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Here are some progress pictures I took today for the restoration of RedWing.

I frequently talk with Jai. I'll tell her about the new pics in her old thread and let her know everyone says Hi.

Everyone likes pictures, And an example snippet from one AMP's catalogs:

There is a lot to discuss on this topic. I’ll try and distill it down as briefly as possible. 1. The 737 Max was crashed by two foreign airlines. This is an important data point. I’ll start by saying if you board an Ethiopian airline and don’t have your life insurance policy up to date then you are foolish. The US has the highest standards for airline pilots in the world. If you are flying on a large carrier like AA or Delta or SWA then I can assure you the pilots are highly trained, experienced and proficient. The FAA has placed such stringent standards on US pilots that I can promise you that your are in good hands. We go through psychology exams, personality tests, cognitive tests and difficult aviation knowledge tests. You can’t fly for a large US carrier unless you have extensive experience with 1000’s of hours in command in a airplane. Not the case overseas. There is a major pilot shortage in the world. I cannot say that you are safe when you fly a low budget foreign airline. My buddy flew the 737 at SWA and said he loved it. 2. When the jet does something unexpected or you that you don’t like the first thing you do is turn off the automation. You cannot wait until you are in a 40 deg dive to make that decision, it has to be made right away. These crashes the pilots waited to long to intervene. Where I work we hand fly all takeoffs and landings. We don’t hand it over to the auto pilot anywhere near the ground. I typically put the autopilot on at 18,000’. I disarm it about 12 miles prior to landing. 3. Boeing didn’t fully explain the MCAS system they put in the jet. It was installed to counter the pitch up on takeoff because of powerful under slung engines. They also didn’t have redundancy in the AOA probe. A single failure on this probe and you get bad outcomes from MCAS. They have dual and triple redundancy in all about systems but didn’t here. I’m confident this wouldn’t have happened on a US carrier. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Arch panel as the metal that goes under the battery tray? Give them a call for that piece. Its a made to order part.

Ah I went back out in the cold and cut them down in half. The total thickness is 5mm, works great the pad fits snug, and the horn is not on randomly. $2.99 Dale hardware, found in plumbing section.

I don't know what the problem is with people and masks. So many dopes walking around with the things on their chin, nose and mouth exposed. Nothing more than a chin diaper. Losers spreading germs, and this virus. Idiots. I don't like having to wear one in public any more than the next guy, but I suck it up and move forward. I do dislike the disposable procedural masks, so I have picked up a bunch of the cloth type. About 30 or so. I wear a clean one each day at work, and when they have all been worn once I wash them, so each day I have a clean mask. Some of the many faces of Racer. Covid Selfies by Racer, on Flickr Covid Selfies by Racer, on Flickr Covid Selfies by Racer, on Flickr Covid Selfies by Racer, on Flickr Covid Selfies by Racer, on Flickr Covid Selfies by Racer, on Flickr Covid Selfies by Racer, on Flickr

I sent him a message. Let's see what happens next game. https://drewbrees.com/Contact/

No! I'm a masker for you, others. I'm not standing up against science. I have a box in my car. Also a box of gloves. The few benifits from working in the restaurant business during this difficult time. I have access to tons of mask and gloves.

Not sure what you're saying. Have you given in? "F___ it, I'm not wearing a mask". ? The current President of the United States lost his relevance years ago. He doesn't matter. Not sure why you're talking about him. My point was about role models.

Ditto. Carl has committed an enormous amount of time and effort to our collective passion for Z-cars. And all of this done free of attitude and ego. He deserves 'Founder' status.

Most early Z's had clear glass but testing parts show defrost wires.

https://qz.com/1572381/the-relationship-between-boeing-trump-and-the-federal-government/ You got your boots on? It gets deep.

And our pensions and retirement plans are leveraged on the performance of Wall Street.

