jmortensen

Unless someone swapped them out they're going to be dished pistons you might find on a 280Z or ZXT. I suggested you see if you could find dished pistons with less dish, but I didn't mean to look in the the block.

I ran wheelspacers on my Z with slicks last time around and intend to do so again. Widening front track is particularly useful to eliminate understeer. The Z is lugcentric, so you don't need hubcentric spacers, but you do need spacers that fit tight on the lugs. Cheap arse Mr. Gasket style spacers are not good enough. The problem with the Z studs is that they aren't long enough to use spacers, so if you're going to run spacers, you need longer studs. You can use 2nd gen RX7 studs, Quest van studs, or ARP Camaro or RX7 studs. The RX7 studs have 12 x 1.5 threads where stock is 12 x 1.25. Not sure about the Quest studs. If you're using a Nissan mag wheel they have a slightly different size lug nut, so a generic lug nut from the store doesn't work. However, Toyota truck lug nuts have the correct size shank and they come in 12 x 1.5. So if you want long studs and Nissan wheels, there's your answer. I had to cut the end off of the nuts for the studs I was using, YMMV. I used to work on a Porsche race car that had 1" or 1.5" lugcentric spacers, cant remember. To be fair though, the Porsche did have 5 14mm lug studs.

I ran a dished L28/E31 setup for years, ran great with a .490/280 cam and SUs' and then later triples. I ran the same head with flat tops and it pinged like crazy, had to mix race gas, basically became undriveable as a street car. 8.3:1 is lower compression than you would ideally like to have, but it's MUCH better to have lower compression and be able to run the appropriate amount of timing than it is to run too much compression and have to back the timing way back to make it run. If you are buying pistons anyway, you might see if there is a piston with a shallower dish or one that has a half dish.

If you're putting triples on it, it's not being restored. If you're hot rodding it, there is no benefit to the 2.4. Worrying about the value of these cars is kinda silly, because a really nice restored 240Z has been about the same price as a new top of the line Civic for about 20 years. It's just not an expensive car. But if you are worried about value, store the 2.4 and that way if you sell the car to someone who wants to restore it, you can say you have the original motor. If you're looking to make power, the bigger motor makes bigger power. a 2.8 is about 15% bigger than a 2.4, so you'll make about 15% more power. You can do a stroker 2.7L with your 2.4, but for the same money (and with a lot of the same parts) you can stroke the 2.8 into a 3.1 and have about 30% more displacement and power for a similarly built engine than the original. By the way triples aren't cheap and if you set yourself up with jetting in a couple sizes up and down you'll be in the hundreds of dollars just in jets.

There isn't a whole lot of room for error and there is no spring inside to take up the slack. If you cut the strut tubes long, you can use thick washers under the strut inserts to shim them up. When you have the height right, the gland nut will get tight with a couple of threads showing. What you don't want is the gland nut to tighten down on the strut housing before the strut insert is contacted. You should be able to get the struts roughly the right length with a pretty bad saw. I now have a band saw for metal, but when I sectioned my struts I used a $50 Harbor Freight chop saw, and it worked fine. I purposely made the strut tubes 1/8" long and shimmed to get the right height. Once you have the tubes cut and beveled for welding you can use a piece of angle iron and some hose clamps to get everything aligned. Do some tacks around the edge and then stitch it shut from there. I like cutting the tubes about 2" from the top because if you were to overpenetrate with your welds you can grind it out easily.

The small one is an R180. That car should be an automatic. The large one is an R200, that one should be a manual. R200's are common enough. Should be pretty easy to find one that is in good shape, and it is MUCH cheaper to find a good one than to rebuild a bad one. Bearings are expensive and I believe the ball bearing on the pinion is NLA. Gears are NLA except for a few ratios you probably don't want out of Nissan Motorsports, or the hyper-expensive OS Giken gearsets.

Take the large plate off of the 83 and then have a look. All you can see is the mount in the center, can't really see the diff at all.

If it reads the wrong speed then it has the wrong speedometer gear in it. The cable can disconnect from the transmission end (done that one) so I guess it should be able to disconnect from the gauge end too. Getting the cable out of the back of the speedo is quite a PITA on a 240. Don't know about a ZX. It's usually the front pinion ball bearing that goes out on the R200. Pretty good chance that this is the problem on yours. I think the bearing is NLA, so swapping diffs is the right thing to do.

1. Pull the rubber pedal covers off. 2. Put some grip tape on the metal. 3. Spend your remaining $75 on something that will actually make the car faster. My non-blingy $.02.

