johnc

Prayers said. There's a lot that can be done to put cancer into remission. Your wife has a lot of happy years ahead of her.

Yup. If you're only doing occaisional welding, that's fine. If you do a lot of welding you'll be suprised how hot the table top can get. Putting a sheet of aluminum betwen the steel top and the wooden bench helps spread the heat around.

Take them out and replace them with class 12.9. McMaster-Carr has them as item number 91290A418 at $13.78 for a box of 100. http://www.mcmaster.com. FYI... SAE bolts are "Graded". Metric bolts are "Classed". A simple comparison: Grade 2 - Class 5 Grade 5 - Class 8.8 Grade ? - Class 9.8 Grade 8 - Class 10.9 Grade 10 - Class 12.9

Industrial shelving frame with a 72" x 48" x 1/2" H6 steel plate.

Man, if I could find straight (straight core support, straiight frame rails, straight rear subframe, striaght floor pans, straight roof, etc.) rust free shells for $1,000 I would buy them in a New York minute.

Better aerodynamics. There's a reason Andy and Tony run the 2+2 at Bonneville.

There are different ways to do seam welding. The usual method is to weld the edge of the seam everywhere you can get to an edge. A more difficult method used when a racing class doesn't allow seam welding is to is use an abrasive wheel to cut a slot through the top sheet of the seam, exposing the the bottom sheet. Weld up the slot and grind it smooth. That method works very well and pretty much undetectable if the slots are placed so they do not overlap the existing spot welds. Its also very tedious and expensive to have done. I did a 1970 240Z this way once after the shell had been media blasted - 60 hours of work.

There's no place on a monocoque (unibody) chassis where you want to see flex. Unfortunately, due to budget and manufacturing considerations, there will always be places where the chassis flexes if the loads are great enough. Seam welding, chassis reinforcements (subframe connectors, gussets, additional material), and roll cages are used to reduce flex in a chassis as much as possible. Nobody designs in flex or uses rivets to allow flex in a monocoque chassis. Flex is an undesirable thing.

I was kinda hoping he would do it and prove us to be a bunch of whiners.

Back in 1990 Harvard Business Review published a study that Toyota completed back in 1980 (Toyota released the study to HBR for publication). What Toyota did was do a large engineering study of who they perceived their foriegn competitors to be 15 years down the road. Toyota engineers bought Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac, Ford, and Chevrolet vehicles and tore them down. They measured parts and subjected parts to materials analysis to determine the quality of manufacture and material selection. The results of their 3 year study was that, at the time of the study, Toyota already had a five fold lead in manufacturing and material quality over the second best manufacturer in their study - Mercedes. What Toyota was behind on was design and engineering quaility (coming up with good designs and engineering more elegant solutions). The article didn't discuss what Toyota did to correct the design and engineering gap, but we know it already as Lexus.

Can't think of a better excuse to build a tube frame front end... get out the Sawzall!

Well... the first test drive will be interesting. As unbalanced as that diff is now with the bolt and the various weld deposits my guess is that you'll have a little vibration issue about 60 mph. Another diff welding tip is to preload the unit before welding. Using both diff side stub axles, apply slight pressure in opposite directions before tacking the spiders.

Sometimes when you see something done to a car, its done by more then one builder. Maybe the car owner put the rivets in and the well respected Japanese builder came by later and seam welded the chassis? There may be a reason to do both, but I don't know what that reason might be.

Pretty impressive! Maybe setup a web cam when its time to fire it up for the first time so we can all watch.

There's not such thing as a $400 FS6R31A transmission unless its been blown up.

So, you want to take 1,100lbs out of a 2,700lb car without going overboard? As far as I know, no one on this planet has ever build a 1,600lb S30 2+2 and probably one two people have ever built a 1,600lb S30 coupe. Those two people went EXTREMELY overboard to get their cars that light.

The master cylinder piston is not retracting completely. Check the mechanical brake pedal components including the pushrod inside the boster.

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I don't understand the stainless rivet thing. A properly seam welded chassis will be as stiff as that monocoque structure could get. The seams won't be flexing against each other, the material itself will be flexing. BTW... the whole point of seam welding is to keep the two sheets that make up the seam from moving independent of each other. That's the best you can hope for when making this modification.

Buy the right wheels.

Without time in a wind tunnel or some CFD software I would be careful about trying to get two different aero elements in close proximity to each other to work well together. The upper surface of a whale tail is a high pressure area and it might be enough to disrupt the low pressure area you're trying to develop underneath a wing (remember, high pressure always flow to low pressure). How high above the whale tail does the high pressure area extend? How low under the wing does the low pressure area extend? What kind of turbulence will be generated between these two aero elements? Diffusers work well with low set wings because you're dumping the low pressure area from the diffuser exit into the low pressure area under the wing. My suggestion would be to build a diffuser under the back of your car first and, later, experiment with a wing.

Bump the compression to about 17 to 1 and run VP Racing's new Q16 leaded. That should give you a bit more power.

The HTS 112F (which is what Pere's running) has a shock body length of 13.875" and a stroke of 6". The HTS 102 has a shock body length of 13.063" and a stroke of 5". Both have the same basic valving.

As stated above, there's not much surface area at the top of an S30 strut tower.

Jason's SM 240SX is mean and fast as hell and is for sale (you can get it for $16K - http://tinyurl.com/23ully). The wheel/tire combination he's running was designed and built before Hoosier announced their 275-15s. I don't know if Jason would have run the 275s even if they were available back when the car was built. Regarding wheel/tire OD: there's a lot of discussion of this issue for our cars on this site, although the discussion is usually a side item in a thread about wheels and tires or ride height. I don't have time right now to post much, but a overall diameter of 22.5 to 24.5" is the sweet spot for a 240Z. Anything more or less requires changes to the suspension to correct roll centers.