Walter Moore

I tend to agree. If you want to buy a 240Z because you want to drive it, then get the best condition on that you can afford. I took the other route. I paid $250 for the Z that sits in my garage, and basement, and office, and... but ONLY because I wanted a project, and did not care if I ever got to drive it. I have alread spend WAY more than I ever intended, and I still haven't finished re-assembling the engine. (Actually, with a couple of teenage boys in the family, the longer it takes to get it running the better.:stupid: )

You might also try bolt depot: http://www.boltdepot.com/ I just bought a whole bunch of metric bolts from them. They will sell individual bolts, any size or grade.

I have not bought a carpet kit from these people, but they sell a lot of Zcar items on Ebay and I know that they do have carpet kits for the Z car: http://www.datsunrestore.com/catalog.html You might look into them as well.

I hadn't considered it, but having a Stainless clutch hose could be a problem if you had a bad ground. Stainless steel is an nickel-chromium-iron alloy, and is a very poor conductor indeed. Actually the "Ni-Chrome" wire in an electric heater is basically stainless steel, or something very close to it. (For those of you who live in California or Florida an electric heater is something that you plug into the wall to stay warm when it is cold outside... Just thought that I should clarify that...)

I LOVE my impact driver! The only way to remove rusted in philips head screws.

Cool, 12 to 15 lb-ft... So I guessed right for once! Whew!

Yes, back in '71 the shoulder belt attached to the clip of the lap belt. It was considered optional. They were horrible from a comfort standpoint beause they didn't have retractors, and constantly cut into your neck. When cars came from the dealership the shoulder belt was clipped to the ceiling above the door. (Which is exactly where 90% of them stayed for the life of the car...) There was a full set of belts for sale on Ebay that you could have looked at as a reference, but the auction ended today. If you look above the side window behind the door post there is a bolt hole. (10mm or 12mm something like that.) This bolt was what attached the shoulder strap to the frame. If I remember correctly it is near the back of the window, almost to the opening for the hatchback. It will take really long seat belts to use the original mounting locations. I have a similar problem. My car has NO seat belts at the moment. It isn't a problem since it doesn't run, but I will have to install aftermarket belts eventually. I know that JCWhitney sells seat belt kits, but I haven't yet tried to seriously research other options.

The local machine shop that installed my new valve seats removed the cam towers from my cylinder head. He said that the Haynes manual was wrong, and that so long as I was careful to re-align the cam shaft correctly when I reassembled the head there shouldn't be any problem. (He did mark the towers for position and re-attach them finger tight before giving me back the head.) (See similar comments by JMT240KGTR in a previous post.) BUT for some reason, perhaps related to their stand on not removing the things..., the Haynes manual does not list a torque setting for the bolts that hold the things in place. I have the cam back in the head, and it is lined up perfectly as near as I can tell. It turns freely, just like when I took the head apart. I am absolutely paranoid about stripping bolts on an aluminum head (been there, done that...) so I have only torqued the bolts to 13 lb-ft (1.8 Kg-m) which is the torque setting recomended for the fuel pump. (It is a similar sized bolt.) Does anyone know the correct torque setting for these bolts?

Well you know what P.T.Barnum said... (or is credited with saying.) That is a pretty obvious phony slab sided body kit. I do hope that "lsrcap" is happy with it. Or is the name of the winning bidder some sort of joke? "I scrap"? "Its cr*p"? Not likely I know... but there is always hope.

Just 2 quick observations: 1. The rear brake drums are aluminum, so a cutting torch is a really BAD idea. (The fuel in the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle is powered aluminum) 2. When I bought my Z the drums were in the back, and one of them had been literally torn apart by someone who removed it from the car with a big hammer. (At least I hope and pray that the braking surface wasn't ripped from the mounting surface by something that happend while the car was in motion...)

Actually, if you read the fine print that $248 price is for (2) seats, at least I think that is what is says, so that is about 1/2 of what Motorsport is asking, even after shipping. Not that I have $328 burning a hole in my pocket... A hole in my pocket yes, but that is mostly from buying parts to restore my Z... :stupid:

I just got my E31 cylinder head back from the machine shop last week. As was mentioned earlier, they came with brass seats on the intake valves. Not that it is likely to be a big deal with you, since you intend to port the head anyway, but the original valves were smaller, 42mm, than the valves in the later engines. So far as I have been able to determine only the larger intake seats, 44mm, are available now. The machinest who reworked my E31 said that it wasn't really possible to install the small seats anyway, because the brass seats have to be cut out of the head, with the result that the seat opening will become slightly larger. (Steel seats are easier to remove. Just head the head to 300 degrees F, and they fall out, or so he claims...) And of course, larger valve seats will require larger intake valves... For some reason the exaust valves in my car were smaller as well, 33mm versus 35mm. Happily for me, I found a bunch of valves on Ebay cheap and was able to use those rather than buying new ones.

Has anyone here ever tried to install these seats in a 240Z: http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2442732906&category=33701 I am not sure that I want them, but comparing that price to the cost of re-doing my existing seats, it doesn't look bad. (Existing seats == 30 years of neglect and bad storage...) Just asking...

Actually Bakelite was invented in England in the 1860s... Originally it was made from coal dust, and other stuff. As a thermosetting plastic it is essentially unrepairable, and can not be recycled.

Somewhere on this site there is a thread about my problems opening the rear hatch on my 240... I hope that you don't have the same problem. Long story short, my car had been in storage for 10 - 15 years, and the rear hatch door latch was rusted in the closed position. The latch was actually released, but the toggle was rusted so badly that it just would not open. I had to resort to drastic measures to open the hatch, and my latch mechanism is still soaking in a batch of ATF... (Until every last rust crystal is gone...:devious: ) I hope you have better luck. But then few places are as "rusty" has Indiana...