We are the leader in the aviation industry on crew rest and we didn’t want the imposed FAA rules on rest because It would have made things worse because of when and how we operate. It’s complicated but the devil is in the details. The UPS crash in Birmingham was purely human error and complacency on the crew. I’ve listened to the cockpit voice recorder in that mishap and we did a case study on it at work last month. On ZHs point. The FAA doesn’t have the depth of professionals to be able to get in the weeds on all new processes and equipment. This sort of stuff has been happening in aviation since its dawn. Regulation is a double edge sword. Not all regulations make us safer, some do the opposite. Most are well intended but fail to see second and third order effects. We get better every year, and we have to have some faith in manufactures. Just like the FDA, it’s not a perfect system. Boeing screwed this one up and they have paid dearly with their reputation and financially. Could have killed the company. Aviation safety is written and progressed in blood. Your greatest risk of dying in a plane is toxic smoke inhalation and manufactures still haven’t changed materials and made it a priority. They’ve already made the cost analysis and it’s cheaper to keep the current materials the standard when they look at the financial risk. I think one the biggest threats to safety and quality in many industries is Wall Street. People only care about quarterly profits. This ultimately hurts the American consumer in so many ways. Companies make poor decisions to meet quarterly profit goals. I don’t know what the financial or engineering reason Boeing chose to not support MCAS with a redundant indicting system. It was probably due to cost but it’s a guess and maybe the FAA was too much imbed with the company. We need to get lobbyist out of Washington...they are the greatest threat to Americans in so many ways, especially in Pharma and medical devices but also in many other critical industries and environmental areas. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

UPS in Birmingham, AL. In 2014, the Independent Pilots Association filed suit against the FAA to end the cargo airplane exemption from the flight crew minimum rest requirements.[18] In 2016 the lawsuit was dismissed by a Washington, DC court, which determined the FAA had acted reasonably by excluding cargo airlines from the rest requirement based on a cost vs benefits analysis.

Wow, fantastic!

Opps, you are correct, Typing toofast and too early #6 was bob's greenie.

Big jump in progress on the Z this weekend. First round of the 901 silver was sprayed on the body. It's amazing how different this silver looks in photos, and which lighting you have around it. We'll get the engine bay and interior painted next, then on to the exterior.

Testing:

No offense taken but this story has nothing to do with the quality of the US pilot population and the failure of 737 max. This is an area I do consider myself an expert unlike how to fix my Z. I have an aerospace degree from the nation’s leading aviation university, I have a another degree in aviation safety. I have so many hours that I don’t ever keep a logbook anymore. I have been the lead investigator on numerous aviation mishaps sorting through wreckage to determine causal factors and writing the final mishap report. I’ve watched my friends be placed in coffins with loved ones in tears. The failures in aviation that lead to crashes are predicable, have common causes and preventable. It’s a wholistic approach..a man, machine, system integration. All have to be right for the relationship to work. Good pilot, flying a bad airline or poorly designed system is a accident waiting to happen. Bad pilot flying a good airplane has it dangers too. I flew the Harrier for 20 years....it’s a death trap. Trying to kill you every time you start the engine. It requires unbelievable training and proficiency to be safe and fly it effectively. It took 30 years to get this plane to any semblance of “safe”. I lost 2 jets when I was a squadron commander. We had no automation in those planes. We have killed 65 pilots in the plane since it came to our flight lines. Automation has made commercial aviation much safer but it has it dangers too. You can’t blindly trust it, you have to be ready and trained to be in 100% control. Airbus and Boeing have completely different approaches to automation. On an Airbus you are a voting member, you cannot completely override the airplane, it won’t let you do many things. The design philosophy is “we engineers won’t let you get in a dangerous place and the jet will stop you if you try”. This led to many early airbus accidents, like the stall on takeoff of an airbus in Paris leading to a terrible crash. When you have a system, sensor failure feeding bad info to a computer that is the final decider you are in trouble. Not the case in a Boeing product. In the end you can disconnect all the computers and automation and fly with old school stick and rudder skills. Yes, you can stall it, over speed or over G it. You might have to to save the plane. Automation is great, it reduces fatigue so when you come to land the pilot is not exhausted from 5 hour of hand flying. But most of you don’t know, all the landings are being flown by hand. Only in rare cases do we let the jet land and those are Cat3 approaches that the weather is so poor that a pilot cannot see the runway to land at 50’. I’ve done 3 of these and they scare the crap out of me . Trusting the jet to land. We use what’s called the “Swiss Cheese” model to reduce accidents, impeded the error chain of event and improve safety. Look it up and you can see what layers we use to stop a single event to lead to a crash. Here is a fantastic article I think you should read. It is tantalizing for me as a pilot. The airbus has no AOA “angle of attack” indicator which is so crazy it boggles my mind. It is the most important instrument in an airplane and tells you if the how close the wing is to stall. The airbus doest provide this information to pilots and all these people on this Air France jet died because of it, but the first officer also had very low flight hours which was causal. He wouldn’t have been allowed to sit in a jet like this in the US. They stalled the plane from 38,000’ until it impacted the water after a momentary induction glitch due to icing. The Challenger crash was caused my a systematic leadership failure at Morton Thyicol and NASA. Pressure to to fly when they knew the o-rings were susceptible to failure at low temperatures and pressure from leadership to fly regardless of the risk. We can discuss the FAA issue as well. It’s complicated. My neighbor is a high ranking FAA employee and I hear about all the challenges that are facing. Read this article: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash/amp Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Deluxe models (Fairlady Z-L and Fairlady Z432) had rear defrosters from the beginning of production.

