AK260

It is indeed! Recognition at last ;) WOSP who make the starter, are also a good British company, who make seriously high quality stuff. When I was deciding to rewind my 280zx alternator for more juice at lower RPMs (due to the half sized pulley on the ATi crank damper), I contacted them and they have a very impressive selection of stuff but not the cheapest around. You get what you pay for in this instance. http://www.wosperformance.co.uk/

You guys look properly badass!!!! [emoji106] If that’s you in the top photo, I’d say it’s definitely Covid proof!! That’s some serious kit you got there.[emoji33][emoji33] I just saw the article pop up on my US news channel - totally senseless. It’s totally understandable that you can’t sleep. A very sad ending to a life of accomplishments but at least his soul is in a better place and at peace. Take it easy chap. [emoji1317][emoji106]

Love it!! Thanks for sharing. As you say, interesting other products too! [emoji106] You would of course have to flip the battery round on a RHD car as the positive terminal is under the wing! [emoji15] BTW, I’ve used AES for years - they are brilliant to deal with.

Words fail me except to offer sincere condolences. Always difficult to lose anyone close and especially on a mindless / needless shooting. Especially when you have survived in battle only to be shot at home. Take good care of yourself and family chap.

That is a great idea! It also worries me that it may leave swirl marks behind. I have a spare rear screen, so I will have a go on that one at some point in the winter. There is a part of me that wonders if you would ever notice the 2cm difference in defroster height if the lines were totally rubbed out and frost fighter installed!? Masking it is great advice!! [emoji106] Just one word of caution, masking tape is EVIL stuff especially if you leave it on the car for any length of time. Ask me how I know! This is what happened when I peeled off the tape just below the rear plate a few days after I was doing some work in that area! Another time, it had a really weird reaction with the paint that looked like Yellowstone park and took 2 months to disappear by itself! Frog tape I have found works best Indoor painting and decorating for sharp lines and no paint bleed https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007AS07UI/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_CRhwFbV5PW1MB Finally, I found adding and old duvet cover provided a level of padding / protection that tape alone wouldn’t.

Nice work! That should definitely add some warmth! [emoji106][emoji106] And on glass removal, don’t even!!! Get a friend around with a face mask, you will kick yourself if you damage bodywork or drop the glass!!! Especially after that hard work!

Nice work! That should definitely add some warmth! [emoji106][emoji106] And on glass removal, don’t even!!! Get a friend around with a face mask, you will kick yourself if you damage bodywork or drop the glass!!! Especially after that hard work!

Agreed! Completely!! The question is, just how does one get the silk printing off? It’s very hardy stuff! ;)

The only other consideration may be that if the paint itself isn’t resistive (I.e. it’s purely conductive) you will create hot and cold spots that may break the glass on a cold day. I have read about people fixing their modern cars and having this issue. Well done for the tenacity and effort to make it work - you need to employ an artist with a steady hand!! I am very much going down the frost fighter route. On my car, the grid has 16 elements with 35mm separations resulting in a grid height of 52.5mm The frost fighter 16 element jobbie ends up as 50.8 - there HAS to be a way to make their product work for us. It’s definitely worth asking them if they can do a custom size - but even with that, i wonder if the original silk screen has to be rubbed off for good adhesion?

Always good to do the job the once ;) BTW as I’m sure you know, that bump stop will sit nicely on the spacer of you push it all the way up.

When I did mine I found that the way up you have it works best. It basically locks the top of the plunger to the bottom of the strut cap thing with the 3 studs coming out of it. You can even put it on upside down and it will work, but you can’t install your shocks without it as far as I could see. Well you could but the lip on the small part of the shaft isn’t large enough to be strong enough. Does that make sense? My old tockicos didn’t have it but the shaft was uniform and fat all the way to the top, the Konis aren’t without that spacer. My guess is that the plunger shaft is a generic design used for other models and they provide the spacer to fit the Z. Here’s the comparison of tockico v Koni

Surely if the bump stops are being hit that often to take damage from the gland nut then the suspension setup needs rethinking! In all my crazy Z driving over 8 years I have only ever hit the stops twice while being very silly over a bump back bridge at speed. BTW the Koni gland nut is pretty smooth with no sharp edges - not a great photo here as I was focused on the spring markings but you can see what I am talking about. Also I used motorbike dust covers on mine which provide a lovely tight fit. So no dust / grim getting in Back to the point[mention=6833]madkaw[/mention] raised, that steel spacer is missing off the pretty generic instructions from what I could tell.

