Dan Juday

Decided to go LT1 after all, huh Alex?

So Brett, How'd you get it smogged?

Well, almost bingo. It's R. Straman Co. This guy does very professional work. He did the prototypes for the f-body convertables, the new Beetle, etc. The conversion looks completely like the factory did it. The car has about 130k miles on it and looks like most cars with that many miles on them. It needs a little TLC. No major mods planned. I want to clean it up, freshen the upholstry and the paint, and enjoy a drop-top again. It's been too long since the days of my Fiat 124 Spyder and the X19. Besides, my honey lets me have all the project cars I want, sequentially.

Bingo!

Will be arriving later in the month.

No, not hard. Get the Helm manual for your motor and take your time. Don't be in a hurry and you'll do fine. There are a bunch of wires to sort through. Just do one at a time and use good practices: solder and heat shrink each time you splice. Give yourself plenty of time. It helps to know the basics of electronics like what a switch does, how a relay works, why some wires are fat and some are small. You don't need to understand solid state circuitry to do it.

All the info here on Autometer should transfer to the SW gauges directly. I was told by a dealer that the head engineer at Autometer moved to SW and took the engineering with him. Good choice. I have been eyeing the SW dials too. I've been quiet though. Didn't want everybody to be doing the samething I was doing. Selfish, huh? Call SW's tech line. That would be the best source for the correct information.

Best quality and professional service comes from reactionresearch.com Price? You get what you pay for. But remember with fiberglass if you save money buying cheap parts you more than make up for it with the shop time to fix it. And yes, those fenders on my car are from Reaction Research.

Aux once refered to my car as the Blue Bullet. That's stuck more than anything else.

Steve, dude, you are amazing. It's like you're just sitting there chewing on part numbers waiting for the next post so you can spit them out. Is there nothing in the Z world too obscure for you?

I have a f-body WC T5 in my car. I'm using the Tilton 7/8" master cyclinder. Works great. I tried like crazy to get the 3/4" one to work but no dice. Also, I did the drill and tap thing on the slave. I haven't had any problems in the three to four years I've been driving it but I would recommend using an adapter instead. A buddy here on the site made it for me when I did the swap on a friends car. If you ever have to replace the slave it's now a bolt-in.

You can drop a two rotor Wankel in and still have room under the hood for your golf bag, ALL of it behind the front axle!

Good advice Scottie. I thought about the doing a home-made Tiger myself. The engine bay of the Z looks like the Grand Canyon by comparison. Very tight in there. Not only is the pan a Tiger-only item, so is the intake manifold. I have a friend who was practically given a Tiger by the original owner when it was only a year old. The handling was so bad that when the guy "parked" it on a turn island that was the end for him. Wouldn't even get back in the car. He called my friend and told him if he would tow it away he could have it for a hundred bucks. My friend owned it for a few months and summarily disposed of it in a similar fashion. He said the brakes were even worse than the suspension. If you have the time and money it could be a fun project. To make it right it would be a much bigger project than the Z though.

Mike posted the link to my post from awhile back. Since then I have taken the car on two long trips. One to LA and the other to Pheonix. After 12 hours in the seat I felt great. Wonderful seats. All you need to install then in a 240 is an angle grinder, a drill, a hack saw, four feet of 1/2" square tubing, and a few nuts and bolts. I got everything at the local Ace Hardware. The hardest part is installing the screws in the rear mounts. Well worth the effort IMHO.

Yup, I've got a similar set. No "city" lights and the bulb cover is a little different. The blue beam looks great with my Viper blue paint but, like the other guys have said, the view from the drivers seat sucks. I drive with the high beams on and on-coming cars don't even notice. How lame is that?

Yup, I agree totally. But you can't deny that emotion and fast cars go together. Nothing makes me more emotional than great clouds of Goodyear wafting through the drivers door window! I'm not a Ford guy or a Mustang guy. It's just where I grew up. A Mustang's got to have a Ford V8 in it. I don't even like Ford six cylinders in Mustangs. Corvettes didn't become Corvettes untill Chevy put V8's in them. It's my memories of being a kid, seeing and hearing those great muscle cars and then wrenching on my own hot rod. I just can't deny those memories, those emotions. No matter how much better a Japanese turbo charged six may be it will never stir my juices like an American V8. It's not where I grew up. If I grew up in Tokyo I'm sure I would feel the same way about Z cars. So we can be bigots when it comes to cars. So what, it's just a car. But people are people wherever they grow up. I respect a guy who is pissed at me for 'butchering' a nice 240Z with a V8. Hey, that's where he grew up.

I must be a bigot. I think that's heinous.

Nice progress Rick, I knew the headlight buckets were going to be harder than you thought at first. I considered fitting them to the YZ fronts when I did my car. The more I futzed with them the more depressed I got. I ended up using the SubtleZ fronts to save labor. Good move pulling in the airdam. Noticed that right off. Looks much better than the "fat lip" racer look.

You should have room to spare. Mine is a JTR mount. Most guys with JTR mounts and a carb run a low profile air cleaner and maybe have 1/2" hood clearance. I have about 2" clearance. But... You would have even more clearance (and a superior motor) If you fitted a LT1.

Right Chris. I've read that the '79 280ZX was actually a few pounds LIGHTER than the '78 280Z it replaced. But, like the S30, the S130 also gained weight throughout it's production run. The real deal on Z's is that unlike most other cars, i.e. the Corvette, the Camero, or the Mustang, the objective of the car seemed to change with each generation. You can argue that the S130 and the Z31 had the same objective but in that case the mechanicals, the looks, and the proportions changed drasticly. The 350Z has made an honest attemp to get back to the orignal purpose of the first Z car. The 240's will always have a special quality. And their owners know it. (wink) That said, there's a rather special Z31 I've got my eye on.

Oh baby that's sweet! Nice work Mike. Keep this up and you'll be out of the pool business.

If all you are doing is drag racing than I guess I see the attraction to a carb. The real benifit of EFI is not max hoursepower at WOT but drivability. Reliable starting everytime in all weather conditions, optimum throttle reponce throughout the RPM range, better fuel economy, longer engine life because the motor is running much closer to a perfect AFR than any carb could hope and not washing the the cyclinder walls with a too rich mixture. Remember, with a carb you had better error on the too rich side or risk burning things up. And then there's that self tuning every second thing that was mentioned. And yes, I personally know a guy with a V8Z that changed from a carb to EFI and his max hoursepower went down (slightly). But I don't see him swapping the carb back in anytime soon. AND, his car is primarily a dragger. Do it if you must. I'll never go back(wards) to carbs.

I fitted Eclipse front corner lights (clear lense style) into the opening in the MSA II airdam. They fit very well.