FastWoman

Hi all, I was driving home in my '78 280, and I smelled the strong scent of raw gas at a light. I drove a few blocks home and parked the car, and I sniffed the hood vents -- raw gas. I popped the hood and looked around. I could find no leaks anywhere, visually. However, I could smell raw gas fumes in the column of hot air rising up around the front of the engine. The strongest smell was just next to the oil filler cap over the #1 injector (forward extend of the intake manifold, just above the forward tip of the heat shield between intake and exhaust. Some of the intake manifold webbing looked slightly "wet," but it appeared to be oil seepage from the valve cover (and did not smell like gasoline). However, there is a drain hole at the center of the webbing, between 3 and 4, where raw fuel could potentially drain onto the heat shield, such that fumes could waft up between the shield and the intake, just where I was smelling them. This is all in theory, as I couldn't identify any leak. I have a priming switch on my pump, so I was able to pump the system up to a full 36 psig, the highest pressure the system ever sees. The pressure gauge holds steady at 36, so nothing appears to be leaking NOW. The engine is bone stock. The intake and EFI have been recently overhauled (a few years ago). Replacement injectors are Standard FJ3. All hoses are new and have Comp Cam clamps. Any ideas as to likely sources of this leak? Should I tighten all of my clamps a fraction of a turn, or is that courting trouble? Thanks! Baffled in Virginia, Sarah

Use Goodyear E-Z coils for the bends: http://www.veyance.com/productsDetail.aspx?id=17254 You can get larger size fuel hoses from a tractor supply house. You can also buy some really nice marine-grade hose from a marine supply store. If it's USCG marine-rated, then it's fuel resistant. DON'T use heater hose! I think your decision to keep the little tank is probably a good one. I think it courts problems to buck the design.

Check your fuel/air/vapor separator for any cracks or defects in the braze joints. Mine had a crack where one of the nipples was brazed on. Even though you say your hoses look good, they shouldn't be hard. If those are the original hoses, one of them could be cracked or split. I'd replace all of them with new.

The problem with staying away from fuel with ethanol > 10% is that there are no guarantees what comes out of the pump. Here in the US, it is illegal for stations to sell gasoline with > 10% ethanol, so one would think that would ensure we don't actually buy and burn any. But the reality is that we have these huge subsidies supporting the ethanol scam, and businesses are incentivized to dilute their gas with ethanol. So by the time the gasoline has passed through a few hands, it may have been cut with ethanol a few times. I suspect gasoline is available in 3 basic mixes in the real world: 10% ethanol, 19% ethanol, and (rarely) 27% ethanol. If you're familiar with your local supplier, you can probably avoid > 10%, but if you're traveling or in an unfamiliar part of town, you have to be careful. I try to find fuel that has come as directly as possible from the refiner, passing through as few hands as possible. There's a local outfit where I try to buy all of my fuel. It feels a bit like a truck stop, and they even sell 0% ethanol gas there if I want -- also E85, biodiesel, and propane. I have every confidence they buy direct from the refiner, and their E10 is really E10, not higher. (Note: My Z is now tuned to E10 and doesn't run as well on E0. I get the E0 for anything of mine with a carburetor -- boats and lawn equipment.) I suspect these are good signs that the gasoline has passed through as few hands as possible: Name brand gasoline. (But note: Shell gasoline, for instance, doesn't necessarily come from a Shell refinery -- probably doesn't. However, it's Shell's reputation that suffers if you buy bad gas at that station.)Large station that sells only fuel -- where you can't buy a drink and a hot dog.Offers lowest price -- suggests fewest wholesaler markups (however, keeping in mind that a wholesaler might profit simply through the collection of an incentive for watering down the gas).E0 gas is available, even if that's not what you want to buy. (I imagine E0 is only available directly from a refiner. Note: E0 at the pump is illegal in some areas -- banned where I used to live, in just the next county over.)

I use this style: http://www.summitracing.com/parts/cca-g3912/overview/ They're stainless and extremely flexible, and they don't have the exposed slots that cut hoses. They're also not springy, so you can bend the loose end a bit tighter around the hose. Mine have worked great. I recommend them highly. The tail is a bit untidy (could be cut off?), but at least they're stainless and hold the hose well.

