BlackBeaut

Looks good, you'll make even more friends if you can make up some suitable for the G-Nose! Cheers, Rob

Spooky, I was just going to ask you how you were thinking of positioning the diff. I was wondering the opposite to you, positioning the diff centrally so that the CV shafts would be the same length but the pinion more offset to one side. Not too sure what the advantages would be to having CV shafts of exactly equal length compared to a difference of maybe 1 to 2 inches with an offset diff. Nice work with the arm design as well, are the beams that the attach to fixed in the rear support or could they be rotated, so as to lift the pick up points to mess with the roll centre? Cheers, Rob

I collected this info from Wiseco a while back when thinking about 88mm pistons. I'd heard about some people using the Dodge Neon pistons. 88mm piston table I've no idea though if an L series con rod little end will physically fit within any of the pistons, or maybe that's just not too important. Also the dome/dish on the pistons needs to be thought about, the +14 on the Skyline piston will no doubt include valve cutouts for the 4 valves. It could probably be machined flat though. Cheers, Rob

Well with the 300ZX shaft I couldn't even get the box in position to raise it fully up to the clutch, so that's that. I'll see if I ever hear back from the various tranny shops I've contacted, otherwise it's time to check out the 200SX gearboxes. Cheers, Rob

Well I got to look at a World Class input shaft today. Unfortuantely the WC synchro/baulk ring has a smaller internal diameter, so that route is a no go. Would've been nice if Astro Performance had answered my email about this though, although I'll give them a few more days, maybe they''ve got stuck in their shop basement looking for the perfect shaft for me I think tomorrow (barring rain) I'll stick the 300ZX shaft back in the box and mate the box - minus bell housing - up to the car to see how bad a fit it is, see where the shifter would end up. I've actually got a short shift kit so I could maybe work around the shifter being a little too far back by assembling the stick in a different way. Course then I'd have to come up with that spacer thing for the bell housing. This would be why you guys just stick V8s in right? Cheers, Rob

Well not much progress on this today. I've got a tranny company having a think about it, who may or may not come up with a plan. Not toooo keen on the idea of a 6cm spacer to be honest. Apart from being a PITA to have made up, it will shift the lever back, possibly too far. I'm wondering if it would be possible to fit a shaft from a WC box in to a NWC. Looking at the 23 Tooth/10 Spline 9 1/4" Input Shaft Part# 1352-085-025 these guys list: http://www.astroperformance.com/products/79-95/T5_parts/t5_parts.htm If the 9 1/4" is the overall length then that's about 1/4" shorter than the 280ZXT shaft, the tooth count on the lay gear is correct, so you'd kinda hope it would mesh with the counter shaft. Obviously the shaft is a larger diameter, think Ford 10 spline is 1 1/8"? Big question is would the brass synchro ring from the NWC fit on the end, and would the loose roller bearings fit inside it. If it did all work then I'd have to option of sticking with the larger shaft and sourcing a friction disc to suit, or presumably I could get the shaft ground and re-splined to Nissan specs. Anyone got a clue as to what the difference between the 1352-085-025 shaft and the 1352-085-050 & 1352-085-055 shafts are further down the page? As in what's the pocket bearing about and why doesn't the 1352-085-025 have it? PITA*100!! The 200/240SX gearbox swap is starting to look more reasonable, but having everything else with the T5 box in place, it would be just soo good to get it to work. Plus it's stupidly light, if I can lug it around then it's gotta be light!! The 5 speed I pulled from the car was much heavier. PITA*1000!!!! Cheers, Rob

Alas, the shaft narrows down after the splined section but about 1mm in diameter. A guy has suggested having the shaft built up on an automatic welder (unfortunately I don't have one in my shed) as a possibility to allow resplining though. Presuambly the shafts are hardened and would require re-hardening after machining? Cheers, Rob

Hey All, For my sins I've been planning to swap in a T5 box from an early Z31 Turbo - before you say things like "are you mad" etc. Yes, is the simple answer Being UK based we never got the 280ZX Turbo. I also know that the Z31 T5 box is not the worlds greatest but it should be OK for what I need, for a while at least. Anyway, I got hold of a box with only 40k on it, turns nicely and gear selection is fine. I managed to get hold of a 280ZXT bell housing, which conveniently had the input shaft with it, in near new condition, which is pretty handy as the Z31 input shaft is about 6cm longer then the 280ZX. So today I took the tranny to the local shop so they could swap them over and do all the fiddly stuff with bearing preload shims. Anyway, he pulls the Z31 shaft and it's got 23 teeth on the lay gear. The 280ZXT only has 22. The shaft and gear are one piece. Rats. So I'm a bit stumped now as to what I can do to get this box to work. One suggestion has been to machine the gear down on the 280ZXT shaft, machine the Z31 gear off, and cunningly combine the two again, maybe spline where the gear mates to the shaft. Another would be to cut 6cm out of the Z31 shaft and weld back together. Neither of which strike me as being the strongest options. Anyway, I'm a bit bummed to have got so close to fitting the gearbox to be shotdown at the last minute, so has anyone got any cunning ideas for a work around here? Cheers, Rob

