gramercyjam

One mans junk ....

I owned an '83 Turbo for about 15 years and I loved the car so no snobbery here. That pic of the drivers floor - tells me that the car has terminal cancer, what you can see is the tip of the iceburg and usually the easiest to fix. What you can't see is the killer. Buyer should be prepared to drive it as is until the wheels fall off. To repair this would require way more work and materials cost to fix than the car would ever be worth.

I would pay $50 to have it hauled to the junk yard.

New gas shocks will raise the rear end. If you push the piston in, does it stay? On gas shocks the answer is no, it will come right back up, with a lot of force. That is why they will contribute to the spring rate too. Of course, worn out shocks won't do this.

With one of these Not the answer you are looking for I'm sure. New gas shocks in the rear can help raise it up a little, as will new springs.

The picture even appears to show the indentation where the nut was staked.

If you just want to replace valve stem seals, you don't need to remove the head or the manifolds. Just the valve cover needs to be removed. --John

I've seen this over on hybridz. Not a simple swap. Major fabrication required. On the plus side, I bet the diff gear ratio is better suited to the kind of power you get from a V8 swap than the Datsun diffs. --John B

$25 A TIRE????? Thats crazy. Don't you have tire shops up there in Dallas like we do down here in San Antone? You can go to one of those shops and they will jack the car up, take the tire off, dismount it, patch it, put it back on for $2. --John

Link to the Big Sam pages on ZHome.com. Big Sam Big Sam used to kick some Carrera butt. Fun reading. I don't think we have seen that BMW before at the Solo II nationals so maybe we just need to kick it up a notch to beat it, but I doubt it will be me. I've always said I'm a better mechanic than a driver and I don't think that will change any time soon. --John

Prepared autox Z cars compete in the same class as prepared 911's and prepared 914's. They are pretty well matched. --John B

Tumbler sounds like a good idea. I have a bead blasting cabinet and it is a pain to bead blast lots of little parts. Once the stuff is cleaned up, I pickle the parts in phosphoric acid to remove any residue that will inhibit the plating process. I plate with some electro less nickle plate like what is sold here . Otherwise the part will flash rust again in a few days. In addition to the plating solution, you will need a hotplate, candy thermometer and pyrex cup. Heat this solution up to about 195 degrees F, drop your stuff in for about 1/2 hour for a nice thick coat of nickle. If your hardware is too big to fully submerse if the cup, you can do one end, then turn it over and do the other end. New hardware is cheaper if you can find it, but some hardware is just not available anymore. --John B

I did the same JB Weld fix for the melted plastic. I have a slightly different approach to the corrosion and poor electrical contact problems. You may notice quite a bit of corrosion where the wire lugs are riveted to the fuse box and where the fuses clip in too. I soaked mine in phosporic acid for a few minutes to remove the corrosion, rinsed in clear water several times, blow dry with compressed air, restake rivets. It held up for at least 8 years after that and may last longer. I just took it out of service and converted to the spade lug fuses.

A nice old VW bus suitably restored.

Now I am not sure if they are 5 of 4. I'd need to look. Anyway, what you do is check 2 things besides just the temp gauge. Check to make sure the piston doesn't hit the nose of the plug at TDC and check to see if the electrode is melting (those nice square edges getting rounded off at the tip) after you have run it a while. --John B

An old pic of my 240Z wearing Azenis:

I run BP4ES on my autox L24 'cause I run a little rich with big triple webers and the slightly hotter plug keeps the plugs a little cleaner. No overheating with stock radiator, 2 10 inch electric fans.

Anti theft mod?

Before you do any more work trying to solve your carb issues, add a heat shield between the carbs and the header. This is not an optional thing. If you do it, you will be absolutely amazed at what this seemingly small change will do. This is a difficult problem to diagnose, because for me, in the garage, or a legal drive around the block, the headers just don't get hot enough to duplicate the conditions where the carbs get to hot. It is hot as blazes here in Texas and I made a heat shield out of a 10" X 24" piece of 24 gauge aluminum and took the car to a 2 day autox south of Houston the next day. Carb problems that were dogging my car have completely disappeared. Hot flooding and stalling, hot restart problems - all gone. Insulating header wrap is not required. I have pretty much an identical fuel system setup to the one in your picture gallery, but no mechanical pump. I found that I ran better without it.

April 1970 Road and Track road test say a bone stock '70 240Z does the 1/4 mile in 17.1 sec @ 84.5 mph. --John '73 FP 240Z

What I said.

Sounds normal to me . Motor and carbs were probably very hot. Boiling fuel in the carbs may be causing the flooding. It shouldn't be a problem with the throttles wide open. It should start right up after a few seconds accompanied by a little black smoke out of the tail pipe. It happens with my Webers too. I think I have heard from other Weber owners it happens to them too. Do you have heat shields for the carbs? I also wonder if your fuel tank is vented properly? --John

SU tuning is just about as easy as anything gets on a car. There are dozens of sites on the web that will tell you how. Search for SU carb tuning or Skinners Union carb tuning. It doesn't matter if the site is a Datsun site or a Triumph site, it's all the same. Sorry to blaspheme here, but I never found those cheap a$$ unisyn flow meters to help. I trust that my own senses are more accurate than those things. You also should learn to "read" plugs. There is a fundamental old school skill that is necessary to learn how to tune carbs. The reason when you shot stuff in the rear carb and nothing happened is because the last three cylinders aren't firing, most likely because of plug fouling. Wiping them off doesn't clean them well enough, they need to be bead blasted to get that carbon off. If the carbs were purely the issue, it wouldn't matter if they were synced or rich or what not with WOT. You will have power if your ignition is good. Too rich, and the carbs may be fouling the plugs, or you may have an ignition problem that is contributing, but until you get some good plugs in there, you really aren't going to know if the carbs are right or not. Like somebody said here, spend $10 on some new plugs. --John '73 FP 240Z