Walter Moore

So, 2Many... how does one go about matching the combustion chamber shape to the exaust setup? I only ask because... well read my signature line. :cheeky:

You know... The funny thing is that just this past Saturday some "Kid" (May have been 25 you know... ) pulled up in the alley behind the house and ask "Say does that little car you are working on there in the garage need a V8? I have a small block for sale. It is in a Malibu station wagon right now, but I need to sell it to pay for my new wheels and tires. It makes like 450HP, is a 350, bored .060 oversize...." Well you get the drift. Apparently he didn't notice the completely rebuilt and repainted L24 sitting on the engine stand right next to the car. Such a deal... but I had to turn him down. Can't blame him for trying.

I am just going from memory here, so someone correct me if I am wrong... What you have on the engine now is actually 2 separate pulleys. The front one is basically just held on by the mounting bold, and is powered for rotation by the heads of two socket-heat cap screws (Allen-bolts). Any standard wheel puller should just pop it straight off, but you may need to push against the original mounting bolt, because the hole in the first pulley is just large enough for the mounting bolt to pass through. The back pully is actually a harmonic balancer for the engine. It has a keyway in the balance pully and another in the crankshaft with a steel key between them to maintain angular alignment. To remove that thing you need to remove the two socket head cap screws, and use those tapped holes with an appropriate wheel puller. Any good auto parts store will have the tools that you need.

I don't have exact numbers, but I remember that when I lifted mine I discovered that it weights a lot more than I expected it would. Just a WAG... but I would say in the range of 50 - 75 lbs. Could be less, I am not all that strong.

Gosh! Has it really been four months since I started on the rear spindle pin project? I still haven't gotten the rear suspension back together, but that is because I have been working too much. I just wanted to post this "for the record". It turns out that the reason I could not get the spindle pins out of my struts was that somehow the pins had become swagged in place right where the lock bolts went through. They were not rusted in place as I suspected... I ended up cutting the pins with a sawsall, and taking the whole mess to a machine shop. The owner, a former co-worker who I trust, told me that he had to use a 30 ton press to get the old pins out of each strut, and it was a hard press at that. When it was done, you could see where the metal had sheared off of the old pin right at the lock bolt. (couldn't have been my fault on the right side, since I never even removed the outer nuts on that one.) Must have been a screw-up by a previous owner, or an inexperienced mechanic.

Amazing! A Z car that is actually in worse shape than mine was when I found it... :stupid:

First, I am not an attorney, and do not claim to know the laws in your state. Second, Everything that I am about to tell you is true in Indiana, but may or may not be true in Georgia. Consult a real attorney before you go to court. HERE (in Indiana...) the charge of driving without a license does NOT mean that you were driving without that little plastic laminated certificate issued by your state of residence on your person. It means that you were operating a motor vehicle without first having been issued a license at all (having an expired license is a separate offense...) If in point of fact you WERE issued a license, before the accident and bring it with you to court, in this state they would either dismiss the charge, or change it to some lesser offense. (a conviction for driving without a license will send your insurance rates out of sight.) The same is true (at least here in Indiana...) for the driving without insurance charge. If you actually did have insurance in force at the time of the accident, and can prove that, the court will dismiss the charge. Actually here you would not have recieved a ticket for failure to show proof of insurance. The officer would have handed you a form that has to be filled out by your insurance agent <and notorized> which form has to be recieved by the bureau of motor vehicles within 10 business days of the accident, or your license is automatically suspended. My wife has had to go through that little dance for accidents where she was in no way at fault. (we don't even get to plead with a judge about it.) As for the following too close charge... you already proved the man's point. Just my opinon.

You didn't specify your location... Dry areas are different from wet areas which are different from salty areas. I thought that I should add here that I am in the middle of re-building the brakes (among other things... ) on a car that had been "sitting for several years" and I ended up replacing ALL the hard steel brake lines because they were rusted completely away. Now I am replacing the fuel lines, vaccum lines, etc... (When I pulled several of these pipes off of the car they literally crumbled in my hand... The price for living in the rust belt I guess.)

The link above will tell you more than you ever wanted to know.

What he said!!! Sorry, I forgot that the arm is a left hand thread... but actually only one of them is left hand thread I think. Unless I am remembering wrong, the driver's side is left hand thread and the passenger side is right hand thread. (or was it the other way around...) (Sides as viewed on a U.S. car... sorry all you RHD folks, but we "Yanks" are so self absorbed...) The tie rod end is the cast looking thing that has the ball joint in it. At the inside end of it (Which is hidden under your dust boot in the picture) there is a flat on the tie rod end and a lock nut. You have to twist them in opposite directions to get the tie rod end loose. They didn't look as rusty as mine were, so you might have just been turning them they wrong way. Had you already changed the other side?

