Walter Moore

The local machine shop that installed my new valve seats removed the cam towers from my cylinder head. He said that the Haynes manual was wrong, and that so long as I was careful to re-align the cam shaft correctly when I reassembled the head there shouldn't be any problem. (He did mark the towers for position and re-attach them finger tight before giving me back the head.) (See similar comments by JMT240KGTR in a previous post.) BUT for some reason, perhaps related to their stand on not removing the things..., the Haynes manual does not list a torque setting for the bolts that hold the things in place. I have the cam back in the head, and it is lined up perfectly as near as I can tell. It turns freely, just like when I took the head apart. I am absolutely paranoid about stripping bolts on an aluminum head (been there, done that...) so I have only torqued the bolts to 13 lb-ft (1.8 Kg-m) which is the torque setting recomended for the fuel pump. (It is a similar sized bolt.) Does anyone know the correct torque setting for these bolts?

Well you know what P.T.Barnum said... (or is credited with saying.) That is a pretty obvious phony slab sided body kit. I do hope that "lsrcap" is happy with it. Or is the name of the winning bidder some sort of joke? "I scrap"? "Its cr*p"? Not likely I know... but there is always hope.

Just 2 quick observations: 1. The rear brake drums are aluminum, so a cutting torch is a really BAD idea. (The fuel in the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle is powered aluminum) 2. When I bought my Z the drums were in the back, and one of them had been literally torn apart by someone who removed it from the car with a big hammer. (At least I hope and pray that the braking surface wasn't ripped from the mounting surface by something that happend while the car was in motion...)

Actually, if you read the fine print that $248 price is for (2) seats, at least I think that is what is says, so that is about 1/2 of what Motorsport is asking, even after shipping. Not that I have $328 burning a hole in my pocket... A hole in my pocket yes, but that is mostly from buying parts to restore my Z... :stupid:

I just got my E31 cylinder head back from the machine shop last week. As was mentioned earlier, they came with brass seats on the intake valves. Not that it is likely to be a big deal with you, since you intend to port the head anyway, but the original valves were smaller, 42mm, than the valves in the later engines. So far as I have been able to determine only the larger intake seats, 44mm, are available now. The machinest who reworked my E31 said that it wasn't really possible to install the small seats anyway, because the brass seats have to be cut out of the head, with the result that the seat opening will become slightly larger. (Steel seats are easier to remove. Just head the head to 300 degrees F, and they fall out, or so he claims...) And of course, larger valve seats will require larger intake valves... For some reason the exaust valves in my car were smaller as well, 33mm versus 35mm. Happily for me, I found a bunch of valves on Ebay cheap and was able to use those rather than buying new ones.

Has anyone here ever tried to install these seats in a 240Z: http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2442732906&category=33701 I am not sure that I want them, but comparing that price to the cost of re-doing my existing seats, it doesn't look bad. (Existing seats == 30 years of neglect and bad storage...) Just asking...

Actually Bakelite was invented in England in the 1860s... Originally it was made from coal dust, and other stuff. As a thermosetting plastic it is essentially unrepairable, and can not be recycled.

Somewhere on this site there is a thread about my problems opening the rear hatch on my 240... I hope that you don't have the same problem. Long story short, my car had been in storage for 10 - 15 years, and the rear hatch door latch was rusted in the closed position. The latch was actually released, but the toggle was rusted so badly that it just would not open. I had to resort to drastic measures to open the hatch, and my latch mechanism is still soaking in a batch of ATF... (Until every last rust crystal is gone...:devious: ) I hope you have better luck. But then few places are as "rusty" has Indiana...

Actually, I just bought bulk brake lines at the local Advance Auto Parts and am in the process of bending them by hand to fit. Or I would be doing that, if I wasn't working 70 hour weeks to try to get a huge project finished at work... :mad: Oh well, I guess it pays for the parts...

Just my opinon, but I suspect that the "11mm" hex fittings that you have aren't 11mm. They are more likely 7/16 in flare nuts with metric threads... (7/16" = 11.11mm, the wrenches are interchangeable.) I didn't think to check the lines that I bought, but they might be SAE-Metric hybrids as well... for me that is fine, but I agree that on a "restoration" that would not go over well.

The shunt is the low resistance resistor across which the amp meter measures a voltageto derermine the current in the charging circuit. If you have an ohm meter, there should be very little (practically zero) resistance across the leads of the amp meter. (Does anyone know if the shunt is internal or external on the Z Amp meters?)