I agree with Zed. The hard restart at McDonalds sounds like classic hot restart stuff and likely has nothing to do with the issue that's randomly killing the engine. Zed's advice about your having to come up with the data is spot-on. If I were you, I'd carry a can of starter fluid and a cheap spark tester (both available at your local auto parts store). Drive your car around local neighborhoods (where it's safe to pull over and work on your car, and where it's not too far to walk home) until the engine suddenly dies again. Pull to the side, and go to work: 1. Pull off one of the vacuum hoses on your intake manifold, and spray some starter fluid inside. Slip the hose back on, and try starting your engine. Does it run for a few seconds? If yes, then you have a fuel issue -- either clogged screens or a fault in the EFI. (You've ruled out only the fuel pump.) If no, then you have an ignition issue. 2. Connect the ignition tester to the output of the coil, where you can view it as you crank the engine. Do you have spark? If not, then your problem is obviously ignition -- probably bad ignition module or coil. 3. After you've done 1 and 2, connect everything back up and try starting your engine again. It's good to determine that you still have the problem and that it didn't resolve itself while you were fiddling under the hood. These instances when your engine dies are golden opportunities to diagnose the problem, or at least to narrow the issue to one system or another. Work fast and methodically. I recommend the spark tester only because it's quick and easy to use without someone else's help. However, you can also pull the center wire off the distributor (the one from the coil) and perch the bare end about a pencil lead's width from a bolt on the body. If the engine dies, and you find yourself without any tools, do at least that to see if you have spark. If you have no spark, then that's your answer. (Either that, or it's too bright outside for you to see the spark -- or the spark is very weak.) If you do have spark, then it's something to do with fuel. Narrow the fault down to one system or the other, and then we can work on planning other tests for the next incident after that.

Congrats, and well done! It looks like you really did find a great home for that Z!

Hey, even though you really can't put an air filter on the thing... REALLY NICE FIND! Thanks!

I suspect a 100% US car would be just as competitive now as it was in 1991 when I bought my 100% US-built Saturn SL2 (well, actually 95%, with a few parts from Canada and a Japanese stereo). The base model (SL1) at that time was selling at about $8500, if I recall correctly. With the nicer DOHC engine, more amenities, electric windows, airbag (driver's side), and ABS, my car rang in at about $14,000. This was in line with Japanese-made prices at the time. People do consider quality when buying a car. After all, the Yugo was not a roaring success. I bought the Saturn because the price was reasonable and because I had confidence in the vastly improved American manufacturing standards of recent years. It was actually the service manager of the local dealership who "sold" me the car. He toured me of all the technical features discussing things the sales staff did not understand. I was VERY impressed with how the little car was engineered. I own that car to this day, and it's almost an antique. It still runs great. The only time it ever refused to start and run was when the alternator died. Over its long life, I've had to replace an alternator, the A/C (the 134a retrofit now being kapoot again), a wheel hub, one electric window motor, lots of brake pads, a couple of brake calipers, and a few discs, an AACV, the severely corroded wheels (which slowly leaked), a couple of valve cover gaskets, the rotted headliner, oil, and filters, a catalytic converter (the rest of the SS exhaust being original to the car), and I think an EGR valve. It still looks reasonably good. Some kid yelled, "Nice Pontiac!" just the other day. You really can't ask much more than that from a car. Would I pay more for a 100% domestic-built car today? Yes. I would have even paid slightly more for my Saturn at the time to support domestic labor. At that time (prior to that purchase), I was primarily a Datsun/Nissan person, with a couple of forays to Toyota and Mazda. However, I felt the American worker needed a boost, and American cars were again up to snuff.

Wow! Nice find. Be careful with that thing!

