Leaderboard

My mechanic is booked until next Monday. So it will be a few days before I know the cause of the noise. I'm just glad to have a mechanic that works on older imports. Sounds like your son is eager to learn and enjoys a good challenge. My child never got too interested in the care and feeding of sports cars. Fortunately, he makes a good living doing classified things for three letter government agencies so he can pay someone to work on his car. Dennis

Most vehicles have long since changed away from a potentiometer based instrument dimmer to a Pulse Width Modulated (PWM) based electronic dimmer controller and I've been working on retrofitting one of these newer style electronic dimmer controllers into my 280Z. I poked around the junkyard looking for one that would mechanically fit in the original potentiometer location and settled on one from a late eighties to early nineties Toyota Camry. The main criteria needed are short stubby mounting depth and rotate control instead of a thumbwheel so I could mount it in the original dimmer pot location. This is the dimmer out of a 91 Toyota Camry: The biggest hurdle with this retrofit is that the shaft is too short, and because of that, this became mostly a mechanical project instead of an electrical one. I took the dimmer module apart and took the control potentiometer out: Mounted the pot in a "specially designed fixture" to be able to modify the shaft. I wanted to turn it down a little to fit inside an extendo-shaft. Here's the pot mounted in the fixture and the rough cut brass extendo-shaft at the bottom: I turned the pot nub down a little and bored the end of the extendo to fit onto the pot nub. After the rest of the machining is done I'll epoxy the extendo to the original pot nub: : Then for the other end of the extendo, I machined some splines to fit the original dimmer knob: Here's the completed dimmer next to the original dimmer pot. I glued the shaft together and everything looks great. I didn't mount it in the dash yet, but I did connect it up and it works great. I probably won't mount it in the dash until the off season. I'm going to pull my dash out for some HVAC work and it'll be a lot easier to swap the original pot out with the dash out of the car. Here's the completed dimmer:

Looks like a Tilton to me. There should be that manufacturers name stamped on it along with the Nissan part number 12310-F1011 for the 225mm unit and 12310-F1013 for the 240mm unit. The replacement friction center is Nissan part number 12311-F1011 for the 225mm. The replacement friction center for the 240mm is NLA.

You can take those float valves apart. Remove that small clip ring at the top and pull the pin out. There's a little cone shaped at the end. Mine are grey in color. There's also a spring in there you can stretch out for a stronger closing pressure. Clean the pin and it's seat inside the body of the valve with a can of carb cleaner. Stretch the spring and it should be like new. Or buy new ones.

I am not sure, but just guessing, the ring gear may be drilled in a different pattern or it is easier to bolt in a complete rear end then move the parts to a new case and get the mess and gear lash setup properly. It is evidently somewhat difficult to get the preload right. Plus with used parts the mesh would have to be very close to the way the previous case was or you can have gear whine... I would love to learn moving the ring and gear and chunk over from the STi case is possible as for me that seems easier. Another possibility is the output shafts from LSD chunk are splined differently than the factory outputs...

Yup, you can cut that top emitter off with no problem. Take a look at my crude hand drawn schematic and you'll see that the five emitters are actually in five parallel paths with current limiting resistors for each path. Taking the top emitter off just removes one of those parallel paths. Here's what I did for cutting down the brightness. Start with this: Desolder the center (positive) connection and the base comes off. If the glue bond hasn't already been broken, you will have to break it. But pull/twist, and the base comes off: Unbend the negative lead and pull off the white plastic ring. Same thing goes for the glue here. It's supposed to be glued on, but the quality of the bond is usually pretty poor and it comes off easily: I shortened the length of the positive lead and attached a resistor. The resistor in the pic is 270 Ohms, but I have since changed to a 240 Ohms to make it just a little brighter. I like my dash dim, so the fine tuning of the value is left to the individual: Slip the plastic ring and the base back on, feeding the resistor lead out the hole in the bottom. Solder up that center connection, clip off the excess, and you're done. Here's what it looks like before you solder the resistor lead: When you're done done, it looks like it did before you started. I didn't glue any of them together yet until I'm positive I like the resistor value I picked, but it's a simple matter to unsolder and resolder that center connection. I'm going to get the whole project done and then glue them up. About the green lens? I wanted white, so I just removed the lenses and tossed them in a baggie. If you wanted green, I think you can get the tower versions in green, can't you? Is that "too much" green maybe?

Good! They got there. I hope they work great for you... make small welds and let them cool completely or they will warp