Just found this thread. I'll just quickly agree with John, Dave, Leon, and others that what makes the engine spin up is its power. If you want it to spin faster (increase rpms faster) then you want more power or less mass to move or both. If the stroker makes more power, it will rev faster than the non stroker. If the cam makes more power, it will rev faster with the cam. The shorter stroke and resultant r/s ratio decreases piston speed when the piston changes from going up to going down, and this allows for a higher redline before the pistons shake apart, but this isn't related to how fast the motor revs. It has more to do with how high it can rev. Thanks, but I would actually say Stage IV if you're talking Schneider. Yes, for a street car. I had a cam that was .490/280 and it ran GREAT with my 8.3:1 L28 with SU's, was a bit small for triples. One could make the argument that a smaller engine needs less cam, and I haven't built an L24, but my inclination is still to go with something in the .490/280-290 range. I was pulling down mid 20's mpg on the highway with that cam and SU's. Notching the block means removing metal from the top of the cylinder near where the valve opens up. Generally this is done by tracing the headgasket onto the block and removing metal with a die grinder. Same can be done for the head, which is called unshrouding the valves. Whether you need to do this or not is a different story. For Dave I think this would be wasted effort. The reduction in compression from removing the metal is probably about the same as the increase that could be expected from better flow. He's not racing, and doesn't have the rest of the head optimized (port and polished, cc'd chambers, etc). If it's an all out race build with custom pistons and really high compression, then it makes more sense to worry about that stuff. Custom slugs just means custom pistons. That's not very descriptive in and of itself. Again for your usage, I'd get an regular old oversized cast piston. You're not turning super high rpms (so far as I'm aware) and the increase in cost of the forged pistons will net you no power and probably some piston knock when it's cold. It will be more durable if you miss a shift and over-rev or something like that, but how often does that happen?

You're making it run. If you were restoring, you would want the original head. N42's aren't that hard to come by. Check with Mat, put out a WTB ad, you'll find one. Doing a valve job isn't too bad money wise, just make sure the shop knows L heads. The performance headwork is expensive. Delta cams resurfaces rockers, www.zccjdm.com has new profiled, lighter rockers if you're really going all out.

How fast do you want to go, and is it worth it to do the job twice? On my project I did everything at least twice, sometimes 3 or 4 times. In hindsight I would have saved a bunch of money if I had just figured out that I was going to end up at 10/10ths and hadn't spent the money to go 6/10th, then 8/10ths, then 9/10ths, then finally built it as crazy as I could. 15x7's are pretty small. Yes, you can have a car that handles pretty good on 15x7's, but will it be fast enough?

Are you "restoring" or just making it run? If you're restoring, then you can just go buy the correct cam and towers and put them on your existing head. If you just want it to run, then you can pick any of them. I believe my bro-in-law has several of the open chambered E88s, his email is matm AT m2differentials DOT com. He has a bunch of other heads too if there is another you would prefer.

Don't use WD-40 as cutting fluid/coolant. Bacon grease works GREAT if you don't want to buy actual cutting fluid. Sharp bits are a very good suggestion. I've had shockingly good luck with Harbor Freight's Cobalt bits. Their other bits are crap IMO, but the cobalt ones are pretty amazingly good, and the price is so low that you don't have to freak out about losing or breaking one.

There is some very good info on degreeing cams at hybridz.org in the L6 engine section of the FAQ forum. I believe it talks about Rebello's interesting method of measuring valve lash at the pad.

It's not that big, and not complex at all. It installs simply and is a permanent fix. Your experience with Ron has been exactly the opposite of mine. Ron and Paul too have bent over backwards to help me and my brother-in-law with machining work.

What's wrong with "easy to install and it worked"? I love the RT mount, which is so-called because "Ron Tyler" as he calls himself, drew it up and posted it online years ago. The nice thing about it is it uses a very easy to find interlocking mount that will never fail to the point where it comes apart. I also likeI'm sure there is a little weight to be saved, but that stock mount, especially the later ones, is pretty heavy. The RT is tough to beat for simplicity.

ISKY should be able to do this for you. Rebello sells cams bigger than that too, as does Sunbelt.

What wealth did he say that he was entitled to? I must have missed that part. The guy worked himself into that position from nothing. He's not a silver spoon trust fund guy, he's more of a Horatio Alger story. He is an entertainer. The market values his entertainment at the rate that he is able to charge for his services. If he says he won't do a TV show for less than $50M, guess what? He won't be doing a TV show. If (when) he loses popularity, as they all do, he'll be out of a gig. No, he is not describing himself. He is describing the OWS whiners. He has worked his way into his living and I never heard him on TV complaining about what he was owed by society when a show that he was on was canceled. Seems to me your problem is you think that only certain kinds of work are valuable, and you seem to believe that you have the knowledge to ascertain what is or isn't. I suggest you pick up "The Fatal Conceit" by Hayek. I think he'll disabuse you of that notion. No person or controlling group can accurately say how the value of building a house relates to being a TV host or a banker or a doctor. The dispersed knowledge of people who choose to purchase products from one of these professionals determine their proper price, and attempts to arbitrarily change the valuations in the name of "fairness" have many bad unintended consequences. BTW, I'd be shocked if he wasn't in the top 1% of earners, who do pay 37% of the income taxes: http://www.american.com/archive/2007/november-december-magazine-contents/guess-who-really-pays-the-taxes