Well, FAIW, I installed that exact same pump on a Chrysler Marine 318, and it lasted a few years before puttering away. I do think it gave the carb extra life, because I could starve the float bowl when coming into dock and (largely) dry up the carb. Then I could fill the carb again before starting. It was a pretty elegant solution to some of the problems of putting ethanol gas in a carb'ed boat in a drippy-humid climate. In that sense I won't complain too much about the pump. However, it did only last a few years, so it wasn't the most robust product in the world. Zed Head, I guess I'm one of the complainers. However, I will actually pay more money, willingly, for a better part. I guess I'm neither a high-bid nor low-bid person. I generally like the middle bid -- reasonable quality at a reasonable cost. What puzzles me, though, is how anyone could screw up the manufacture of a reed switch! I admit to being surprised about that one -- Chinese manufacture or not. I'll also clarify that I think the Chinese are perfectly capable of manufacturing a high quality product and frequently do. However, I'm sure anyone will admit that China manufactures a disproportionate share of cheap consumer crap. More disturbing still, much of China's crap exports are counterfeit products -- such as pharmaceutical look-alikes, some with LEAD pigments, that doctors prescribe, that pharmacies buy unwittingly from wholesalers and re-sell, that people put inside their bodies instead of the medications they need to be healthy. I mentioned the capacitor issue, BTW, because this is something a Chinese friend of mine is familiar with. His father manufactured electrolytic capacitors in mainland China, and he remembers fondly how his dad would sometimes come home with a bag of caps that they would pop in an open fire like firecrackers. When the startup capacitor went out on his heat pump, he appreciated that I knew where to get an American-manufactured capacitor to replace it. He didn't buy a Chinese capacitor. To me that says a lot.

Carl, you raise some good points. And it's certainly worth remembering that Japan was once a purveyor of mostly cheap crap. You say that we should speak in terms of the company and not the country, but that's nearly impossible in the case of China. There are zillions of mom-and-pop businesses in that economy, many of whom make parts for brands we might recognize. For instance, I might not hesitate too much to buy a piece of Yongnuo lighting equipment (for photography), but I realize it has scores of components from unknown Chinese sources that could easily fail the same way my reed switch did. Part of the problem is parts that deceive and specs that lie -- for instance canning a 35V-rated electrolytic capacitor in a 50V-labeled can (literally a complete, canned and labeled 35V cap placed into a larger, mislabeled can and sold for more money). I hope Chinese manufacture matures like Japanese manufacture did, but then there will always be another China to feed us cheap crap.

OK, not Z related, but Chinese crap related: Night before last, our security alarm kept going off in the middle of the night, until I finally had the sense not to re-arm it. The offending zone was a contact sensor on the garage door. The next day I went to diagnose it. It turns out that the reed switch had a resistance of 29 ohms when closed, and the circuitry to which it was wired couldn't decide whether that was open or closed. A reed switch... A Chinese reed switch... I mean, how do you screw up making a reed switch? It's one of the simplest and most robust designs of switch there is. Sadly, all reed switches seem to be made in China, so far as I'm aware. I replaced the offending Chinese reed switch with another Chinese reed switch whose contact resistance is of a fraction of an ohm. We can now set the alarm again without the system going off spontaneously at 4:00 AM. It was a $2 part that wasted one night's sleep and an hour of two of my time. I wish we could start making stuff here in the US and Canada again. I'd buy it.

I still think it's turbulence from that enormous hood ornament. The PO cut the return line for some reason, as misguided as that might have been. It might be that the return line is blocked with rust. You might even have a bit of that issue with the supply line. You should investigate those possibilities. Also, is that some sort of red goo in the bottom of your tank? I'm not quite sure what I'm seeing in that photo. Red goo could be betty betty bad. Or maybe that's some sort of gas tank sealer? Is it gooey or hard? Is there rust and dirt in whatever you drained from the tank? Is there red goo?

My stepson is a Hokie. I'll warn him to avoid Canada for a few weeks: http://www.mtnlakelodge.com/var/plain_site/storage/images/media/images/events/vt-logo/8143-1-eng-US/VT-Logo.gif

If you're game for rolling your own, about $10 in parts will do the job. I have a schematic on post 35 of this thread: http://www.classiczcars.com/forums/electrical-s30/35588-upgrade-fusible-links-circuit-breakers.html There are some other electrical mods in that thread that will pep up your current. My lights are still bright and white, so I've been very pleased with the work I detailed in that thread. But if you're not comfortable digging into your wiring harness, cutting wires, crimping, soldering, etc., then Dave apparently makes a very nice harness.

Good to see you're still amongst the living and making progress! Nice play toys, Len!

Nah, a completely restored Z is going to be too pretty and perfect for daily use. The best DD, IMO, is a car that looks pretty good (but not perfect), maybe has a scratch or a ding or four, but is mechanically sound. If you can park it at the grocery store, turn your back on it while you buy food, and not worry excessively whether someone will ding it or whether you will be able to make the trip home without a tow truck, then I think it's a car you can enjoy very much. But certainly make certain you fit inside it OK. FAIW, this used to be a popular car for alums to give to football players.

