johnc

Garage ornament.

Your tire size selection will build in understeer for the occaisional autox and track days. With the torque you are planning on you should be able to use the throttle to drive around it. I suggest the following if your car weighs around 2,500 lbs or less. Front Shorten the front struts 1.5". Install Tokico Illumina Toyota MR2 struts. Install 10" long, 2.5" diameter Hyperco or Eibach springs with a 200 lb. in. rate. Adjust for a ride height of 6" measured att he front of the rocker panel. Install a 1" (25mm) diameter front anti-roll bar. Install camber plates or slot the strut towers. Poly bushings all around and offset bushings in the lower control arm. 1.5 to 2 degrees negative camber. 6 degrees positive caster. 1/16" toe in. Rear Shorten the rear struts (I forgot exactly how much). Install Tokico Illumina 240Z front struts. Install 10" long, 2.5" diameter Hyperco or Eibach springs with a 225 lb. in. rate. Adjust to a 6.5" ride height measured at the rear of the rocker panel. Install a 5/8" diameter rear anti-roll bar. Install camber plates or slot the strut towers. Poly bushings all around and offset bushings in the lower control arm inner pivots. 1.5 degrees negative camber. 1/16" toe in. Some kind of LSD (no welded or locker).

Unfortunately the Illuminas adjust bump and rebound together. Ideally, a set of double adjustable shocks would help considerably. Almost full soft on compression and full stiff on rebound in the rear and medium on both in the front. Use the front to control how the car handles and the rear to control the weight transfer.

Ultimately each cylinder requires a slightly different a/f ratio for optimum performance. A lot depends on compression ratio (both static and dynamic), intake and exhaust flow, cam design, spark plug position, heat loss, etc. And if each cylinder wants a different a/f ratio, then it stands to reason that each engine also wants a different a/f ratio. Dyno or track testing are the only ways to come up with the best number for your engine. A simple way is to use EGT to tune the engine. Try for 1,325 degrees at WOT throughout the rpm range. You'll need fast acting probes and, ideally, you'll want at least two - one for each side of the engine mounted as close to the exhaust port as possible. Weld bungs on each primary - down by the collector is too far away.

There is also a chemical bonding of the tread rubber to the road surface. Race Car Engineering had a good discussion of this topic a couple issues ago in regards to the traction control systems on F1 cars. Basically, the top F1 teams in conjunction with Bridgestone and Michelin are still not able to develop accurate algorithms that model tire CF (both physical and chemical) for traction control software. There' still some guesswork involved (temperature plays havoc with the models) and lots of trial and error testing during practice and qualifying.

CCW doesn't have much of a web site. You have to look at the Viper and Corvette photos. John only sells one style. You can also see them on the first Z in Nemeziz post above. FYI... I was talking with John at CCW today. He is only making 17" and 18" wheels with .220 wall rim halves. Figure about 18 lbs. for a 17 x 10 wheel.

CCW is Complete Custom Wheel .

The model year 1980, 1981, and 1982 Nissan 720 4x4 pickups had R180 diffs in front with 115mm gear ratios 3.90, 4.11, or 4.38. I've heard rumors of the 4.6 gear but I've never seen one. I've also never seen a LSD in the front of the 4x4 and I'm pretty sure none were ever offered from the factory. And, no, you don't have to flip them over. Nissan engineers were "smart" enough to have the output shaft from the transfer case turn in the correct direction.

Although a friend has agreed to purchase these later this year, I would prefer to sell them a bit sooner. Monocoque 16 x 9 245/45-16 tires fit perfect and Tire Rack lists 31 tires in that size.

CV joints are not stronger than U-joints. CV joints take less power to turn and work better at more extreme angles. In most Z applications (including V8 conversions) the strength of CVs are more than enough. When you get into the higher torque applications then the additional strength of U-joints might be of some value. But, I'm not talking about the 240 halfshafts. Those can have problems with 400+ ft. lbs of torque. If you're doing a high horsepower Z then you should probably have custom halfshafts built. Try Unitrax or McKenzies. Both can build CV or U-Joint based halfshafts.