Last photo is a great illustration of why the defrost grid was switched from vertical to horizontal wires. In the photos taken during testing in Banff National Park, I had not noticed previously that the cars were fitted with winter tires on both the rear and the front wheels. I would imagine that this was planned beforehand and copied from European rally practice. Although from some angles the tires look like old-fashioned 'snow tires', I suspect that they were a Euro-spec 'winter' type (not easy to buy over-the-counter in North America in the 1960's).

So how does HLS30-01776 make any sense as a 12/69 production dated entity? How can it be explained? Taken at face value, it makes a mockery of any 12/69 production dated door tags on the cars HLS30-00540 and up. Clearly door tags were being stamped and attached after the fact. Looking back at the zhome.com page where this topic is discussed, it is possible to see some more evidence of the illogical habit not only of painting 1969 production-dated Fairlady Z, Fairlady Z-L, Fairlady Z432 and Fairlady Z 432-R models out of the story, but also of painting HS30-prefixed cars out of Nissan Shatai's early production figures. Here's an example: So that's HLS30-00001, HLS30-00002 and HLS30-00003 cited as "the first pre-production prototype" Datsun 240Zs, whilst Nissan Shatai's own production data states the following: May 1969 - total 2 cars - one domestic, one export: 1 = S30-00001 (Factory prototype 1) 2 = HLS30-00001 (Factory prototype 2) June 1969 - total 1 car - domestic: 3 = PS30-00001 (Factory prototype 3) July 1969 - total 4 cars - two domestic, two export: 4 = HLS30-00002 (Primary Production prototype 1) 5 = S30-00002 (Primary Production prototype 2) 6 = PS30-00002 (Primary Production prototype 3) 7 = HS30-00001 (Primary Production prototype 4) August 1969 - total 7 cars: 8 = S30-00003 (Primary Production prototype 5) 9 = S30-00004 (Primary Production prototype 6) 10 = S30-00005 (Primary Production prototype 7) 11 = PS30-00003 (Primary Production prototype 😎 12 = HLS30-00003 (Primary Production prototype 9) 13 = S30-00006 (Primary Production prototype 10) 14 = PS30-00004 (Primary Production prototype 11) ...so not only ignoring the S30 and PS30-prefixed cars (which are UNDENIABLY an important part of the concept, design, engineering and production processes) but also managing to somehow let HS30-00001 slip through the net in favour of HLS30-00003. Whoops. Why do this?

