zKars

Just buy the later ones. Only difference is the angle of the inlet fitting that will require you to bend the hard line or make/buy a new 12" chunk of premade Copper/nickle brake line and bend it to your will using only your baby finger tips

Something this rare and un-exected needs to be shared. Going up the hill to happiness: Working on stripping down a friends 72 to send it to the paint shop. Car is really nice everywhere, no reason to expect much rust. Engine bay, frame rails from the outside, battery tray, dog legs, all clean. Going down the hill to hell. Finally get to tearing out the interior, floor mats, padding, then some kind of PO applied black tar like sheeting, seems like half sound deadening, half dampener, and when I pull that up, what do I find? Fibreglass! GD Fibreglass applied edge to edge, front to back, covering the entire floor. Both sides/. Oh wonderful, I know EXACTLY what this covering..... And how the hell do you remove 4 square feet of fibreglass? Grind, dust, huge mess, that's how. Going back up the hill of happiness again. First I dig around the fibreglass edges that curl up the sides, seeing if I can lift some of it and get a look at the mess underneath. Hummm, edges lift pretty easy, little pounding, little prying. Well long story short, I got the entire passenger floor cover off in about 6 pieces in 15 minutes. Thank god they didn't clean the floor properly before laying that 'glass. And loe and behold, what catastophe were they hiding under all that fibreglass? Damn near nothing but clean metal!!!!! Except for one hole at the end of the frame rail and a couple of holes up at the firewall seam. Nothing a little newspaper and duct tape can't hide! I mean, fix, yeah, fix.... I cannot believe my eyes, or my luck. Here's hoping the driver side is not much worse. Now that I'm pushing my luck, I hope the sun roof hole plugging goes as well.

I love your LCA adjustment solution. Just don't forget the crush sleeve that just fits snug on that bolt on the inside of the K-member so it has something to lock on.

There is a thread here from Wheee! where he shows details of how he did the prep and welding of his weld on - coil overs. 1976 280z Restoration Progress is the name of the thread, page 63 is where it starts. I highly recommend this type of installation and coil over style. Any welding shop can do it. There is nothing special about welding one steel tube to another. This is not a plug, well not much of one, but I bought Gecko weld on coil overs for my 510 and I'm pleased with the quality and price. They are new and trying to make a good impression. A full set of 510 coil overs were something like $850 USD shipped. They had a similar deal for S30.

Well I'll be dag nabit. ANOTHER unique thing about early cars. This one is on HLS30 03798. Enchiladas Enchilaidis potato potato....

For reference. The real enchalada...

They are M8 x 1.25. Length is 30mm maybe 35?

Yes that flange is to a stock 240 driveshaft. Asking $25 for that flange. Total to 07040 would be $30 + $25 + $25 postal = $80. Package is 1.8kg, 26x19x9cm Paypal to z240@shaw.ca

The flange is 2.125 x 1.875 bolt pattern (54mm x 45mm ish)

I took the plug out to drain the diff. I have the plastic vent as well, I took it out for cleaning. I have the front flange too. It looks like this, but I can find one the looks like the one in the picture if you like. contact me at z240@shaw.ca and we'll handle shipping and details please.

I'll dig one out and get you some pics. $30 bucks? And postage.

Cam looks fine. I did check the lash, some were tight but all were positive.

If no one else pipes up that is closer, let me know. I can scrounge one up.

So we have a block with 250,000 + km. stock 86 mm pistons, evidence of engine work at some point, rings that don't look the age of the block, poor erratic compression ( that BTW does improve a bit with oil added) only one clearly bad cylinder valve wise, a timing chain with no tensioner, that must have slipped or was put back together without it, that resulted in in-consistent piston smoochin'', The other clues I noticed: -oil pan gasket is not a stock gasket. -chain guides were very worn. Not down to the steel, but grooved and very thin. So fellow detectives? What say you? Not that it matters, she needs a full round of rebuild love.

The last remaining mystery to me is the really obvious air leakage into the sump during the leak down test. Just how is that air getting down there? So I see two clues. First the ring end gaps. I popped #1 top ring off and stuffed into the bore, and measured the end gap. 0.020 ish. Hmmm, FSM suggests .010 to .015 is normal, with .040 max,. So .020 sounds ok, maybe a bit wide. With no obvious damage anywhere, about the only thing I see that is not "right" is a really random location of the three end gaps around the pistons. Some have the top ring gaps right next to each other, some are spaced roughly 1/3 of the way around. I likely moved them some while handling, I don't know how much weight to put on this. The walls were all well-oiled, how else does air get past the pistons? Usually I do this test with the motor buttoned up so I never get to hear whatever air escapes past the rings normally in a healthy engine? The leakdown tester was always saying the amount was well into the green/great/good region. I don't think this means too much. The head gasket was great, no issues there. Oil was water-less, water was oil-less. Finally I did a quick bore inspection. Only saw one scratch in #1 that can feel with a finger nail. Everybody else is nice and clean with clear hone marks.

