FastWoman

Lenny, great news! Very exciting! FAIW, I would kick out the "outlying" AFM data and shoot just a bit towards the rich side of the tuning. The reason is that it's better to be a bit too rich than a bit too lean. At least I have always erred just a tad towards rich. Not only is lean running hard on the engine, but a lean mixture can cause a flaky idle and possibly harmful backfiring. The consequences of rich running are fewer -- less motor oil life, harder on the cat (which most of our cars don't have), fouling of the plugs.

Congratulations! My first Z was a gold '75. It's a pretty color! You should go strait to xenons30.com to download a copy of the factory service manual. It's an indispensable resource for these cars -- light years better than a Haynes or Chilton. Go to the Engine Fuel section, and start debugging. I would especially check the following: -- power to the ECU -- connectivity between the (-) side of the coil and the #1 pin of the ECU (signal used by the ECU to clock the injector pulses) -- +12 to the injectors -- good connections to injectors and drop resistor assembly (beneath master brake cyl) -- good ECU ground

Come on, Andrew! You only have to fill in a few square inches with your imagination. How hard could that be?

I caught a glimpse of a nice Z in BRG. It might have been a repaint of an original, rust-free brown/butterscotch '78 that was sold in the area maybe a year ago for $4500'ish. Had I thought of a BRG/butterscotch combo, I might have been more interested in it.

Are there any unused pins on the ECU connector? If so, perhaps they could be used for the USB. Then a dongle could be soldered in to the appropriate pins on the vehicle side of the connector. Otherwise my vote would be for a SHORT USB pigtail that could be tucked neatly away when not in use.

Give a girl a fish, and she'll cook a nice dinner. Give a girl a good fishing pole, and she'll have no more use for that lying, cheating, SOB boyfriend/husband of hers. Oh, FAIW, a lot of the auto parts stores will look up fluid capacities for you (e.g. AutoZone). I'm amazed they have fluid capacities for vehicles as old as my Z, but they do -- and also much older and more obscure.

Strange questions. A stock Z would do fine if driven intelligently. During mountain driving, if done properly, brakes do not get overheated and do not need to cool down. Wind up the engine, and let it do the work. Even feathering the accelerator will accelerate the car pretty dramatically. (No need to "stand on the gas.") When driving down a grade, just remember that gravity is shoving you forward, so you don't have the same braking potential before you lose traction and slide off the embankment. Unlike on a flat track, mistakes are often fatal. I actually did some google searches to find out how suicidal people might race cars downhill. I came up with nothing. There are UPHILL races, but not downhill. I'm sure there's a very good reason for that, namely that when racing uphill, you can stop on a dime, but when racing downhill, you can go skidding off the road with even moderate braking and can plummet to your death. So if you want to know how the autocross racers do it, I suspect the answer is that they don't. It's sort of like asking what techniques track and field athletes use to get the best time when sprinting across an ice rink. Or maybe it's like asking how people race their mules down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Absolutely! Please don't feel beaten upon. I think we all did dumb things in our youth. I think this was just a teachable moment. I would like to think that someone would take the time to have the same sort of talk with my own kids over this sort of thing. As for engine braking technique: It's pretty much flat where I live, and I'm of the mind that brakes are easier/cheaper to service than clutches. So I, too, leave my car in gear as I'm rolling to a stop. I don't do any downshifting unless there's really a need (e.g. I'm towing a trailer and want to keep an excessive load off the brakes). Doing this extends the life of the brakes and makes no difference to the life of the clutch. And rolling down a long grade (your situation), I will drop a gear or two, such that I can coast down at approximately the speed I want without using the brakes. I think 3rd would have worked fine for the grade you took. If you remember seeing any caution signs that said "Grade. Use low gear," that's what that was all about, whether automatic or stick. FAIW, I remember once driving down a grade about that long, but actually much steeper, with sharper curves, in a Dodge Ram 2500 truck, towing a rather heavy 30' camper. The entire rig was 50 ft long. My heart was pounding the entire way, and I needed about an hour at a diner to chill after I reached the bottom. I think I did it in 1st gear (automatic transmission) at approximately 35 - 40 mph, with the engine winding up within maybe 1000-500 RPM of redline. And if I could have avoided that situation, I would have avoided it. Unfortunately there was no warning before I was committed to it -- only a sign telling me I'm in deep @#$% for the next several miles, with no pull-offs available. (Thanks for the useful info, Arkansas!) Nobody was impatient with me. I think everyone on the road understood that doing it any differently could have resulted in someone's death. Mountains are different: Gravity is not your friend. Nobody will fault you for doing what you have to do to stay safe.

The question of whether to engine-brake or not is open to debate ONLY ON FLAT GROUND. Irrespective of whether you drive stick or auto -- and irrespective of whether you're towing a big camper with a big truck, or whether you're just tooling along in a little sports car -- Model T Ford or late model Lexus -- you MUST, MUST let the engine carry the braking load on long, downhill grades. MUST! You commented that you smelled the clutch burning, but I can assure you that wasn't the clutch. It was your brakes, which were probably glowing a dull red. The problem with riding brakes down a long grade is that friction causes heat, which can cause any moisture in your brake fluid fluid to boil. If this happens, the steam fills the lines, resulting in complete hydraulic failure -- NO BRAKES AT ALL, except for your emergency brake handle, of course. (Most emergency brakes are inadequate for a situation like that.) There's a YouTube video somewhere in which someone was offroading in an SUV down a mountain. The brakes failed in this manner, and they had a pretty scary free-rolling descent to the bottom, ending in a crash. You could hear everyone in the SUV screaming as though they were going to die. Nobody was hurt, fortunately. It's unfortunate they didn't teach you this stuff in driver's ed. I second Leon's recommendation for a good course. Hey, no matter how old or experienced you are, there's always something else to learn!