At least in the U.S. the real reason that nearly all cars have EFI is that it is almost impossible to meet the emission laws with a carb. The wonderful unintended result of that is that the new cars are significantly easier to start and drive than the old ones were. (Particularly Ford products...) Most of the people that I know who turn street cars into race cars convert them to carbs, but only to increase the airflow through the engine. The problem with that is that they have to have all sorts of instruments, like barometers, relative humitity gages, etc. because they have to constantly re-adjust the carbs for the current conditions. (Which is the original source of the Indy 500's "Carbration day" the Thursday before the race.) Carbrators can actually only be adjusted to operate perfectly at one temperature, barometeric pressure, and humitity level. Which is the real reason that the older cars never seemed to run quite right, their carbs were set for a middle of the road setting and only sort of worked the rest of the time. (Except Fords, which never worked right unless you yanked off the Motorcraft carb and replaced it with a Holly.) As for the "restriction" of the venturi, all Otto cycle engines (Including fuel injected ones...) REQUIRE a restriction in the intake path to control the speed of the engine. That is the purpose of the throttle plate. (As opposed to Diesel engines that have no restriction in the intake.) It is still possible to buy huge carbs, like 950 - 1000 SCFM units that would absolutely flood a 2.8L engine. But what is the point? If you really believe that EFI doesn't restrict the air flow, go pick-up one of the "Mustang" magazines at a book store and look at all the adds for "Oversized Throttle body" kits for the multipoint EFI that Ford put on those cars. My opinon is that if you are going to run it on the street, and your car's electrical system is intact, you will be happier with the driveability of the EFI system. Mine is going to have the dual SUs that it came with when I get it running, because that is all I have. Besides, it isn't going to be a daily driver, and the funky carb based operation is part of the experience ;-)

Actually, I was able to find the hard steel brake lines at the local Advance Auto Parts store. They are straight tubes that you have to bend yourself, but they weren't particularly expensive. (Buy a tubing bender... and maybe an extra line...) I don't know about the rear lines yet....

For what it is worth, the story that I have read many times since they banned leaded gas in the U.S. is that the U.S. Army tested unleaded gas in their older vehicles back in the 1970s and determined that for a car with any significant mileage already on it using leaded gas, running it on unleaded gas did not "significantly" shorten its useful life. Of course since then the army has switched all its vehicles to run on jet fuel, so I do no know what they meant when they said its useful life... I know that I have run some pre-catalist cars on unleaded gas for years with no ill effects, but that is no guarantee of anything. My OPNION, with little to back it up is that the worst thing that could happen using unleaded gas on an old head is to burn the valves, but if you have to rebuild the head to prevent that... is it that much different to just wait and rebuild it afterward? (Spoken by someone who has to rebuild his head anyway...)

Are the brackets that attach the front bumper on a 240Z straight or curved. When I bought my 71 it had been in an accident of some kind and the front bumper was missing. I assumed that the bumper brackets were bent in the collision, but now I see the following for sale on Ebay... http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2413188378&category=33640 and those look just like the ones that I have... except that mine are rusty of course... I do live in Indiana. Are they supposed to be that shape?

As near as I can tell my '71 does not have any rear speakers. Of course it also doesn't have a radio, or a whole lot of other things that WORKING automobiles are known to contain.

I don't live in CA, so take my opinon for what it is worth... but I seriously doubt that any environmentalist would accept a bill that allowed people to opt out of an emission test by mailing in an easily faked photograph of SOME odometer reading. More likely I suspect you will be up against one of the following: Best case, you have to drive the car to the testing site every year where an "impartial" governmental agent certifies that: 1. Your odometer is in good working order. 2. The mileage recorded in the past 12 months is less than the (ever shorter...) distance permitted. Worst cast, the 12K mileage exception is an "affirmative defense" meaning that you still have to get the car tested, and pay for the test, but if it fails you can play the mileage exception like a get out of jail free card. (After the impartial govermental agent certifies items 1 and 2 from the best case above... Good luck. :-)

Any discussion of the 240Z in the U.S. is incomplete if it fails to take into account the fact that the U.S. "Baby Boom" generation, those born in the halcion days just after WWII, were just reaching their young adult years at the time the Z was introduced. The boomers shaped most of the buying patterns in the states from the late 60's to today. At that point they were mostly young, un-married, and making what were incredible wages, adjusted for inflation. They were, and most remain today, spoiled, self-indulgent, and self-centered. Two seater sports cars were just the ticket to stroke their already inflated egos. I ought to know... being born in 1960 means that "I are one..." Just barely however...