I am under no constraints as to commentary or opinion; keep in mind that my comments are worth what they cost you. I felt a lot better about Boeing management before they decided that they needed to be in Chicago. I am thoroughly tired of companies abandoning their heritage and the cities that nurtured and built them. I suspect this is a common source of some frustration in many people around the Pacific NW. From the news and articles I read, it sounded like a critical component of the failure was a single attitude sensor which fed data to the plane. Why there would be only one sensor has never been clear to me and sounded like a single point of failure, which is unthinkable on a passenger aircraft. I also haven't heard that they have added additional sensors to provide backup and avoid the potential single point of failure. This makes no sense to me. I may have misunderstood this, but it is pretty clear in my memory. I buy the argument that US pilots are better trained than those of many other countries, especially such countries as Ethiopia, which have a reputation for being lax in all kinds of oversight. I also buy the argument that the first thing a smart pilot will do is turn off the automatics and fly it manually. (I've heard this can't be done in new fighter jets, but we're not talking fighter jets.) A good driver or pilot has to have great hands and great feel for the machine and what it's doing. It's pretty clear that the crashes by foreign airlines involved pilots without the sense to turn off the automatic systems and fly the damn plane. So I'm willing to assume that Boeing has fixed their software and changed or updated hardware if needed, but I assume this only because they got an internationally publicized proctological exam over this aircraft, leading to possibly their biggest financial setback in history - which is probably the only thing that the Chicago brass hats care about. My faith in any company's willingness to do "the right thing" if it costs them more money is very limited. But it's pretty clear that Boeing is in deep trouble if this aircraft isn't totally right. Therefore I'm willing to bet they got it right. Would I be comfortable flying in one of them? Maybe a year or two from now.

Oh! OK, now I understand. I'm so happy she still has her current Z! Sent from my SM-N986U using Tapatalk

No offense AV8 but here is a famous American carrier accident. My point is that "management" will always be looking for ways to cut costs, and many managers are fine with taking chances with other people's safety. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/28/us/space-shuttle-challenger-34-years-scn-trnd/index.html

The color is 110. Jai sold it to my friend. Frankly, I thought it was a parts car, but he is slowly resurrecting it.

Yeah, it sounds like you're definitely in the market for a new pair of needles, and maybe a pair of nozzles as well. Material removed by corrosion will wreak havoc on your idle mixture. And if there's pitting on the needle, it's certainly possible there's the same kind of corrosion on the nozzle. That may explain why the needles fixed one carb, but not the other. As an example... Here's a pair of nozzles. One enlarged by corrosion and another with an accurate original sized hole. The corrosion ate away so much of the material that I can see the difference with the naked eye. At idle, it takes a very small gap to make a huge difference. So...... Weren't your carbs rebuilt? Sold to you in good working order? Slap-em on and go? Might there be some negotiation and relief there? And as for swapping and mixing and matching parts between carbs... I think it's OK as a test (like you've done), but I would want to keep the original pistons and chambers together with the carb body they came from. You could possibly move the pair (both piston and chamber) over to a different carb body, but you would have to re-align the nozzle. I wouldn't trust that it would line up after moving to a different body. But the best thing would be to just keep them together on the same body. I should go into the carb rebuild business.

I'm sure he'll respond. He probably wears backwards hats at the dinner table too. Famous people aren't like us, they don't need common life sense, no need to.

#1776 had a Date of Manufacture data tag stamped 12/69. So it is a 69 Production Year example. As are all the specific individuals on that list. Correct, not all VIN's below #1776 and above #00500 were 69 Production Year examples - only the specific individual examples on that list have been found to be 69 production year examples at this point. Carl B.

85,000 passing yards. He lives in a $$$$$$ bubble. I know this is redundant but the frickin loser potus doesn't even wear one.