He needs not to be in neutral and riding his brakes all the way down! (The same would be true with an auto transmission -- slow down a bit, and DOWNSHIFT!) This isn't flat track driving; it's mountain driving.

I was wondering about a sticking tensioner too.

Driving steep roads like that, you REALLY need to understand engine braking. You don't WANT to use your brakes (much) on a road like that, because you'll overheat them possibly to the point of failure! You should have ridden it down in maybe 3rd gear. Your spinning engine would have given you vacuum for occasional power braking. FAIW, if I were taking that hill downhill in my 280Z, with my foot off the pedal and the engine spinning way over the 2500 RPM (?) fuel cut limit, the system wouldn't have injected fuel anyway (and therefore wouldn't technically be "running"). I'm glad you're OK. Phew!

Kelly, honestly, if I were you, I'd go with a brand new EGR tube, even though it's expen$$$$ive. You want the tube to last as long as possible. It's a bear to remove (and might even require assistance from a machine shop to do it). You don't want a tube with ANY head start on corrosion. Even if you're not actually doing the work, there can be a lot of labor involved, which of course you pay for.

Instead of power washing, just break out a small scrub brush, some rags, and some WD-40. Use that to clean the engine. Use detergent on painted surfaces. Don't go crazy with the water. The first step after you get the engine running (which will give you some much-needed encouragement) is to verify and/or rebuild your brakes. Stopping is far more important than going -- not as much fun, but definitely more important. Along with your very-important electrical refresh, pay special attention to the fusible links. Also clean all of your fuses/clips and lube very lightly with dielectric grease.

I'm kinda with Kelly on this. The green and gold was groovy! But wow, what a great restoration you're doing!

Check your in-box! I'm not sure if I sent the message correctly (no copy in my "sent" folder).

Hey Kelly, could I beg the crumbly old wheel off of you? All I can find on ebay is wheels in good shape. What I want is a good frame to use for building a (tiger maple ) wooden wheel. What you consider a fair price?

Some nice cars there, but how could I NOT vote for that pretty Z?! There were some very nice Mopars indeed, and who doesn't enjoy a Delorean? And that was a really sweet little '28 (?) Buick. Anyway, yours was definitely in my top 10!

You can get a rebuilt one from an A/C supply shop. However, they often only sell to professional mechanics, which is why you should do your best to sound like a mechanic. Hint: it's just a "compressor," not an "air compressor." (It compresses Freon, not air.)

Cool! A very large leap forward! Don't forget the vacuum line that goes through the passenger firewall and controls the HVAC equipment inside your dash. If your car is like mine, half of those hoses will be split/broken and/or will have fallen off their connectors. You might also have dirt and hardened grease in your mode selector switch (off/vent/heat/defrost/whatever). You can take that vacuum switch apart, clean it, grease lightly with dielectric grease (similar to vacuum grease), and reassemble.

I won't swear to it, but I think there are (local) spring shops that can make you a custom sway bar. At least there was a shop local to me where I lived long ago. They made me a coil spring.

There's some sort of patch material for the flexible bumper covers on modern cars. I think it might be polyurethane based. I have no idea whether it would work -- just tossing out an idea.

Wade, the FSM is among the best I've seen for any car -- well organized, comprehensive, good diagrams. I don't know why you think it's obtuse. If half of the vacuum lines are hanging open, that could result in a rather lean condition, but I agree with Wade that your problems are probably greater than just vacuum lines. The 280's engine isn't particularly complicated. I'd recommend just going over it from end to end. Check and verify each part and move to the next. Pay special attention to the electrical connectors. Get them clean, and goop them with a bit of dielectric grease. The most problematic connectors are on the front of the engine on the thermo housing -- thermotime switch and coolant temp sensor.

There's a vac line that should connect to your distributor advance, and then there's another that runs around the front of the engine and across to the carbon canister cap. Then there's a return hose (fatter) that goes from the cap to the intake. Any open vacuum line is going to cause your engine to run lean. You should go through the entire vacuum system and replace all the hoses, whether they appear to need it or not. Sometimes a line will look perfectly good but will have a crack in it.

Pictures, not part numbers! I paid absolutely no attention to resistance values, so don't order those specific parts. Besides that, I think one of the pics was from Newark Electronics. They have a hellacious minimum order and shipping charge. You can pick up parts like these pretty economically off of ebay if you can't find them in your local Radio Shack. I would guesstimate the resistance you need (which you can measure off of whatever you cobbled up, using a multimeter), and I would double that value and look for the closest even value for a potentiometer. For instance, if you find you need a resistance in the neighborhood of 1.1 kOhm, I'd double to 2.2 and then probably go with either a 2.5 or 2.0 kOhm trim potentiometer. The idea is that you want your adjustment to be comfortably somewhere in the middle of the scale.