Well, to be clear, I was referring to YOUR steering wheel and some other woodworker. I had already acquired a donor squishy wheel for my own woodworking project... to be undertaken when I actually have some spare time.

Depending on the kind of paint, you can try mineral spirits. However, that might not work much differently from the naptha. Basically, it swells up the adhesive so that you can roll it off. If you use something that can actually dissolve the adhesive, you might dissolve other stuff too.

2SixT, that's very good karma! Interesting thing about the brake boosters... Although a parts remanufacturer might be able to rebuild an old booster, it's probably not something that WE can do ourselves. I remember back in 1983'ish when I disassembled a slightly leaky brake booster in my '75 280Z, carefully following the information laid out in the factory service manual. After I identified the parts that needed replacing, I went to the local Datsun dealer to put those parts on order. NO internal parts were available, and they told me I wasn't supposed to open the can to service the internals. I shamed them into selling me a replacement booster at cost, because my old booster wasn't really all that bad, and I wouldn't have disassembled it had I known I was essentially destroying it, and the official Nissan manual indicated I could accomplish what I was trying to accomplish, were it not for a failure in parts support. PS, Rossiz, my new(to-me) bumpers have begun their cross-country journey. Thanks so much! PPS, An idea for woodworkers out there: Strip the squishy, squirmy rubber off the steering wheel, and create a genuine wooden steering wheel. Assemble the exotic hardwood pieces of your choice in two halves, and assemble over the frame with epoxy. Shape it, finish it, admire it. Do you shifter in the same wood. I already have an old wheel slated for this project. I have an idea for doing it in a silvery tiger maple to match the colors of my car.

My 280Z is also a daily driver, although in all fairness, its owner does not drive daily! I would not hesitate to make a very old car a daily driver. However, I would caution anyone that the car must be in exceptional mechanical condition. Whenever I see a claim that a car is in great running condition, I translate to "it runs without dying and can move the car from point A to point B." That doesn't mean it runs properly or reliably. However, if you buy it and work on it, and if you continue to drive it daily and pick away at it for maybe a year, you will probably be able to achieve whatever level of reliability you demand of it. All of the various gremlins will have presented themselves, and you will have either chosen to fix them or ignore them. Your car will have no further surprises in store for you. But can a Z become rock-solid reliable? Absolutely -- as much as any other car. My '78 Z is as reliable as my '92 Saturn, which is as reliable as my '94 Miata, which is as reliable as my '09 Ram. Any car will break from time to time, but it is rare for a car to leave me stranded. One precaution bears mentioning: These engines are somewhat large, and the hood compartments don't ventilate very well. So the 280Z is prone to a hot restart issue (search for "hot restart" and read all about it). Theories vary about why this problem occurs, but many believe it's because of a combination of low fuel pressures (by design) and complications from ethanol gas. Worst case: You have to twiddle your thumbs for 10 min with the hood open to cool the engine enough to restart it. However, in many/most 280Zs, this isn't even a problem (or much of one). And what others say is quite true: You should learn to be your own mechanic. It's not that a 280Z requires frequent repair. I find it to require less attention than many other modern vehicles. However, it will take much more attention to put it into a state of good repair, after decades of neglect. That could be expensive if you are relying on a mechanic, and the mechanic might not even get everything right. Again, very, very few old engines really run as they should.

Nah, that would be too obvious and wouldn't invoke special effects. I'm thinking this: With a calm, smug demeanor, he pops his hood and waits for the engine to cool. Then he starts up. By this time, the nukes have already gone off over New York City, but no problem... The EMP would not affect his analog ECU so far away. The streets are eerily clear, as people have flocked to the nearest televisions to follow the news. He starts speeding down the road, reaching a critical speed of exactly 88 mph. The flux capacitor engages, and he is teleported far enough back in time to drive to his favorite WiFi hotspot (the diner), and hack the arming system of the terrorist nukes, reprogramming them to detonate at their launch sites. NYC is safe, and the terrorists are dust. Score another one for the Department of Homeland Security!

Mmmmm.... One horsepower! Me like...

I think that's the cool-car upgrade he was demanding from DHS -- a '77 or '78 with electronic fuel injection, baby! I'd love to see how he hacks his analog ECU to overcome a hot restart issue as he is racing against time to reach the next server to foil some terrorist plot! Maybe we EFI folks will finally learn what to do, besides popping the hood and waiting for the engine to cool back down.