Yes, it is very possible to break bolts of the size that attach to the tie rod ends by using a breaker bar. That is why I really recommend heating the tie rod end. By heating the outside of the assembly it expands and loosens the nut and tie rod end. I do not know if just heating it with a regular propane torch will do the job, but trying to twist loose a heavily rusted bold is a quick ticket to a broken bolt. If you really can not heat the thing, try soaking it in a bucket of diesel fuel or light oil overnight. I don't know that it will work, but it is a lot better than having to replace the steering rack ends.

Without a torch you might be in trouble. I had to heat mine red hot with an oxygen-MAPP gas torch to even get them to budge. But the amazing thing is that if you get it really hot, the lock nut usually is totally loose. (and it melts the rust completely away.) torches are smelly, and expensive, but for some jobs nothing else works.

An original E31 that has never been touched? When I took my E31 off the engine to see why it had no compression, the brass seats were beat down into the head... I really doubt that those things would hold up to unleaded gas. But then I have a hard time believing that brass valve seats would hold up at all. When I had it re-done I had to upsize to the larger intake valves, (sniff, sniff, let me wipe away these crocodile tears...) because the brass seats have to be cut out. Which is why there are no replacement seats for the original, small valves... But for those who have the later heads, I doubt that unleaded gas is going to reduce the useful life of the valves by much.

On a fuel injected engine a high idle is often associated with an air leak in or around the intake manifold. This could also make the engine's fuel/air mixture run lean which would make it run hot. One of the most frightening experences that I ever had was when the vaccum line to the power brake booster on my old Volvo 164E broke off just as I was approaching a stop light. The engine speed jumped to 2000 or 3000 RPM and the brakes felt like they were not there... If I hadn't pushed the automatic transmission into neutral and used both feet on the brakes it would have been ugly. On a Z, The studs that attached the exaust manifold or header are also used to hold the bottom side of the intake manifold in place. I know that on my car three of them broke off inside the head when I removed the manifolds, and I gather that this is a common problem. Perhaps after the exaust guy attached the header one of those studs snapped and he just didn't notice it. Or he could have forgotten to tighten one of the nuts. In either case, since you say that the car's performance went bad when the header was installed, and since the symptoms match what one would expect from an intake manifold leak. I would look there first.

There are a lot of houses around here where the garage is in the basement. Most of them are older however, before people discovered that carbon monoxide was a bad thing... But I agree, that thing looks like it has been used way more than 4k miles. By the way, what was the original color of the engine on a Z? Some of the parts on mine were a blue color, and the closest match that I could find in engine paint at Walmart was GM corporate blue. Am I way off on the color? (Not that I am likely to hurt myself if I am you understand...)

Paddles on the wheel? Dream on... unless you have some spare high speed servos handy...

For the record I removed the paint from my 71 with 36 grit sandpaper and a 7" disk sander. But then the body on my car is so beat up that there was very little concern about warping... In fact nearly 25% of the surface of the car was covered with bondo, so paint stripper would have been on very little value. A friend, now dead, who worked in a string of body shops over the years recommended sanding the paint off. His exact words were "Just 40 it." Which he later explained meant to remove the paint with 40 grit sand paper. Of course I was doing this in the dead of winter, in a poorly heated garage where the temperature never got up to 45 degrees F, so heat was the least of my problems.

I have searched the forums (too late...) looking for information on removing the spindle pins that connect the rear struts to their lower control arm. It sounds like I am in trouble here. I tried to follow the Haynes manual, and when I got to the part where it said to "pull" the spindle pin out it would not come, so I tried to convince it with a 12 pound sledge hammer... To make a long story short, I have now completely snapped off the entire threaded end on one side, and have literally beaten the other side's threads off. I heated the lower spindle housing with a torch and got it so hot that I caught the bushings on fire, and that stupid pin just sits there laughing at me. :mad: So, is my next step a hacksaw/angle grinder, or is there a better way? There was some discussion of removing the entire lower control arm. How difficult is that? How likely am I to end up with even more broken fasteners in that attempt?

I have bought quite a few interior parts on Ebay. Other than that I haven't found many. At least not in my price range. I have heard of other sources, but can not recommend them.

Just a quick comment without trying to start another fight here... G.M. is currently phasing out all of their V6 truck engines in favor of double overhead cam inline 6s (and 5s). They are smoother, lighter, and deliever more power from a similar displacement, so not all V6 engines are better than all I6 engines. Of course the new "G.M" engines are Isuzu designs...

Thanks, at least one answer was what I wanted to hear... I really hate the thought of pulling those front struts off and tearing them apart again, but I guess better now than after I get the fenders back on.