Here's my take on it: The black paint on a car works as a very inefficient heat engine. The sunlight (radiant energy) striking the black surface excites the dark colored molecules and some of the radiant energy is converted into kinetic energy (Brownian motion), thus raising the temperature of the surface of the car. This process is not very efficient so most of the remaining radiant energy is converted into heat due the the First Law of Thermodynamics (Conservation of Energy.) Remember, little of the radiant energy is reflected from the surface of a black car so that energy has to be accounted for in the system. Because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy) the output heat flows into the cooler heat sink - the surrounding air. Adding heat to the surrounding air increases the air temperature and Brownian motion of the molecules, which increases the distance between them and reduces the surface pressure in an unrestricted area. Thus, the black car is moving through air that is less dense than the air a white car is moving through. Again, remember that most of the radiant energy is reflected off the surface of a white car. And also remember that this is an academic discussion with no application in the real work...

We just built an adjustable vacume can for an S2000. I would try a can first and get as large a one as possible for the space you're planning to mount it.

WSJ - PLAIN TALK By DAVE KANSAS The Buy-and-Hold Mantra Deserves Closer Examination "Buy and hold" may be the last undiscovered scam of the bubble era. As investors cottoned to the stock market in the 1990s, professionals offered basic advice. Buy and hold for the long term. Stay the course. Buy the dips. Never surrender. One of the great surprises of the stock market's downturn is how investors have clung to the buy-and-hold theme even as their portfolios have crumbled. Equity fund inflows were positive in 2001 and remain positive this year, even though the stock market is on the way to its third-straight losing year for the first time since World War II. But late last month Barron's, the financial weekly published by Dow Jones (publisher of this Web site), finally said what must be on just about everyone's mind. "The buy-and-hold mantra that was drilled into investors' psyches by the bull market of the '80s and '90s no longer leads to nirvana." Indeed not. The defrocking of buy-and-hold is just the latest bodyblow for individual investors. Already, they've endured Enron's stealthy books, Merrill Lynch's double-talking research analysts, Arthur Andersen's shredding, Adelphia's crony capitalism and, most recently, WorldCom's explosive confession of book cookery that may top all lists. Now, the received wisdom of buying and holding is no longer the sure thing it was sold as. Individuals who have steadfastly bought and held this market right down into the sub-basement (think dollar-cost averaging and auto-investing -- the ultimate tricks of the buy-and-hold trade), may finally be realizing that they're the last ones holding the bag. The buy-and-hold strategy stems from the concept that timing the market is impossible. Underscoring this notion are data indicating that gains in a given year usually fall on a small number of days. For instance, the one-year return after the 1987 market crash was 23.1%. But if you didn't own shares on the five best trading days during that 12-month period, you would've had a 6.8% loss. Buy-and-holders, since they are always in the market, don't miss those days. The buy-and-hold philosophy also argues that stocks go up over time. According to data from Chicago-based Ibbotson Associates, from 1926 to 1999, 90% of five-year periods were positive for stocks. But those figures don't reveal long periods of pain in the stock market. After the 1929 crash, the Dow Jones Industrial Average took 25 years to regain its pre-crash levels. The Dow traded above 1000 in 1968, but failed to close above that level again until 1984. Finally, buying and holding ostensibly applies differently to stock investors and fund investors. For stock investors, buying and holding makes little sense, since companies and trends change over time. A stronger case can be made for buying and holding an array of diversified mutual funds, especially since fund managers are not likely buying and holding forever but are continually monitoring and updating their holdings. The idea is that you minimize the risk of staying in the game by spreading your assets among a number of investments. But even with funds, buying and holding is no elixir. You could buy and hold the life out of an Internet fund, but that won't make it come back to life. And with many folks talking about a lengthy weakness in technology, does it make sense to buy-and-hold tech funds, or "diversified" (read: tech-heavy) funds for that matter? The fund industry would prefer you not question too much the buy-and-hold concept. By getting investors to