My only experience with full underbellies is on the Lotus Elise. That's made in multiple parts for ease of removal, which you should definitely consider as essential if going for idea 2. Likewise, the Elise pans are aluminium for weight saving, you wouldn't want to be lying under a single piece of steel that's the length and width of your Z tying to shift it out of the way for maintenance!! Looking at your pink line, I'd say you'll want at least 3 sections, front to near firewall. Centre, firewall to front of rear wheel well. Diffuser section. For the centre section I'd be looking to attach somehow to the frame rails, going lower than those would mean potential pain on speed bumps. Unless the car has side skirts then I don't see much point in going wider than the frame rails. The other issue is gearbox cooling, even more so for auto boxes. Decent tranny cooler would be essential, which would mean getting the cooler radiator in to airflow somewhere. The rear section is obviously tricky as you need clearance for control arms/struts to move up and down which is going to make a nice mess of air flow in that region but there's not a lot that can be done. There's also heat isses with the diff to consider. Without doing either computer modelling or getting a model in to windtunnel no one is ever going to really know the true effects I don't think. For street speeds I doubt it would make any appreciable difference. It would be pretty interesting though if someone here does happen to work in a industry where they have access to such toys and can get to play on them in their own time Cheers, Rob

Possibly frame damage, also possibly just the hole in the hub that the spindle pin passes through was machined a bit wonky relative to the plane of the hub face. I believe that's quite common. Simplest fix would be to go for some adjustable control arms from Arizona Z or Modern Motorsport. Actually simplest fix would be to do nothing Half an inch of toe out sounds a bit mad though. Zero to a little toe in on the back is fine for everyday life I believe. Also if you don't go with adjustable arms, try and find another set of 280Z control arms as they're stronger than the 240Z arms. Check out how they're built up more over the outer bushing. Cheers, Rob

Lookin' good Jamie. One of these days I'll actually get some more work done on my subframe design again. I do like your idea of running the control arms with rose joints of a fixed beam. I'm just going with common old Arizona Z arms So I've got to run separate fore-aft beams which is a bit of a pain. Just waiting for the local machine shop to get my new front cross member sorted and then maybe I'll be in business again. Also heard from the other machine shop that's working on my 300ZX hub conversion last week. Popped down to see how they were doing with machining the old hub area. Looks like they didn't pay too much attention to my plans and have removed too much metal. Might still be able to build it back up with cunning welding though. Ho hum Cheers, Rob

Sagi is £49,350 New, possibly lacking a few options. So a tad more then $70k, more like $88k. However there's always the second hand market but at the moment there's not much saving due to the newness and rarity: http://www.pistonheads.com/sales/list.asp?p=1&s=349 It's also generally concerned a good idea to wait a year or so after a new TVR release for them to iron out a few bugs, customers are considered testers Faisal's the only guy I know that's managed to get a new TVR in to the US and on the road so he would be my first point of contact for suggestions. I seem to recall he could only keep each car for a year though due to some red tape BS. Would be a hell of a risk though if the engine let go. They're currently around £5/6k to rebuild out of warrenty - ouch! Cheers, Rob

Can I just say that we pay nearly $7/US gallon for regular petrol, we have speed scameras everywhere and the traffic police are total Nazis (well that's pretty universal ) Getting a modern TVR in to the US is not totally impossible though, Faisal managed it with a couple of Cerberas - http://www.tvrfreak.com/ - Sounds like a lot of hard work and you'd be screwed if they went wonky, but think of the looks you'd get?!! Cheers, Rob

The Speed 6 makes those figures because it is highly tuned, twin cam, 24v inline 6. TVR is a small volume manufacturer and so can circumvent some of the annoying emmisions regs imposed on big manufacturers. It's unfortunately not got a clean history as far as reliability goes though, due to badly manufactured out sourced parts wrecking the valve train but hopefully that sort of nonsense is a thing of the past now. I used to own a Cerbera with a 4.2 V8 rated at a similar 360bhp, yet it was faster than the Speed 6 equipped Tuscans at the time, and due to it's flat place crank revved like God intended but sounded like the Devil Cheers, Rob