Good advice! Now why didn’t I think to do that (google it) when I was assembling them!? ;) This is the best explanation I read: “This little white plastic doodad is often overlooked, but its importance can't be overstated. If your strut bottoms out, the impact can actually seal the bump stop against the strut housing. When the suspension decompresses, that seal is broken, and it can actually create enough suction to break the seal on the strut itself. This piece of plastic creates an air gap between the bump stop and the strut, preventing this weird disaster from occurring" Edit: thinking about this, the gland nut removal holes will likely perform a similar job on mine. What I’ve read so far says that the early seals were theorised to have this issue so they left the discs in as a cheap insurance policy.

I’m so very pleased to hear a very experienced person also did this!!!! #metoo!!!!

I don’t have a better picture unfortunately, I was just glad to get the blessed thing off and get on with my life. It was definitely nyloc and I ditched the rest!!! You said it spot on IKEA instructions!!!!!!!!! They do need improvement for sure. That white disc thing - what do you suppose it does? I didn’t fit mine in the end as I could see no real need for them except to rattle and annoy me! As for the spacer, it vexed me for some time. What I decided in the end was to put it the same way up as you have. It came through the spring top hat as I tightened the nut like an “interference fit”. It didn’t need much more than 25lbft to come through; i know this as I did it gingerly using a digital torque wrench. That way, it holds the spring top hat centre on and doesn’t interfere with the bump stop.

Interesting links, thanks for sharing. My mistakes were that 1. I was in a hurry so I was undoing it quickly. 2. I didn’t stop immediately when I felt it fight back. Within a second of it resisting, it had welded itself solid! The nuts all come in the sealed bag of bits Koni supply with the dampers. I do believe it is a stainless steel thread as it is part of the single piece damper shaft. The yellow tip is indeed the adjustment - quite a neat solution. I agree with you - the pipe is the way forward. Because two of the dampers arrived damaged in the post, I have a template in the garage to work from. I quite like the idea of making something that looks properly machined.

You’re not kidding! My language was definitely not family friendly and I had to walk away from it for a day or two. The thread is metric fine, so beware you don’t end up forcing metric coarse threads onto it. This is what I used in the end which is consequently the same size as the ones on the compression rods, moustache bar, diff insulator’s long bolts etc. They were also on my previous shock absorbers. https://www.thezstore.com/page/TZS/PROD/14-1274 Letter to Koni will certainly be done complete with photos. They developed them in conjunction with MSA / Zstore so I would imagine they did use a test vehicle or two but I guess you can’t test every scenario of how the consumer goes about fitting them. I was using a non ratcheted socket handle and turning it quicker (and without regular stops) than you would if you were ratcheting it, so maybe that’s why they hadn’t seen this issue previously. As for the dial, I was only going to put on a giant + sign for 90degree adjustment steps - 8 settings is plenty enough. But I do want a less floppy fit as I will be constantly playing with them when going tracking again one day. I agree on the carb comment - THE ONLY way I have succeeded in accurately setting up carbs is taking the domes off and using digital callipers. Good luck and let us know how you get on. I’m certain yours will go smoothly. Oh BTW, I made my own gland nut removal tool for the price of a spare bracket, some drilling and a couple of 8.8 bolts - in the pic below the second one is hidden behind the shock rod. The big bolt was purely to give me a point for a socket to attach to but in the end a few taps with a 2.5lb hammer worked way better. Glad to be of service. ;)