buy and hold for "the long term" (forever?), fund companies generally amass assets and book a nifty piece of revenue via their asset-management fees -- a percentage that keeps on taking no matter what the fund's performance. It's no wonder that just about every fund manager on television, in newspapers or on the Internet frequently extols the virtues of patience and the buy-and-hold strategy. "The investment managers, the fund world, clearly has a vested interest in telling people to stay the course, to buy and hold, because they make a lot of money on the assets they have under management," says Jeffrey Bronchick, chief investment officer at Reed Connor Birdwell, a Los Angeles investment firm. "The fact is, buy-and-hold is not that easy a system. The reality is there are far fewer companies that are buy-and-holdable than there are publicly traded securities." So how did buy-and-hold become such an unquestioned piece of received wisdom? Like just about any strategy, it worked when the market was going up. Stocks rose for such a long time that the buy-and-hold concept seemed flawless. Like much of what happens in the market, though, we've been through this before. It's only remarkable that so many are holding onto this game well after its failure. The so-called Nifty Fifty stocks of the late 1960s and early 1970s were "buy 'em-and-forget 'em" stocks. But that idea died a quick death after the market decline of the early '70s. Trading volume slowed to a trickle on major exchanges, and mutual funds suffered five consecutive years of net redemptions during and after the Nifty Fifty's collapse, according to the Investment Company Institute. Nifty Fifty sounds like a lotto game to most people in today's market. But long memories are invaluable when it comes to evaluating investment strategies. "Buy and hold? I got my lessons in the early '60s," wrote Howard Garrison, a retired oil and gas engineer now living in Spain. "I bought and held and kept buying a company called Yuba Consolidated Industries until I got a letter which read: 'I am Francis Xavier McGillicudy, trustee in bankruptcy. The first item is my fee.'" Like many of the shortcuts we took during the bubble era, buy-and-hold is actually a rather evil truncation of an intelligent investment strategy. The best way to think about it is buy-and-watch, or buy-and-beware. You could have bought and held WorldCom with great gusto. But that wasn't stopping the stock on its trip to oblivion. A potential variant on the blind buy-and-hold concept is to buy good companies and hold them. The challenge is in identifying good companies, and that takes watching too. Sun Microsystems, the server giant, was a worldbeater three years ago. A recent story in the Economist raised issues about Sun's survival; its shares, $5, trade roughly 90% off their highs. Over the longer haul, only one company from the original Dow Jones Industrial Average is a component of the measure today, General Electric, though even venerable GE has had two stints outside of the average during the measure's 106-year history. Debunking buy-and-hold is not the same thing as embracing wild-eyed speculation. Often investors get lost in this Manichaean view of Wall Street. But buy-and-watch means that you make sure your portfolio remains diversified. For instance, if you were a true buy-and-holder, the boom of the late 1990s meant, inevitably, tech and growth became an outsized part of your portfolio. A buy-and-holder would have ho-hummed and gotten crushed as the bubble burst. A buy-and-watcher would've rebalanced -- even selling part of a tech-bloated S&P 500 index fund -- to cushion the portfolio from the implosion of the Internet and tech bubble. The buy-and-hold chatter of the past few years has many individuals peeved. Todd Johnson, an investor who lives in Denver, wrote to say he feels "burned" by the continuous drumbeat of buy-the-dips or buy-and-hold for the long term, especially now that the market has fallen on such hard times. "All I hear is 'stay the course' from John Bogle types," wrote Mr. Johnson, speaking of the founder of the Vanguard Group of funds, known for its index funds. "I'm sure their thoughts are well-intended, but inaccurate in hindsight." For Mr. Johnson and others, the buy-and-hold mantra seems more a feel-good nostrum than an effective strategy. Still, some individual investors continue to cling stubbornly to the buy-and-hold thesis. (To see their comments, click here.) Perhaps they'll be vindicated. The question is whether they can hold on long enough to find out. Write to Dave Kansas at dave.kansas@wsj.com Updated July 9, 2002 10:44 a.m. EDT

I was told today that a black race car is faster than a white race car because of the second law of thermodynamics. I thought about it for a second, realized it would take more than a second to understand, so I went back to welding parts. Can someone explain this to me or do I have to find a physics book?