I know a lot of these CV adapters have been sold for 240Z's over the years, and there has been considerable discussion revolving around flipping the cages on the CV shafts in order to prevent the CV shafts from bottoming. I believe that on a 240Z (and probably a 260 and 280 as well but I don't have them to measure on), flipping the cages doesn't get anywhere near fixing the bind issue. What happens if the CV bottoms out? Well it's pretty much the same thing as if the stock U/Jointed halfshaft bottoms. John Coffey did a writeup on that on his website: http://www.betamotorsports.com/benchracing/R200handling.html but the quick description is this: I can recall one guy (screen name mayolives on HybridZ) who destroyed his limited slip and determined that this CV issue was the cause. When you use the CV shaft as the suspension bump stop, the loads not only go into the wheel bearings and stub axle as John describes, but they're transmitted equally into the differential as well. So carrier bearings take a beating, in limited slips the side gears move in and out so they take a beating, the pinion gears in the center are forced to run on each other while under great pressure, and if the carrier bearings start to go this can cause misalignment in the ring and pinion as well. M2 Differentials has manufactured a solution to this problem. It is a set of custom CV shafts that puts the CV right in the middle of its travel. Being in the middle of the travel is particularly important for guys running adjustable control arms or rear camber bushings, as they might want to make the arms longer or shorter, and there is room to do so without having to worry about the shafts. There is the possibility of buying just the short shaft and then using the stock driver's side shaft on the passenger side of the car, but that wouldn't allow for shortening of the control arm. The set of shafts is normally $575, price will go down to $500 per pair if we can get a group of 10 to buy, a LH shaft is $350. Discussion that led to this product's development: http://forums.hybridz.org/index.php/topic/100094-cv-axle-discussion/ Installation documented with very nice pictures: http://forums.hybridz.org/index.php/topic/103391-z31-axle-swap-r200-clsd-m2-differentials/page__p__967257__hl__%2Bcv+%2Baxle+%2Bdiscussion__fromsearch__1#entry967257 Vendor thread on Hybrid Z for group buy: http://forums.hybridz.org/index.php/topic/102798-short-z31t-cv-shafts-group-buy/

I really like his bit that he did for Reason as well. Especially the part about running red lights (NSFW):

If you have an impact you can hold the pinion flange with your hand. If not, you'd probably have to stand on the brakes or something.

3.70 on a 79 280ZX? I thought that would have a 3.54, seeing as how it has the 280Z transmission. Maybe I'm wrong. A 2+2 would have the 3.36 (automatic only???) The pinion flange on the turbo will be different, but that can be swapped pretty easily since there is no crush sleeve. Just red loctite the pinion nut and torque spec is something like 137 -210 ft lbs. The differential output stubs just pop out with a prybar, so you could use the old halfshafts if you wanted. If you wanted the CV shafts you could swap out the companion flanges on the stub axles and the rest should bolt right up, unless Nissan did something really funky and put 27 spline stubs on the NA and 25 on the T. I know the turbo has 25 spline. Read up on cutting the peened part of the nut off before loosening. If you think that diff is bad, swapping really shouldn't be that big a deal, much easier to get to all the bolts on the ZX than it is on a Z due to semi-trailing arm rear suspension.

What you need to set up a ring and pinion is a dial indicator and magnetic base and gear marking compound. Plastigage shouldn't be used for setting up a ring and pinion. It is meant for bearing clearances and that sort of thing where you bolt on the bearing cap and torque it down, then take it back off and measure how much squish you've got. There isn't a way to measure backlash with plastigage because you would have to TURN the gears in order to get it into the ring and pinion where they mesh. This would be roughly akin to putting plastigage on a main bearing and then spinning the crankshaft. Gear setup manual: http://www.ringpinion.com/Content/HowTo/TechnicalInstructions/Yukon_Installation_Kit_Instructions.pdf

Don't think you'll find a ring and pinion for an older R180. In 1976 I think it was they changed the ID of the ring gear and so you have one set of gears for the older cars and another for the newer cars. They're still using the R180 today, so if you want to find a different ratio or if yours is making noise, finding a used unit is an easy way to get what you want. If your diff isn't making noise, change the seals and call it a day.