God I love [mention]Captain Obvious[/mention]!!!! He totally understands me! If he was a woman, I ..... Aaaand in the blue corner, on my other shoulder in a super deep British accent: “Ahem! Steady on old chap”!!! Exactly what he said, better than I did. [emoji106][emoji106][emoji106]I’m going to a write to Koni to give them feedback and let’s see if they act on it. There is a little too much play in the adjuster knob for my liking so at some point I will make my own on a lathe with a much tighter fit and include degree marks. Am I obsessing too much? Or is it too much to ask that a quality product should have this resolved from the outset? The “galling” cost me 5 hours for a 5 min job!!!!!! So it’s really worth heeding the warning. Had to go really carefully with the dremel to avoid creating too much heat; regularly cooling it gently and avoiding potential damage to any seals. Also once the shaft and nut are in the strut hat / cap thing, there is diddly squat room to get anything in there. This is what I call the strut cap / hat thing - which I had buy another of and take back to bare metal / de-rust / treat and paint with chassis paint! I tried to recover the threads with a thread file, but to no avail as zooming in showed me how the galling had eaten away some of the thread. A fat 5mm washer was employed to use the undamaged threads above it. Not ideal, but it worked well. On the topic of the adjustments, I was out test “thrashing” the car at the weekend and the handling is now just sublime!!!! On 1.75 turns with what I believe are 2.18kg/mm euro spec springs (same ones as used before the Koni upgrade) and stock 195/70/14 Bridgestone Turanza T005 tyres, the limit of adhesion is way beyond where it was, often outgunning the hot hatches on the twisties. The ride quality is on par with my old S2000 - the bumps that would shake the car previously are just beautifully absorbed and dispatched without drama. And lastly, on the adjustment topic, not all my shocks have a full two turns available. Being a nerd, i would say two of them are between 20-30 degrees short of 720 degrees. So for adjustments to be equal, rightly or wrongly, I made an assumption that at full turns the valve is at it’s max closed position, therefore I work back 180 degrees from there. As an experiment, they are currently set to 90 degrees back from max and still, the ride quality is excellent.

Interesting thread! Especially as my Aussie (spectra looking) pump started to play up at the weekend and intermittently pumped well then dry filter time. It’s been on the car for under 4k miles!!! Fortunately I had the 43 year old original pump and a small socket set in the spare wheel well so I swapped it out on the side of the road. Then I proceeded to carry on with my 3 hour round trip journey and even terrorised a Mustang having a go and not thinking my car was a fair bit quicker ;). Just love that modified L28! And in all of this the old pump didn’t miss a beat!! I only replaced it previously so that the engine bay looked new/ tidy When I put the L28 in. Waste of money by the looks of it. I will take it apart at some point and upload photos.

Have you considered replacing the entire grid by overlaying with one of these? https://frostfighter.com/clear-view-defrosters-16.htm

You won’t be disappointed! Just a heads up on the locknut that comes with them, while installing mine, I decided to undo one side to have a second look and on the way up, it started to get stiffer and stiffer until it welded itself on!!! I had to grind off a part of it on the flat side of the damper shaft with a dremel and chisel it off!!! Being a stainless steel nyloc nut, it produces a lot of heat if turned quickly as I did (by hand) and produces some galvanic reaction of sorts. Moral of the story? Go slow or ditch the lock nuts for something better. The other thing i found was that the adjuster couldn’t get deep enough through the holes in my rear strut towers, so I had to “improve” on the Koni design with a hacksaw ;). I halved the height of the “gripping bit” and it fits perfectly now.

To add to the body of knowledge here, just ran my Z for the first time in 4 months after putting it back together again with these Konis. Having gone from the Tokico blues of the PO to these, I am truly stunned at how well the car is damped and how well it corners now. I’m currently on 2 full turns of the adjusters and find the damping to be wonderful without shaking out my fillings (I am on lowered eurospec springs). I think I will tick back to 1.75 turns though to get a little more comfort for longer journeys than my usual local blasts of the twisties. The first set arrived damaged but with a couple of photos and emails, MSA priority mailed me a new set without delay. Love those guys even more now. As an occasional track dayer and furious fast roader on bumpy twisty British B roads , I can’t recommend these shocks highly enough. They have truly transformed my Z! I also get way better traction at T junctions now with no wheel spin unless I really goad it.

Glad to hear you got it sorted! That’s very pleasing indeed! [emoji106]

I have to agree with CO on this one. The thing I find troubling is that your lights dimmed but no fuse was blown. [emoji848] Typically that would suggest a weak battery (which doesn’t sound likely here) or A LOT of current being drawn somewhere.

Perfect - thank you. Over here we call it a “satin” finish.