In a Z application, its probably a tossup. The high horsepower Viper guys all have to run U-joints because they blow up CVs regularly.

Again, do you guys want skidpad numbers for a stock 240Z with 4.5" wide wheels? That brings me back to my original point - this is a meaningless question unless you are comparing absolutely stock vehicles. When you start allowing mods into this discussion then the old qualifier "all things being equal" is NEVER true. My 1970 BSP 240Z on an asphalt autocross course regularly pulled 1.2gs steady state and 1.7gs transient lateral using 225/50-15 Kumho V700s as measured by a Palm Vx based Geez system. So what? There's only one car configured that way at that time. I can also build a 280Z that will probably pull 1.5gs steady state and over 1.9gs transient. To do the same in a 240Z I would probably have to put a full roll cage in because the chassis is not stiff enough. Without the cage I'd bet that you couldn't keep a 240Z in a steady state turn near 1.5gs without sawing at the wheel and throwing off the measurement. IMHO... For a street V8 conversion, assuming smog laws don't impact the decision, I would go with a 280Z chassis. Its stronger to begin with, has provisions for EFI, comes with an R200, and is easier and cheaper to find. Weight is not as big an issue for a street driven car.

Back to the original question: > Which will produce the most power and best > reliability and driveability? I need advice! FI.

1/4" is plenty unless you have wobbly wheels.

I would just buy a set of spacers and grind a step in them. Try http://www.mcmaster-carr.com.

Sounds like a fuel problem. As Jim said check for vapor lock, float level, fuel filters, fuel pump, etc.

Some people would argue that the 240 is a better handler because of its lighter weight but they forget that the early cars were stuck with 4.5" and 5" wide rims. Later 280s had 6" wide rims. Once you start qualifying your question with things like, "...assuming they have the same width rims..." then you've opened a Pandora's box of mods. Also, what kind of "handling" are you talking about? Street driving, drag race, autocross, road race, LSR? I think this is one of those rehtorical questions that depends on a person's viewpoint, biases, etc. BTW... my 1970 240Z is the best handling Z out there...

Use a die grinder to remove the peened over flats. Then soak the threads with Kroil, Liquid Wrench, or some other penetrant. Crank up your air regulator and start hammering away with the impact wrench. Heat also helps.

Given a clean slate to start with, I would always go with FI over carbs.

I've seen the oil pressure vary about 20 degrees when the oil is cold. Usually after the first five minutes the pressure guage settles down.

Be careful about trying to get a MIG weld to look like a TIG weld. They are two different processes and have different results. There's a good change you'll compromise MIG weld strength by trying to get it flat and looking like a "stack of dimes." I've noticed that the welding world (at least in the motorsports arena) there's a lot of emphasis placed on asthetics. You generally pay a lot more for the nice TIG welds and in most cases the welded part is a little lighter (based on material choice) but not any stronger. A good example is the roll bar my wife and I just put into her Miata. We paid $450 for a MIG welded, 1.75" .120 wall DOM bolt in bar. A fabricator friend looked at it and made some comments about the MIG welds. I asked him how much he would charge for a similar roll bar. He said $1,500 to $2,000. It would not save much weight because the SCCA Solo1 rules specific .120 wall for ERW, DOM, and CroMo. So, I asked him if he was paying for it out of his pocket, which would he choose? He said our bar looked pretty good.