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I got my Z back on the road two weeks ago. I used the ball bearings from McMaster Carr (see Post #10) and they work perfectly (no sound at all from the bearing now). I actually added two additional bearings (32 in total) and the steering feels great! Of course over the winter I also replaced the strut inserts (Tokico Blues), ball joints, tie rod ends, strut bearings, steeing rack bushings, inner control arm bushings, and installed the Motorsports Auto Tension/Compression rod kit (http://www.thezstore.com/page/TZS/PROD/classic20j/23-4190, highly recommended!) and new front tires (Dunlop Direzza ZII Star Spec) so I'm not sure how much the new bearings contributed to the improved steering feel. But the steering feels awesome!

Here is the colour 76 280Z wiring diagram. The link keeps playing up for some reason. I think there is another thread, might be my 240Z color wiring diagram thread, with a link that works. Chas 76circuit_COLOR.pdf

Ah, OK.... I saw the points replacement comment and forgot that the 260Z has electronic ignition. Clomolina, try this: Lift the wire(s) off the - terminal of the coil, turn on the ignition, and measure the voltage of the - terminal. It should be +12V if you have not mixed up your wires. The wires you lifted off the terminal should all be 0V. If so, you're good. Now reattach the wires to the - terminal, and add an additional piece of wire there. Strip the opposite end of the wire. Pull the coil high voltage wire off the center post of the distributor, and hover it over a ground point, maybe a couple of mm away. Now turn on the ignition, and tap the bare wire (connected to the - post of the coil) to ground somewhere. (DON'T TOUCH THE BARE METAL OF THE WIRE WITH YOUR FINGERS.) As you tap the bare wire to ground, you should see a spark from the high voltage coil wire to ground. If this happens, your coil is good.Assuming your coil is good, now work forward: Remove the extra wire from the - terminal of the coil, and leave the high voltage coil wire perched above the ground point. Now crank your engine. If you get a spark, the transistor ignition unit and distributor pickup is good. As Chas points out, you might have the dual pickup system. I forget.Assuming you've got spark to the distributor, the question becomes whether spark gets from your distributor to the plug wires. You might have a bad distributor cap (dirty/cracked/old/worn), which might be shorting your spark to ground. IMO, you should consider replacing the cap and rotor for good measure.

