JimmyZ

You know, the funny thing is that many glass companies could not look up the part and refused to try getting me glass for this car even when I posed the later model '78 280Z. These old cars are not in certain systems anymore. (Online insurance, etc...) Glass supplier at Winter Park/Maitland border. Seek and Seal 1200 Solana Ave Winter Park, FL 32789 407-644-0027 The glass was PPG brand and came with a blue tinted band across the top. It was the only one in stock at the time. I'm sure that with proper arrangements you could get a clear windshield. They also offered a cheaper aftermarket windshield for our cars but I like factory spec parts better. Jim I installed a windshield in the Z roughly 17 years ago. It's not so bad as long as the person pressing outside is careful.

Here's a link I found on CZCC earlier. This site has pictures of color chips and average prices per gallon for differing grades of paint. http://www.autocolorlibrary.com/scripts/depot.exe?pgm=aclgate.bbx Nice looking Z by the way. Mine is #23654 made in 2/71 and had the same color. I would have like to have kept that color but the wifey liked red better.

After searching the junkyards and finding no Z's with decent windshields I called the local auto glass company. To my shock I was able to get a brand new windshield for $117.00!! (That's me picking it up and installing myself) This is only $50.00 more than the cheapest junkyard price! Just thought I'd share this for those of you who are faced with needing new glass.

I just bought a set from MSA and I'll bet they are the same. I have not installed yet but will be following this post. I've heard that the quarterlight/window seals are a not fun to install in the car. Just curious, my MSA kit says that it's made by Precision Replacement Parts. What does yours say?

Holy cow! I was told by all my buddies that it was a direct bolt in. (Possible difference between HLS and HS? Not likely but possible) Kudos for your mods. It should really stop on a dime after you're done!

If you don't like the "junction box" of brake lines then run each circuit of the master cylinder separately with Tee unions to split each wheel. You'll need the adjustable proprtioning valve to dial in your rear brake function. You may be able to get away with a stock Prop.valve but the adj is better in your situation. Running a dual piston master cylinder into a single block which in turn gets divvied up between the four wheels isn't good construction and begs a bad day. Either get another block or completely split the system by fabbing some new lines. My 2c Jim

I once installed a non-stock brake system on a Mustang. I've no experience with non-stock Z brakes but just a couple thoughts... We used an adjustable proportioning valve. It sounds like one wouldn't hurt here. You might want to try using a 280Z vacuum booster since it is larger. (Less pedal press req.) Just my 2cents (Trying to keep this post on top for ya)

That's the trick Gav! After a woman receives lots of interest/compliments while driving a Z they begin to see things more clearly. The girlfriend before my wife took mine to get tires and gas as I packed for a long road trip. In two hours time she was approached several times and engaged in many discussions about the car. Chics look hotter in Z's! Z's like yours are a real trophy and if a woman can't see the value in the car then she needs to have her eyes/head checked. Jim

When I was young I had a girlfriend that gave the ultimatum "either the car goes or I go"! I said "sorry..cya"! She stayed and eventually shared my love of the car. Years and many girlfriends later I met the woman who was to be my wife. Before we got married I made sure that she could stand me keeping the car until the end... She reluctantly agreed. I can understand the strain a relationship undergoes when a man loves a car almost as much as his wife. (At least that's how the wives perceive it) The truth is that everyone needs an outlet or means of expressing themselves and affirming their abilities and self-worth. The greatest thing the Z and other projects has taught me is this simple but awesome realization... If man has made it I can make it or fix it if my desire is strong enough. Nothing is out of reach. Enjoy the journey my friend.

Sweet! My fav is the kids in the riced Hondas. They are too young to know what a Z can do. Kind of reminds me of my first race/humbling.(Car prior to Z) I had a four banger and the old geiser next to me incited the whole thing after seeing my erratic driving. He was driving a giant Cadillac which I thought would be an easy mark. Instead he was laughing really loud as he manually shifted his automatic through the gears and blew my doors off. Nothing like driving the Z on a long trip though.