I have a couple of questions. I am afraid that I already know the answers, but here we go. First, Did the 71 240Z have a rear sway bar? The reason that I ask (obviously...) is that mine doesn't, and the Haynes manual shows one. I discovered this when I finally got around to starting the process of replacing the rear strut insert. The second question is: Does the STOCK front strut assembly have bump-stops? Again I ask because I realized AFTER I got both front strut inserts replaced that there were no rubber bump stops present. In this case the Haynes manual does NOT show bump stops on the 240Z strut. Only the diagram for the 260Z shows a rubber bump stop, but all the aftermarket catalogs seem to imply that they should be installed on all models of the Z cars. I am not sure where bump stops would even fit on my 240, because there is a pretty deep recess in the upper spring retainer housing and it would take a long spacer to get past the steel part.

I tried to install a "NOS" (new old stock) cork gasket on my L24 the other day. But by the time I got the bolts to the 7lb-ft of torque listed in the Haynes manual, I noticed that there was an awful lot of gasket sticking out all the way around... After I took the pan back off I realized why. The cork was OLD {that is why they call it new-old-stock I guess...} and the sealing ridge in the center of the oil pan's gasket surface just cut the sucker in half. (Two gaskets for the price of one I guess, so why am I complaining?) I bought a rubber one at the local parts store, put a really thin even coat of that blue gasket goop on both sides, and it stayed in place just fine all the way to the full 7lb-ft. Does it leak you ask? Ask me again in a few months when I get the engine back in the car...

Sorry guys, but anyone who thinks that 30 years ago it was any different in regard to the percentage of "performance" upgrades that were just junk for the looks of it are forgetting: "Mag" wheel hubcaps. Sick-on hood scoops. Lift kits (for leaf springs. How many of you know what those are? My S10 has leaf springs, and the wheel hop to prove it...) "Traction bars" (What ever those did, or were aledged to do... might have had something to do with leaf springs, or wheel hop. Yuck!!) The entire 74 to 78 production run of the Mustang II (How soon we forget. In the case of the Mustang II we can't forget soon enough.) Even if lift kits and traction bars had some purpose, I know that removing them from my 72 Pinto (with a whopping 47 HP) didn't hurt a thing.

Just about any tire and wheel assembly can be balanced off the car. The wheels for ALL new cars are balanced on an assembly line conveyor system immediately after the tires are mounted on them, a long way from where they are bolted to the car. Frequently they are actually balanced in a totally separate factory by the out-sourcing company that mounts the tires to the wheels. I should know, I have worked for companies that build balancing equipment for more than 20 years. If as you say you couldn't get rid of the wheel shake except to balance the wheels with them attached to the vehicle then there is a problem with either one of the wheels, or with a hub, rotor, or brake drum. Are your existing wheels OEM, or aftermarket? Most aftermarket wheels have an oversized centerbore to accomidate a wide range of vehicles. When wheels are balanced on a free-standing machine the wheel is located by this centerbore, and the balance measurements are taken from that centerline. When a wheel with the correct centerbore diameter is mounted on a car, the pilot of the hub engages the wheel by the centerbore and aligns to the same centerline that was used on the balancer. (There is some interference between the centerbore and the wheel studs, but mostly it locates by the centerbore.) But when a wheel with an oversized centerbore is bolted in place, the centerbore clears the center alignment pilot on the hub all the way around, and the wheel ends up centered on the lug hole pattern instead. If the centerline of the wheel's lug hole pattern is as little as 0.005" out of alignment with the centerline of the hub you will experience vibration at highway speeds. The car companies all have pretty rigid standards for the wheels that they buy, so OEM wheels are usually fairly easy to balance. (Aluminum wheels more so than steel ones.) I hate to mention this, but a lot of aftermarket wheels are... well... let's just say that in the U.S. there aren't any government requirements that aftermarket wheels be checked for runout, or that the centerline of the lug hole pattern be concentric with the center pilot hole. If it will safely hold air, bolt in place, and support the weight of the car it's typically good enough to sell. (And the price tag of the wheel doesn't tell you very much about the runout either.) It is also common for brake rotors and brake drums to be out of balance, particularly when they get old. Usually however it takes a lot of imbalance in a brake part to produce significant vibration. Balancing the "wheels" on the vehicle will compensate for all these problems, temporarily. If you buy new wheels you should attempt to get wheels with a pilot ( center bore ) diameter that is appropriate for the car. Because if on even one hub you have say a bent wheel stud that moves the effective centerline of the bolt pattern off center, and you install a new wheel with an oversized pilot hole on that hub the problem will still be there. Those wheel adapters that I see on Ebay all the time that let you put Honda wheels on your Z (I am sorely tempted...) could also cause this problem if you had one that was improperly made, or not mounted correctly. When you space the wheel out 40mm, it is almost a sure thing that the hub's pilot isn't doing anything for you. Sorry I got so long winded there. Walter Moore