Weirdly I went from a Lotus Elise to my 240Z. Although it had the Rover 1.8 K-Series engine which you guys didn't get due to emission regs. I had the engine tweaked to give around 160bhp and 140ish lbft which is a pretty respectable torque figure for that engine. Yes it was pretty fast and did handle very well (apart from when I stuffed it in to a wall, ooops) but you know, even though my Z has been up on stands for far too long and I can barely remember what it's like to drive, I much prefer the Z to it. It may be that as I went from a TVR Cerbera to the Elise, I just felt that there was no sense of occasion when driving the Elise in comparison. They're also relatively common here which does help the big head in me Few pics of my old one here: Clicky me Note the all black look Mike Still it's good to see Lotus selling again in the US and hopefully bringing some much needed revenue to the Norfolk factory. Cheers, Rob

PSML!!! That's so spot on it hurts!! Cheers, Rob

Attached is a set of diagrams that hopefully show the differences that using the so called bum steer spacers give over adjusting the LCA inner pivot. Now I should say that the pics greatly exagerate the angles etc. for clarity, and they might not bare any resemblance to the Zs geometry, but hopefully they show what's happening. #3 and #4 are the important diagrams. In #3 we can see that adding in the spacer moves the LCA outer pivot point down and so LCA angle to a more OEM location, which should move the roll centre back up toward stock location. HOWEVER the LCA and steering tie rod still remain unparallel so this has no effect on the existing bump steer. In #4, the LCA inner pivot is moved up - and that's the only thing that's changed here. This has two effects, it returns the LCA angle to a more OEM location AND it causes the LCA and tie rod to become parallel which does have (a hopefully positive) effect on bump steer. Cheers, Rob

Ah, got it to work as a jpeg, off I go to the FAQ! OK, posted in FAQ, awaiting moderation. Cheers, Rob

Unfortunately I can't guarantee the web space it's hosted on, and I also cannot attach it to a post myself as I seem to only be able to attach weird letterbox sized images. However if yourself or one of the mods wants to grab that image and correctly attach it to the FAQ then I'm more than happy for that to happen, I'm certainly not worried about copyright on it! Cheers, Rob

It's taken me a while to get my head around this one, but I think this pic helps out. Seems to me that all this confusion has been caused by misnaming the spacers as 'bump steer' rather than 'roll centre'. I'm sure JohnC will agree there! Now I should say that the pics greatly exagerate the angles etc. for clarity, and they might not bare any resemblance to the Zs geometry, but hopefully they show what's happening. #3 and #4 are the important ones. In #3 we can see that adding in the spacer moves the LCA outer pivot point down and so LCA angle to a more OEM location, which should move the roll centre back up. HOWEVER the LCA and steering tie rod still remain unparallel so this has no effect on the existing bump steer. In #4, the LCA inner pivot is moved up - and that's the only thing that's changed here. This has two effects, it returns the LCA angle to a more OEM location AND it causes the LCA and tie rod to become parallel which does have (a hopefully positive) effect on bump steer. I could of course still be way wrong, and if so please tell me so I can adjust the diagrams so that they can be shown to future baffled people and hopefully clear things up quicker for them! Cheers, Rob

Job done, just cut down some 90mm M10 bolts to 60mm and threaded the cut end to the magical M10x1.25, dead easy instant stud! That nicely takes care of that little snaffu on my part so I can now concentrate on bigger things, as in everything else Cheers, Rob

'Tis indeed a good point Stan, and thanks for the comps! I've vaguely addressed it by welding the large washers to the 'thing', so things should be at least solidly mounted at the frame end. The pics on the car show me marking up where they should be welded on. I do like the idea of machining up some extra material to fit snugly in the end pieces though, shouldn't be too hard at all. Maybe even Delrin would be good enough for that job if it's a nice snug fit. Clint, thanks for the lead on Wurth, I'll check in to that. I had one guy get back to me this morning saying that he could get some made up but as it's a small run, the setup cost would be high, quoted me £25-30 for 4. He was good enough to suggest just taking a stock bolt, chopping the head off and threading the exposed end which isn't such a terrible idea, and of course much cheaper. Why didn't I think of that?!! Cheers, Rob

Yep, those guys. If I can source some studs I'll use them, if not I'll live without the two inner bolts, and anyone daring enough to follow in my footsteps here can make a better job of this part Cheers, Rob