Enrique wrote, Then you mention Quote: Getting floor pans to fit perfectly against your cutout is next to impossible so epoxy prime then apply 3M's Fast'n Firm body caulking. It is ready to be painted in 30 min after that." Does that mean you don't advocate a complete continuous weld because of the difficulty of fitting the repair piece? How do you propose to restore the strength back to the floor pan? Sorry, but that's just too many short cuts taken for me to give much weight to the rest of your advice. End quote Here's a brief semi-full explanation... I advocate a perfect butt weld if at all possible. (100% fused airtight all around) Realistically speaking, when working with an area the size of a floor pan and trying to contain it to a single sheet a small lap is almost unavoidable. Getting a 0 -.023" gap around such a large area is a real time expenditure. Let's say that one area of your cutout has no holes but has been thinned by rust. Attempting to butt weld new material (thicker) to the thin stuff will invariably find you burning back the thin edges. A lap of 1/4"-3/8" will work fine. With a lap technique you can avoid blowing holes and simply "drop" the thicker sheet via puddle onto the thinner sheet. If working with thick on bottom you can also build a puddle on the thicker sheet and direct the heat at the thicker sheet so that as the puddle moves/grows the thinner sheet is fused to the advancing puddle. I'll make a video of this when I get a good shade for my camera. The best/proper way to do it is to fab a new floor pan and do as one of the other memebers of the club posted... Cut the pan off at the rocker panel. Paint the rocker everywhere except use weldable primer where the spot/plug welds will go. It is the transmission tunnel area and the irregular surfaces/contours which I'm reffering to lapping in. Welding stainless to mild steel is not a big deal. Yes, stainless should be back purged with inert gas but the number of lineal inches of weld laid overcomes the reduced strength. You can use regular ER70xx MIG wire when joining the two. I MIG and TIG weld stainless so I know what one can get away with for each application. Welding stainless for corrosive environments or high heat is quite another issue. Auto sheet metal welding is just one step up from tractor welding in the scheme of things. (Just need to pay attention to heat input/distortion more) The pain of working stainless is cutting it or grinding it. It can be cut/gound with normal tools but the abrasives don't last. I use a plasma cutter then grind the edge clean of oxides. The back side/half of an unshielded stainless weld will be brittle and have little corrosion resistance. (Grind, sand then paint is the answer) In a floor pan situation look at the length of the weld though. (10-12 feet) In the strictest sense an ideal finished weld should posess the same metalurgy/properties as the parent material. (Be as strong or stronger, dutile etc...) One textbook's definition of welding was "The joining of two materials in a matter suitable for the intended use/structure". This second definition is what I'm reffering to. It's hard to express complete ideas in these posts without writing a novel. I try to be brief and this leads to the need to expound. My opinion, (And it's just mine, I recognize that) is that using stainless would free one up to focus on keeping corrosion down in other areas during repair. Post repair benefeits are to be had as well. Properly installed mild steel is fine too. It just takes a little more footwork for prep. my 2c

Hi Enrique, Yes, I agree no war or anything intended, just good discussion. I knew that saying anything against POR would elicit such a nice response. It does make for good discussion. I'll make this post for the POR discussion then another post for the floor pan mtl. explanation. I'll explain how the POR products were applied and where I think things may have gone wrong. On any given day of prep I would start by sandblasting a section no larger in area than 3'x3' (An entirefloor pan or entire front inner fenderwell for instance) Air used in sandblasting was double filtered and 95% moisture free. I've actually laid cleaned parts in the garage for a month after sandblasting and not had any surface rust develop. (Just microscopic stuff of course) I would wait a few hours for the compressors (25 cfm combined output) to cool then drained my traps/compressors. Before painting POR I applied metal ready and YES I do know better than to let the stuff dry during application. Some panels were rinsed off others were wet toweled. In all cases panels were towel dried and crevices blown free of water. The metal looked like it had been prepped. There was the usual hazy film but not the extremely red/rusty film which betrays the fact that things stayed wet too long. Unthinned POR was sprayed thru 1.5 tipped HVLP gun in two coats on vertical/irregular surfaces. I brushed the floor pans so that I could work the paint into some welding irregularities. Two coats, sometimes more were applied but usually two coats. The rest I've written about. It is possible that there was excess humidity in the air during painting during the FL summer. It's possible that the product was applied to thin to be impermeable. I do know that the Z.phosphate leftover from the metal prep was on the money as far as appearance. The metal was allowed to dry/bake long enough before paint application. At the cost of dragging this post out too long I'll cut it here. Jim