I confess, I confess... I ALWAYS replace the entire blade, never just the insert. But then that is because usually when I replace the wiper blades the old ones were crushed by the weight of snow and ice that built up on it... But seriously, I would never have even known that there was such a thing as an original240Z wiper blade...

The wheel in the picture looks like an old style Cragar brand "Mag" wheel. Those were not original on any car, but were an extremely popular aftermarket weel in the 70's. They were Aluminum, in spite of the name...

Ok, I admit that the only 240 I have ever really looked that closely at is the pile of parts that is in my garage (which I should point out I am sure hasn't been restored yet :-) )... but I am not so sure that this is a fake... First, on the VIN#, is it possible that he just left out the "30" from the model number? My car's VIN number is HLS30-2XXXX. If you assume that the 30 is missing, and all he has listed is the part after the dash then the number itself is only about 900+- higher than mine, which was manufactured in April of 1971. As for the rest of the car... the original parts that mine still has look just like that. The valve cover on my engine is identical to the one in the picture... in fact the whole engine compartment is with the exception that his still seems to run... ;-). The serial number on the engine in my car matches the number on the nameplate, so I have no reason to assume that the valve cover isn't original. (In spite of what I have read on some web sites...) I can't talk about the shift lever that much, because the transmission in my car is clearly from a 260Z, the lever isn't straight like the one in the pictures, and someone has cut-out the floor to make it fit. But on the plus side for the Ebay seller, his shifter doesn't look like mine... As for the shift knob... the car is 32 years old... I never left the original shift knob on any car that I owned with a manual transmission back in the 70's. That center console is a dead ringer for mine, except that his is clean. The pillar vents, or what ever they are are identical to my car. The car has clearly been repainted at some point, so whoever painted it may have put the front side markers on backwards. And of course, the wheels are not original, but they look better than the chrome abominations on my car. Granted the radio is aftermarket, and the car has been spruced up a little here or there, but any car that someone has been actually DRIVING on a regular basis is going to have to be worked on just to keep it running. (And I wouldn't have put up with an AM radio for one day longer than I had to either.) But for the real test... the current bid is over $4100 and the reserve hasn't been met. Too rich for my blood... But I am a tightwad, just ask my wife or my daughters...

Gosh, you folks have me just about talked into dropping by the track this September to watch those "foreign" cars run the "wrong direction" around the track. I have to admit that having lived in Indianapolis for 42 years, I kind of take racing for granted. I have only actually been to "the race" once, just after the CART/IRL split. The paper that year said that "nobody" had shown up to watch the race. It took about 4 hours for the 500,000 nobodys present to get out of the track... I decided that if that was a lightly attended race, I didn't want to see the real thing. I love the racing, but hate the lines... But the F1 cars have always interested me. I really want to hear one of those things screaming down the front straight at 18,000 RPM. I hear that the Indy track has the longest full-throttle stretch of the season. The first year they were all crying that their engines couldn't run at full boil that long without exploding. None of them did as far as I know... I might drop by, but I just don't like crowds.

Yes, the Infinity is the "up market" (read luxury) version of a Nissan. They have a higher base price, and usually more leather on the inside. A funny story, a friend of mine went looking at Nissans because he wanted to buy a Maxima, but ended up buying the Infinity version because by the time you added the options to get the Nissan version up to the same equipment level as the base Infinity it was more money, and the Infinity has a better warranty... (Free loaner car etc.) His even came with a limited slip differential... which I didn't know you could do in a FWD...

An even better question is does the amp meter still work correctly if you install an internally regulated aftermarket alternator? I am strongly considering putting a G.M. style alternator on my Z (If I ever get it put back together.) I am not fond of the externally regulated alternators of the early Z car era. I had a lot of trouble with an old Volvo and its rickety charging system. I really love modern alternators, but don't want to loose the usefulness of the gages.

That having the needle straight up or down thing... that is a old racing trick. The NASCAR boys still do that today, even with the remote control monitoring, they turn the gages so all the needles are vertical when all is ok. Makes it easy to spot a problem.