Walter Moore

Those are not flat tops... Those are downdraft Webbers. There is a thread around here somewhere on those things. They were originally an emissions legal replacement for the flat tops.

The entire drive train has been replaced? Does that include all 6 universal joints? When U-joints fail they typically produce a vibration. I have had bad drive shaft U-joints on a couple of different cars, and the basic characteristic is a vibration that is too high of a frequency to be tire balance. (3 times the road wheel speed or more) It it likely to be a tire problem. It doesn't cost much to have your tires balanced usually, in fact if they are fairly new, say 3 months or less I would take them back and have them checked. Most reputable tire dealers will re-balance them for free after 500 miles or so, because it is a proven fact that the tires do not actually seat fully on the wheel until then. (my employer sells a machine to car companies that seats the tires in the factory...) It could also be a bad tire. Normally tire uniformity problems show up at low speed, but sometimes a tire will have a defect that only shows up at high speed. (We sell machines to check for that as well.) (We also make tire balancers for the automotive industry.) A good clue to see if it is a balance problem is to check all of the wheels for balance weights. Sometimes you get lucky and end up with a tire and wheel combination that doesn't need weights, but not very often. If there is a wheel without a weight, particularly if you think that wheel used to have a weight, then that is likely to be the one with a problem. Also, if you had to make a panic stop in the first 1000 miles or so after buying new tires, it is very likely that several of the wheels will be out of balance. Several sources have documented that heavy acceleration, either starting or stopping on newly mounted tires can shift the tires on the wheel by several degrees. (I have heard of examples where tires moved 45 degrees, but I haven't seen photographs to prove it.) Anyway, car tire and wheel assemblies are balanced as an assembly, not individual parts. So shifting the tire usually produces a balance problem.

Glad to meet you.

Very nice. What year is that manifold? It looks different. There is something strange to me about the cross-over pipe.

"They are getting harder and harder to find..." Isn't that Ebay-ese for "these are a dime a dozen and I need to unload them?" Perhaps not, but that is the sort of wild claim that keeps me away from Ebay. Usually I end up finding a better deal somewhere else on nearly every auction that I run across.

Are you talking about sensors on the engine, or the transmission? The 4 speed transmission in my car is out of a later vehicle apparently, because the floor had to be cut to make room for the shifter to reach 1st and 3rd. Anyway, the later 4 speed has two switches built in to it. One for reverse (to power the rear lights) and another for a neutral switch. Since my 71 had no neutral interlock on the starter, that connector is just hanging in space. If your car needs a neutral switch and the transmission doesn't have one, you will have to put a jumper wire in the old connector to get the car to start. I do not know when they started adding the neutral switch interlocks into the Z cars, but 73 seems too early... If you are talking about engine sensors, that is another matter entirely.

The orientation shown in your photographs matches my recollection of how mine were mounted before I removed them for painting. (For what that is worth.)

http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/acetone.asp

A local Chevrolet dealer here uses that same advertisement series... Must be syndicated.

In any case I am going to watch the bidding on that car, because it is in better shape than my car is likely to ever be, at least so far as the body goes.

It really shouldn't take much current to pull in the solenoid. My son's Geo Metro had a similar problem. It would only engage the solenoid when the car was hooked to a battery charger or being jumped from a running car. (It seemed to prefer G.M. jump starts, perhaps because they run a little higher voltage.) Anyway, I fixed the problem by spacing out the starter from the transmission housing with washers. The starter gear was being forced to far past the flywheel, and a couple of extra volts were enough to slam it home hard enough to make the contacts that actually fire the motor. At first we replaced the starter (twice) but that had no effect. Apparently a PO must have left off a cover plate or something. (Thus the need for spacers) I only bring it up in this thread because I suspect that the relay may be fixing a symptom, not a systemic problem. There could be some stack-up issue or just a worn or improperly installed solenoid causing the problem. (or, to be fair... perhaps burnt contacts on the ignition switch.)

Since everything else in the ad is metric, I am going to take a wild guess and presume that the 0 - 100 time is kilometers per hour. Otherwise that is one amazing car...

On all new cars they use a clear coat over the paint to prevent oxidation. I know that when repairing a new car the body shops clear coat the car. I assume they would do the same on an older car also... for a price.

Some idiot caught a local apartment building on fire with fireworks in Indy today... But thanks for the support.