Here's a page I'm starting http://warbuddies.homestead.com/RestoHelp.html I'm adding to it all the time Jim

Awww jeeez, I just had one last thought to jot. The paint by itself is completely amazing in it's durability and everything else you could expect from a paint except it failed in one area... In two years time I had more rust develop underneath the paint than 14 years of regular paint weathered. The directions say "two coats minimum" when what they should say is "apply four to eight coats to be absolutley sure". That's all I want to hear from them. Two coats minimum says to me that two coats is enough to get the job done. Works for bases, clears... why not this stuff? I know the metal prep was acceptable but the # of coats could have been a lot more and maybe I wouldn't be red eye'd typing away with a Z buddy in some other state/country! Nite Jim

Really, I'm not trying to be argumentative or anything but I know what I saw and what I've read. I just yanked the instructions from the 'net. http://www.por15.com/SUPPORT/POR15FAQ/POR15TECHNICALINFO/tabid/178/Default.aspx The main instruction page doesn't mention marine clean though I imagine it does the same thing as PPG's DX579. (It just skips to the metal ready bit) Marine clean should be have some acid etching properties and be heavier on detergent aspect. Detergent is used so that there is no barrier between the next acid (DX520 or marine clean) and the metal. Marine clean can and should be used for absolute certainty but if the metal is freshly sandblasted with clean air/media degreasing is not an issue. On another page they talk about the four step process but look at what they are starting with... Some nasty metal. http://www.por15.com/4STEPSYSTEM/tabid/187/Default.aspx My stuff was clean, freshly sandblasted metal. PPG will tell you that you can skip to DX520 without using DX579 if the surface is clean. This is why one guy told you you didn't need it. My PPG place sells POR which is interesting. Here's a snipit copied from POR's website... same page as mentioned above. http://www.por15.com/SUPPORT/POR15FAQ/POR15TECHNICALINFO/tabid/178/Default.aspx To coat smooth metal surfaces: Use POR-15 METAL-READY to prepare surface before painting. Surface must be dry and free of grease, oil, or other foreign substances. Use of 'rust converter' products is not recommended as they may affect bonding of POR-15 to metal. POR-15 likes to adhere to surfaces with 'tooth' rather than smooth, glossy surfaces. My understanding is that you can acid treat if the surface is clean. Marine clean makes absolutley sure that this is the case but is not needed in situations where the metal is already clean. I'm turning in dude, Time to count Z's DX metal treatment.pdf

The abrasion resistance and durability of the paint is not to be questioned. It's awesome in that respect. What's happening underneath the stuff is what I'm getting at. I recently stripped my 240 and saw metal that just 14 years earlier I had seen. The conditions in which my car was painted were horrible when I was in my early twenties painting in a carport. Amazingly there was very little sheet rust growing underneath the paint. (Just a few spots here and there) I had prepped the metal well. Two or three years ago I took the Z off the road to do frame rails and floor pan replacement. This time I had a garage and much nicer equipment. I know how to prep metal but instead sandblasted and used POR's metal ready. Maybe it was a bad "six pack" of POR pints I ordered. Maybe the batch of POR metal ready was made too diluted at the factory. Whatever the case, two years went by and between restoring a mustang, building a plane and everything else the car had set outside covered by a tarp. Water had set on the floor pans for a few weeks here and there so I wasn't surprised to see rust developing despite being properly POR'ed. What really got my attention were areas that stray Aircraft Remover stripped. The areas had been properly covered with POR and looked fine on the outside but there was a fair amount of sheet rust growing underneath. (More than my 14 year old paint job had) There's something wrong when cheap epoxy and Centari enamel do a better job over 14 years vs a wonder product in two. Maybe it was just a bad batch. I used every can within two days or less and applied their metal ready exactly per instructions. Only small sections were sandblasted prepped and painted the same day. I still like the idea of POR but somewhere along the line this consumer got jipped.