Not the kit, but the guy that owns the store, he's been around for quite a while. He used to be Datsun Parts LLC. You can search that on the internet. His new name comes up on the site occasionally, I added a search link below.. His screen name on the forum is URGELIS. https://www.classiczcars.com/profile/13357-urgelis/ https://www.classiczcars.com/search/?&q="california datsun"&search_and_or=and&sortby=relevancy

Beware! Some 240z repair kits with gaskets and needles sold for early 240z are too rich. The needles may be made for later 240z with flat tops or even another SU application such as the roadster. Both @Captain Obvious and I had these. The rest of the kit was ok.

Very cool what you do. Airplanes have been part of my life since I was a young kid. Like you, having a passion for what you do makes it almost not feel like work. I’m currently flying the 757 but I am type rated in both the 757 and 767. I almost moved to the 767 last month because there is a really nice pay bump but I’d lose seniority and control of my schedule. Quality of life over money, it’s a value decision that many don’t understand. Most guys chase the $$. I commute on our 767 and everyone loves them, minus the bathroom in the cockpit. That was a UPS build spec that we didn’t want to pay to change but that’s the only complaint. The rest of our aircraft have the bathroom behind the cockpit door. We did have an accident in LAX in a brand new 767 about 8 weeks ago. One of the main landing gear failed to extend and the emergency system failed also. Really a 1.000,000 to 1 odds. Pilot climbing out of the window of the cockpit had a minor injury. These plans are a joy to fly and so reliable it amazes me. In the four years I’ve been with them, I’ve never had a flight cancelled due to a maintenance related issue, only declared an emergency once when a throttle cable got water in it and froze one the throttle levers. When I flew fighters in the USMC the jets broke about 30% of the time you tried to fly and I declared an emergency about 3 times a month. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Good for you. As an eastern WA guy, I always feel better when flying on a Boeing aircraft.

Hey, sorry to disappear like that. I had work Friday and Saturday, my retirement work week. Plus, I have a vulnerable family member with Covid19 and I get 4-5 calls a day asking about symptoms and treatments. He is my son-in-laws father. Fingers crossed. So my son did a rework which I haven't seen. I suspect it was to properly position the holes. He says that he just put visual holes in the drawing for now. He doesn't want the holes put in until I decide I'm using the 350Z DBW for sure. I guess, I'm driving him nuts. I told him it's payback for having to go through his adolescence with him...

@Patcon @Namerow Hi Guys, thanks for the kind words and Marry Christmas wishes to you as well. I think this has been a tough year for everyone, but so far we are doing well. Mostly staying home, but did attend Jim Frederick’s Z Mecca Christmas Party earlier this month in Lutz, Florida. Great turn-out with Bob Sharp as an Honored Guest. Florida weather co-operated with a bright sunny day. Stay safe and healthy to enjoy the holidays with your friends and family. Carl B.

Carl, I hope you're doing well! Merry Xmas

Been meaning to update the build. Lately, the body has received several hours of sanding in preparation for sealer and base. So not a whole lot of exciting or interesting photos to post. We did get the battery tray welded in. At the moment its being sanded down as well as we get closer to painting the engine bay. Planning to get the underside completely painted in the coming weeks. Even with painting it in a booth, we'll shoot the body in stages to make it easier, and will be a more thorough paint job this way in the end.

I just did some of those garage door drives in the house we just finished. They are really quiet!! I like them a lot.

Got so much done today!! ... cleaning that is. Half the shop done!

Who says you need to ruin them?

Thanks everyone for the feedback! I actually don't mind the big bumpers. 😘 I had a 78 many years ago, so I guess they grew on me then. Given the original condition, I'll probably keep it totally stock and try to restore it to a very clean state. I'm unsure about the auto to 5 speed conversion. It makes it more appealing as a driver, but I feel like keeping the auto would retain its collectability factor. I'll probably talk to collectable appraiser about that. Is anyone familiar with the California Datsun 5 speed conversion kit below? https://www.californiadatsun.com/transmission-accessories/datsun-240z-260z-280z-zx-automatic-to-5-speed-transmission-conversion-kit.html