If you look closely, you can actually see the existing Bondo in the rear fender lip photograph. If you bought that car, buy the time you were done sanding on that fender lip it would be mostly air... I expect that the car has been "restored" some time ago and then driven a lot. It may run fine, but you would end up doing a lot of body work...

That part about shattering the drum... believe it. When I originally bought my car one of the rear drums had been thrown in the back hatch area, in pieces.

If I understand the context of the article correctly: "When police popped open the hood, Hoang said, they found a stolen transmission. " "He had purchased a B-20 Vtech engine with a double-overhead cam a couple months before, and after a police investigation, was told it was stolen." "Police need a court order to destroy the cars. They must prove that the serial or identification numbers on a vehicle or its parts are removed, altered or destroyed." The justification that the local authorities have used seems to be that the specific cars they are targeting are: A - Illegally modified (emission laws no doubt.) B - Constructed using parts from stolen cars. (Grand theft is a felony...) Street racing may be the reason that these particular people were targeted, but the legal theory behind the destruction of the cars is likely to be solid.

Those clocks are very nice looking indeed. By the way, how accurate should the "standard" clocks be? Of all the cars that I have owned from the 70's my Z is the only one with a clock that works at all. It loses about 2 minutes per week. Is that normal? If not are there places that will clean and adjust a clock of this vintage?

$40K restorations? I fear that the air in this forum has become a little too rarefied for this shade tree mechanic and his rusty old "rice burner"...

As I was on my way to the Narita airport on my way home this February a very new looking Corvette passed my bus on the freeway. It was left hand drive of course, so I suspect that they only place where the owner can safely pass is on the freeway.

Cars have been getting heaver recently, but not so much for safety, as gimicks. I rode in a friend's G35 the other day. It has that silly all purpose remote. The doors unlock when he touches the handle. The Driver's seat retracts to the full back position EVERY TIME that he opens the door, and the steering wheel and dashboard move up to their highest setting. When you push the start button, (there is no key...) the steering wheel, dashboard, and driver's seat return to their programmed position. All that I could think about as I watched the useless motion was how complicated the motors, ball screws, and tracks have to be, and how expensive it will be to keep that car operational when it is 15 years old. Power windows are bad enough. I would hate to even guess how many electric motors there are in that car. All the extra electrical power requires a bigger battery, more powerful alternator, and larger gage electrical wiring. Each of those by themselves add some weight, but taken as a whole... there must be 1000 lbs of useless junk in that car. Just my opinion you understand.

All the horror stories make me feel better about the $250 that I spent on my car. (Ignoring the thousands that I have spent since...)

I bought a similar compressor at Big Lots a few years back. Mine appears to be the same motor and pump, but with a smaller, horizontal tank. The specifications for mine are very similar to that unit as well. I paid around $99, on clearance. (Clearance... at Big Lots... ) Within a year the pressure switch broke. The cheap plastic body just came completely apart. When that happened the motor would never shut off. It ran non-stop. (There is a small emergency pressure relief valve to keep the tank from exploding.) But the copper tubing that connects the pump to the unloader valve on the tank split at the same time that the pressure switch broke. ( I suspect that one failure caused the other, but do not know which one happened first.) I have heard that the pipe is copper to act as a pneumatic fuse of sorts, but am not sure if that is true. Anyway, to repair it I had to buy a new pressure switch, and some 3/8 black pipe. (I don't have access to the copper tubing.) The pressure switch was around $50 (Granger's) and the black pipe was more than $20. (For some reason 3/8 pipe is hard to find. By the time I got it running again I had put an additional $70 into my $99 compressor. All that and I still don't have the volume to do much more than inflate tires, and run my "air vac" while bleeding brakes. I guess what I am saying is that going cheap rarely pays in the end.

I suspect that people's experience with using R134 in an old R12 system depends upon their location. I ripped the air conditioner out of my 71 because I don't want the weight or power loss, so I don't know how R134 would have worked in that system. (badly I suspect.) On the other hand, I have owned two other cars where I "converted" the air conditioner to R134 with no problems. But then here "hot" is 85 F, and unbearable is 95 F. We only see temperatures like that for about three months out of the year typically, and usually when the air conditioner in one of my daily drivers breaks I don't bother to fix it. I am sure that southern Florida or California have different requirements.