My only reason for using stainless is if one should have puddling inside their car. If you live where it rains or snows a lot your carpets can get damp. It would be a relief to know that there are limited chances/places of damage. Forgot to roll up the windows a few times and came out to find soaked capets ranging to 1/2" of standing water in the car. Painted/undercoated steel would be fine but if you can find some surplus stainless... I would love to go the steel route if they still offered the whole floor section. (tranny tunnel and all) That would be nice. I'm not dissing the steel pans that are offered out there. I used steel when I did mine. I also remember being under the car sandblasting. Even with the thing tilted 40 degrees it wasn't fun. I like some of the pictures I 've seen on this site where people use a matress! Have to remember that next time I need to clean up the bottom. Jim

Regarding the POR-15 rust issue... It would be interesting for someone with the product applied 2+yrs ago to strip a section of it off using stripper (not sanding) and see what's going on underneath. (Yes, I used their metal prep solution) It didn't seem to matter if I brushed it or sprayed it, there was still rust developing underneath. It took about two years for it to show. Mind you, these parts are constantly exposed to water, sometimes salt water. Perhaps the double filtration system I use let me down when spraying it, that's plausible. But the brush?! I really do like the abrasion resistance of the product though.

If it's just going to be light surface rust then Ospho them before use, sand and paint. You can get away with that. Like I mentioned in another post I'd just fab them out of stainless. Have a sheet metal shop fab your frame rail extensions then butt or lap weld them. Getting floor pans to fit perfectly against your cutout is next to impossible so epoxy prime then apply 3M's Fast'n Firm body caulking. It is ready to be painted in 30 min after that. My 2c Jim

If I had to do mine over again I'd do them in stainless. It's easy to have a sheet metal shop bend up the sleeves which attatch to your frame rails... They could be stainless too. Usually stainnless runs about $300 for a 4x8 sheet but I've found some for $90/sh at my local surplus yard. Getting paint to stick well to stainless takes some extra prep but it would be worth it. Jim

If your floor pans have the melt sheet garbage on top of them then it may be more than surface rust. Once the rust starts to spread under the melt sheet it is over for the floor pans. It is pretty easy to fab floor pans as I had to do this on mine. Getting the melt sheet off was accomplised by using a torch to warm it then scraping with... a scraper. Aircraft remover was used to zap any leftover residue. I have grown a strong dislike for POR-15. a7dz is right, it is hard to sand or sandblast. The stuff comes off in a nice clean sheet when aircraft remover is applied though. If you apply it too thick or have a pool of it it cracks. The reason for my dislike of it was discovered several months after application. I religiously used their metal prep after having sandblasted the metal them applied two coats (spray). It seems that you really have to put the stuff on thick or it will rust. (Try 4-5 coats min.) In their advertising the talk about a 1000 hour test under salt spray but look at the fine print. The thickness used for the test was a whopping 100mils! I say spray some regular single stage (enamel) and follow up with body shutz. (a type of undercoating) Avoid the POOR15. I'm sure the stuff works but when you live near the beach and visit it you get to find these things out the hard way. If I had it to do again I'd use stainless for my floor pans. Getting paint to stick well to it takes some extra prep but at least you wouldn't have to worry about it.

Not that this will do you any good but I rememebr when Nissan still offered it. You can probably save it with some serious patch work/hammer 'n dolly. Mine is gone too. All along the top. How do you like your new QP's are they full QP's or just the lower half type?

Your'e welcome! There are lots of things I learn each time I do a car. This page is a synopsis of everything I've picked up. I plan on expanding this to a few pages with a heavy section on economical equipment. Jim

I've done quite a few clutches on mine. At first it took three hours but now I've got it down to 1 hour. Make sure that you either drain the tranny fluid or plug a spare driveshaft yoke in the back to keep a pool of nasty 90W from developing. I've always used a regular jack underneath the drain plug. Be careful as you engage the tranny to the new clutch. Make it go in straight or you can damage your input shaft bearing(tranny). Of course you'll need a clutch alignment tool ($5.00 at autozone etc...) I use a 280Z pressure plate/disc in mine. It has better grab than the 240Z remanufactured units. Use red loctite on your pressure plate nuts and driveshaft hardware when reassembling. Torque pressure plate nuts to specified value and don't be a cheapskate... replace the throwout bearing. It's cheaper than the aggrivation of hearing it whine. my 2c Jim

Making the page I wish I had before doing any repaint/restoration... http://warbuddies.homestead.com/RestoHelp.html I'm sure there are/have been others in the group but this is my two cents. Seems to me it would save people are new to this a lot of time. It would also be easier on those of us helping people to simply refer them the page. I'm just getting started on the page and should be done in a week or two. Cheers, Jim