So now that I obvious valve / piston contact in #1, let's check the others. All the others have normal combustion products on top and have to be cleaned with a wire brush (yey! Actual power stroke!), but the two I checked also have the new valve reliefs, though to a much lesser degree. They all had no audible leakage out the intake or exhaust ports during the leak down test (stethoscope used) so they might not be bent, they are just very very good friends with their pistons now.

Plans? Well I seem to have P79 head that needs some new valves. Looks like a recycling candidate. Now that nice flat top F54 block with the new piston reliefs, now that has potential!

Now on to the pistons themselves. Rings should be dirty, gummy, nasty, worn, something. Ah, no... They look like they have about 10,000 miles on them. Clean, free, no obvious defects. At least not on first inspection. More in a bit. Now with #1 intake valve not sealing, very little in the way of serious combustion was happening there. I was able to clean off the black carbon with a quick solvent wipe. And what should reveal itself to me beadie little eyes? Two little eyebrows divits with the rear (intake) being a bit deeper and longer. I guess we know why that intake valve is not sealing very well. And maybe we understand a bit more about the chain timing accuracy. Me not think it "ideal"

Ok, I couldn't stand it. I tore the b down. Grab your popcorn. First the debris from the tensioner spring migration. Found it! It made friends with #2 piston. No this is not a piston return spring. Must have been a hell of a ride! After taking the pistons out and inspecting the rod bearings, well, there were a few extra oil flow guide grooves... This is #2 and #1 rod bearings. Nice grooves. Some others have embedded bits... Other than defects, the bearings are great. No hint of age or wear through. Other than maybe #1 there...

As to the mystery of the tensioner escape, I have a theory. If someone changed the head, but lost the tensioner in the process by not using a blocker, or just didn't know better and just put it back together anyway, I guess that might explain how it escaped it housing. The broken spring is just what happened later when it got caught in a nasty place. Good thing that tensioner found a snug home in a dark corner, so close to the chance of instananeous and total disaster One thing I regret is not checking the cam timing when I took it apart. With no tensioner, makes you wonder if the chain ever skipped a tooth or two at some point. No indication of valve contact so things didn't get that out of hand. About the only clue to wrong valve timing is the fact that the motor didn't like to exceed 4 or 4.5k RPM. Never had a chance to determine if that lack of fuel or something more sinister... With that loose chain, I would have expected more chain noise, but there was none. Maybe it was the fifteen exhaust leaks that masked the noise. I do now that the block was rebuilt at some point in its life, and likely at a real engine shop. I noticed that the engine builder I use here put something I hadn't seen on a couple of frost plugs. And I see them on two frost plugs on this block as well. I believe them to be a tell-tale to detect either excessive temperature or movement that might indicate a condition that would nullify the warrantee. Removing them is apparently a sin according to their inscription. Any one see these before?

Pictures. Not sure this resolves much. The #1 valves are different than the rest, but all pistons look pretty much the same. Note: the scratch mark across the top of every piston top is a remenant of TDC finder probe, not an interesting artifact. Not sure if I will have a chance to tear down the block this morning before the next Z shows up at my door. I'll try. Both #1 valves are black, while the exhaust valves of all the rest are nice and white. The carbs were running very rich in few hundred km prior to this. Well #3 isn't much better...

i know, I know, it's all fake news without pics. Coming

Lucky to get 10 at idle, lift is somewhere north of 1/2", always battling with idle quality, Mik 44''s or brand new SU's. Worth it for the screaming top end, right?

So today I'm tearing down a very worn high mileage F54/P79 ZX motor. It had low compression, and each cylinder was all over the place. 10 lbs, 50 lbs, 80lbs. Runs like crap. Anyway.. I take off the front cover and "clink" on the floor goes the chain tensioner piston. Pick it up and find about 1/2 the spring inside it. This is not good.... The tensioner body is still nicely attached to the block. There is no way the piston can get back in the body, I tried. How did that get out? Well it did. I wonder how much oil comes out of the tensioner, and simultaneously NOT get where its supposed to go. I decided to do a leak down test before I rip the head off just to see if its the valves or rings. Well with pressure on every cylinder I have this nice little draft coming at me. Right from the sump with the front cover off. Anybody wondering how the rings are now? Not me. As a bonus, with air on #1, there is a really really nice draft out of its intake port. Oh goodie..... And for you doubters, yes I did remove all the rocker arms before doing this to be sure they are all as closed as possible. Next we'll take the oil pan off and find that other 1/2 spring. Or its dust.... And check some rings. The bores all look new, the usual no upper ridge and you can still see some cross hatch. Love these blocks.