Source:http://www.improvedtouring.com/forums/showthread.php?23288-Which-Intake-Manifold-for-a-240Z&s=188653bfe00de2be0d6f11b4e3afdadf KThomas Jan 16 2008 E88 or N33, whichever you have that's prettier. Rebello used to claim 10 hp or something stupid like that. We couldn't show enough difference on an east coast dyno to matter. Our ARRC wins were with an E88. Needles- they need to look like a telephone pole. More metal, not less. SM's, N27's and anything "ground on" will be too fat. N27 was stock for 1971, N54 for 1972. I think we ran something closer to an N58. With everything in perfect blueprint (bottom end, valve placement, cam, and carbs) and a decent header, you'll be too fat up to 5500 rpm and too lean past 6800. So we slow the suction piston down and live with a little leanness over 7200. We used [secret] for the damper oil, so 20w or 10w30 is fine. I don't believe in lighter, like ATF. Makes the piston come up too fast and runs fat. Now the old school thinking was get the piston up quick so there's no restriction. ATF for damper oil was the rage back in the 70's. Ive found that it just doesn't make horsepower that way. Rich mixture will cure a lot of ills, for example you can run zero point gap (if you had points) on a Z if you put enough gas in it. But if the rest of your system is blueprint you don't need to be rich, you need to be lean. Mixture control is more important than flow up to about 6800. There are some very competent Z pilots out there running the Rebello method of no oil whatsoever, so the piston slams up to the top soon as you crack the throttle. Those guys never beat me. And my car idles and drives around the pits without spitting black smoke all over the place. I like my way. In the end you need a bigger jet to take care of the over 7000 lean problem, but then you're in for custom needles. It isn't really a problem, you won't melt a piston, but there is a few more horsepower up there to be had. The stock jet limits you. But having said that you should be able to win races with everything perfectly stock, and we never made it to the bigger jet part (we ran to 7400 rpm at Road Atlanta, 7200 tops anywhere else). You really need a good O2 sensor on each bank (I used cyl's 2 and 5) and a HAL30 or similar lambda or air/fuel sensor. We were fortunate to do our tuning with a proper engine dyno, but if I was on a budget I'd put the instrumentation in car for test days when you can look (I've decided driver's don't see anything during a race unless it's a big blinking red light). Uh, the secret oil is secret because I forgot what the mix was. Man, i miss my brain... One other thing on the operation of SU's. The common knowledge was running lighter oil in the damper allowed the piston to go up faster and hence you were at a lower point on the needle and therefore had more jet area exposed which equalled richer, which everybody associated with more power. The factory will tell you that slowing the damper down with thicker oil created a bigger vacuum, which resulted in more gas being pulled past the needle and hence a richer mixture. That was the case I always found on street cars, they ran better with thicker, or proper, damper oil. Now that counters what I just told you in the previous post. We slowed the piston down to make it leaner. However, we're talking about two different regions of piston travel, rpm, and vacuum. The region of piston travel we care about on the track is the upper 1/3 of travel. On the street, the first 2/3. For rpm, above 4000 for track, below 4000 for street. For street rpm the throttle and piston position can affect vacuum greatly, for race the throttle is always full open when it isn't full closed (you Z pilots got that, right? Full open, there is no part throttle or "feathering" in a Z. If you can't do that we need to talk about shocks and setup), so vacuum is more a function of rpm, and less affected by the last 1/3 of piston travel than it is with the first 2/3. What we were slowing down was the last 1/3 of piston travel (and running stock like oil to have stock like piston response in the street range of throttle position and rpm). On a stock setup, when you open the throttle at 4000 rpm the piston pretty much goes straight to the top. The needle is essentially out of the jet so what is affecting your mixture is the vacuum over the jet bridge caused by increasing rpm. It ain't the piston moving the needle in the jet as you go from 4000 to 7000 rpm. So we slowed up the last 1/3 of travel, ran long needles with very little taper at the end, and lived with lean mixtures above 7k. There used to be a video showing the piston movement during a dyno pull on ZTherapy's website. That was mine, very early in our engine program. Headers will affect mixture, so YMMV. katman Manifolds Your right there is a bit of a difference. The walls seperating cyl2-3 and 4-5 on the e-88s have less of a taper from the carb side than the n-33's which are reatively blunt. I have not seen an n-36 to compare, but have heard they are either similar or identical to the n-33. We're gonna try each (e-88 and n-33) just to see how the different runners affeect it if at all. My sneaking suspicion is Katmans right that we are best off with the purtiest one.

My electrician friend said "condensers attached to coil are merely for removing any electrical disturbance to the tachometer"

Although these frame rails were not in horrible shape, the owner of the car has decided to replace the original rails with thicker aftermarket rails to make the body stiffer to support the additional horsepower the car will have once complete. Our job was to make the new frame rails replicate the original to maintain the overall stock look the customer wants to keep.

The downdraft two barrel? Cobwebs that make it clear you don't drive the Z often enough? Seriously though. If your points are visibly arcing, I suspect your condenser is toast.

What are the condenser specs for the L28E?

This a very good idea and method of execution is very clean. Well done. Nothing beats a modern ignitor to replace 40 year old crap. It is little surprise that your car runs better than it did before. I feel compelled however to lend some advice. The generic cheap GM HEI ignition module is not the best component for this purpose. There is/was a lengthy (older) thread on hybridz about ignition instability at higher RPM's with some of the more bargain basement varieties of thes items. At the time, there weren't a lot of options, though MSD and others had "high performance" versions of the basic HEI module that performed better. jegs or summitracing.com probably sell several varieties. I'll try to find the hybridz thread and you can decide if its helpful. Good news is that there are more modern and well tested components. DIY autotune has one of the better ones, the BIP373 is the one that comes to mind. DIYPNP BIP373 Ignition Module and Heatsink Kit DIYAutoTune.com This thing can replace the HEI module, or the E12-80/92 module on a ZX dizzy or any reluctor based distributor and will fire any basic 12v coil. And its smaller. And at $9.80, I buy three to carrytwo as spares, JIC....