status of those cars. I mean, just about any car from the 50's is just plain sexy, and don't even get me started on 50's and 60's europian cars. The push to make aerodynamic cars at a cheap price point forced the style into very confined boxes and finally today companies are actually trying to make GOOD looking cars again that are STILL aerodynamic. One of the big problems though is the whole tuner culture and how it's affected people's tastes. Kids were given hondas from their parents, so what are they going to modify? Thier honda. They don't want it to look stock, so they find the most outrageous body parts they can find for it and eventually we have this whole culture that's addopted that outrageous look. And then companies follow the culture and BAM: . . . You have a nissan GTR.... Though other companies actuall got a CLUE! Look at all the Ford GT40 concepts over the years. Which one looks best? The new one they actualy made looks far better than any of the concepts imo. What's scary is that with how similar it looks it still achieves VERY amazing aerodynamics while the old one was terrible and very freaky to drive (obviously I've never driven one, but there are plenty of interviews and comments by people who raced them in their day). That's the beauty of modern engineering, making a car look as gorgeous as those old cars and still performing just as good as a new car should. I applaud companies like TVR taking classic lines and making them look new again. I sure wish someone was selling cars like that stateside. I never once thought the retro move was a gimmick. Make some companies make it that way, but as a whole I don't think it is. I think it's smart engineering and smart marketing working as one.

That's a very good point howlermonkey. The inspector can make or break your testing. I tend to recommend people to go to shops that I know aren't very busy as there's a good chance they'll take the car right away. Ideal situation you drive your car hard for a good 15 minutes, and park and get the test done within 10 minutes. I'm about to go do a mock test this week on my new 80', we'll see how much the burning oil effects the numbers...

What I want to know is where it lost it's weight from. Unless it's from the chassis itself does it really matter? Will people be able to get them even lower in weight or has all the availble mass been removed? (other than luxury options of course) I'm not sure I like the headlights, looking like arrow heads and all. Might grow on me though. I didn't like the Z33 when it first came out, now I think I might buy one down the road. So who knows right? I do like the hood and the sides though.

Well that's an all out drag car with an open down pipe. So I started looking for more 20B vids. Heres the stuff that I found that made me drool Those should be some good examples of what a 20B can sound like.

Blaa, didn't get a chance this weekend. Ended up being way busier than expected. The dream theater concert was good though I hope to maybe stop by the richmond yard tonight after I get home from work.

On the L Engine program the stock turbo compression comes out to 7.38:1, And I've normally seen it rated at 7.4:1. But there's lots of guys that have run turbo parts on NA motors, and get pretty impressive numbers. Stock NA compression is 8.52:1 on the P79 engines, and 8.29:1 on the N47 heads (note that the N47 motors use a dish piston like the turbo, if using a flat top compression it is 9.82:1) I don't know much about the rod quesion. Something in me wants to say they're different, but I don't know either way. I think you can skate by without forged pistons, as long as you tune it really well. 400hp is about the range that the stock pistons will just plain explode once you start reaching knock levels. So keep in mind you'll want to make sure you've got a good EFI setup to tune it, and I'd consider some type of spark control like EDIS.

That's a good quesion woldson, because now that I think about it I know that alcohol burns a lot cleaner than petrol which is why everyone was talking about the possability of everyday cars running on it (note that ethanol is alcohol). Now the term "ethanol" is huge and we don't think about it as "alcohol"... drag racers have been running alcohol in certain clases for decades now so it has it's advantages. So I guess I'll do some research of methanol emission charts... Would be a really compelling reason to add meth if you had a car that needed to be smogged.

I could have saved him the effort and told him that Fairfield has been scarce on S30 cares lately. Last time I saw any was before I bought my 75' and there were two, a 78' and 75'. Havn't seen a S30 there since (2 months+).

I'm going to the richmond yard, it's about 2 miles from my house. Normally I go to the fairfield pnp because it's less than 5 miles from my work, so I can casually walk through the lot before heading home. This weekend or early next week I'll be posting regarding my latest findings there. Shhh, it's a secret. (kinda being sarcastic here if you can't tell, since I don't think anyone is going to die from anticipation)

What can I say, when you're on a roll you're on a roll. I might make it out to my other main yard on saturday, haven't been there over a month. who knows what I'll find.

You'd be surprised how much load they actually put on the car for that very reason. Those dyno drums have brakes that are applied to simulate the vehicles weight. To me they seem to add more resistance than if the car was just driving at 15 or 25 miles an hour, but I don't have definitive data on the subject. I've smogged quite a few cars though.

Too lean is NOT good. 14.7 IS IDEAL. There's a reason most new cars shoot for 14.7 at cruising conditions. As far as which gas... well that's hard to say. Some say highest octane you can get, some say lowest. I don't think it makes a large enough difference to matter much. It's much more important that the engine be as hot as you can safely get it before testing. Heat produces NOx, but olders cars are more likely to fail from unburnt fuel than NOx.

Congrats guys. That's awesome you all got turbo motors in such a short span. I don't think I've ever seen turbo motors in that concentration in a junkyard. That's pretty sweet man.

Chris makes a good point. A rim width measurement is taken at the mounting point for the tires, and then there's the lip which adds AT LEAST a good 1/4 inch per side, but 1/2 like chris said is perfectly acceptable. And backspacing is generally the measurement from the mout surface to the LIP, not just the measured edge. Also don't forget that tires will add another variable, as they usually end up wider than the rim itself, giving you another thing to calculate when you're selecting a rim.

Yea, I'm fearful of spiders, but after doing some real research on definitive cases of spider bites, how different venoms affect you, and the real world statistics, i'm not AS afraid anymore. But I still don't generally like them, and normally kill any decent sized spider I find... or feed it to my venus fly trap. There's been some good suggestions on how to kill them, so I'll add a fun one. Granted this might now work, but it sure would be fun if you like to experiment. Go to the local garden center and buy several cases of praying mantises (or is that mantie?) and see if that makes a dent. The praying mantis should definately go for the spiders, it's just a question of how well the spiders defent agains them. You can also get one of the matises once grown a bit and see how it does against the spider in captivity. Otherwise I'd go with the previous suggestion of the Cyper WP, as it should do the job just fine. There's no reason to take chances with the well being of your kids. Black widows aren't normally very dangerous to adults, but kids... that's serious stuff to be dealing with. I'd also suggest appliying any chemical around the base of your house first, in order to minimize their approach on the house.

Looks good corpcrim, though I'm not sure how valid my opinion is. Also chb280z, nice shot! Don't find views like that every day. ...ok, so why am I posting?... because I just couldn't leave that shot I liked alone, so now it looks something like this today:

I stand corrected. But the numbers are very very few. I've seen a LOT of S130 cars in person, never once seen one that came without a rear wiper from factory.