Actually, I just bought bulk brake lines at the local Advance Auto Parts and am in the process of bending them by hand to fit. Or I would be doing that, if I wasn't working 70 hour weeks to try to get a huge project finished at work... :mad: Oh well, I guess it pays for the parts...

Just my opinon, but I suspect that the "11mm" hex fittings that you have aren't 11mm. They are more likely 7/16 in flare nuts with metric threads... (7/16" = 11.11mm, the wrenches are interchangeable.) I didn't think to check the lines that I bought, but they might be SAE-Metric hybrids as well... for me that is fine, but I agree that on a "restoration" that would not go over well.

The shunt is the low resistance resistor across which the amp meter measures a voltageto derermine the current in the charging circuit. If you have an ohm meter, there should be very little (practically zero) resistance across the leads of the amp meter. (Does anyone know if the shunt is internal or external on the Z Amp meters?)

At least in the U.S. the real reason that nearly all cars have EFI is that it is almost impossible to meet the emission laws with a carb. The wonderful unintended result of that is that the new cars are significantly easier to start and drive than the old ones were. (Particularly Ford products...) Most of the people that I know who turn street cars into race cars convert them to carbs, but only to increase the airflow through the engine. The problem with that is that they have to have all sorts of instruments, like barometers, relative humitity gages, etc. because they have to constantly re-adjust the carbs for the current conditions. (Which is the original source of the Indy 500's "Carbration day" the Thursday before the race.) Carbrators can actually only be adjusted to operate perfectly at one temperature, barometeric pressure, and humitity level. Which is the real reason that the older cars never seemed to run quite right, their carbs were set for a middle of the road setting and only sort of worked the rest of the time. (Except Fords, which never worked right unless you yanked off the Motorcraft carb and replaced it with a Holly.) As for the "restriction" of the venturi, all Otto cycle engines (Including fuel injected ones...) REQUIRE a restriction in the intake path to control the speed of the engine. That is the purpose of the throttle plate. (As opposed to Diesel engines that have no restriction in the intake.) It is still possible to buy huge carbs, like 950 - 1000 SCFM units that would absolutely flood a 2.8L engine. But what is the point? If you really believe that EFI doesn't restrict the air flow, go pick-up one of the "Mustang" magazines at a book store and look at all the adds for "Oversized Throttle body" kits for the multipoint EFI that Ford put on those cars. My opinon is that if you are going to run it on the street, and your car's electrical system is intact, you will be happier with the driveability of the EFI system. Mine is going to have the dual SUs that it came with when I get it running, because that is all I have. Besides, it isn't going to be a daily driver, and the funky carb based operation is part of the experience ;-)

Actually, I was able to find the hard steel brake lines at the local Advance Auto Parts store. They are straight tubes that you have to bend yourself, but they weren't particularly expensive. (Buy a tubing bender... and maybe an extra line...) I don't know about the rear lines yet....

For what it is worth, the story that I have read many times since they banned leaded gas in the U.S. is that the U.S. Army tested unleaded gas in their older vehicles back in the 1970s and determined that for a car with any significant mileage already on it using leaded gas, running it on unleaded gas did not "significantly" shorten its useful life. Of course since then the army has switched all its vehicles to run on jet fuel, so I do no know what they meant when they said its useful life... I know that I have run some pre-catalist cars on unleaded gas for years with no ill effects, but that is no guarantee of anything. My OPNION, with little to back it up is that the worst thing that could happen using unleaded gas on an old head is to burn the valves, but if you have to rebuild the head to prevent that... is it that much different to just wait and rebuild it afterward? (Spoken by someone who has to rebuild his head anyway...)

Are the brackets that attach the front bumper on a 240Z straight or curved. When I bought my 71 it had been in an accident of some kind and the front bumper was missing. I assumed that the bumper brackets were bent in the collision, but now I see the following for sale on Ebay... http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2413188378&category=33640 and those look just like the ones that I have... except that mine are rusty of course... I do live in Indiana. Are they supposed to be that shape?

As near as I can tell my '71 does not have any rear speakers. Of course it also doesn't have a radio, or a whole lot of other things that WORKING automobiles are known to contain.

I don't live in CA, so take my opinon for what it is worth... but I seriously doubt that any environmentalist would accept a bill that allowed people to opt out of an emission test by mailing in an easily faked photograph of SOME odometer reading. More likely I suspect you will be up against one of the following: Best case, you have to drive the car to the testing site every year where an "impartial" governmental agent certifies that: 1. Your odometer is in good working order. 2. The mileage recorded in the past 12 months is less than the (ever shorter...) distance permitted. Worst cast, the 12K mileage exception is an "affirmative defense" meaning that you still have to get the car tested, and pay for the test, but if it fails you can play the mileage exception like a get out of jail free card. (After the impartial govermental agent certifies items 1 and 2 from the best case above... Good luck. :-)

Any discussion of the 240Z in the U.S. is incomplete if it fails to take into account the fact that the U.S. "Baby Boom" generation, those born in the halcion days just after WWII, were just reaching their young adult years at the time the Z was introduced. The boomers shaped most of the buying patterns in the states from the late 60's to today. At that point they were mostly young, un-married, and making what were incredible wages, adjusted for inflation. They were, and most remain today, spoiled, self-indulgent, and self-centered. Two seater sports cars were just the ticket to stroke their already inflated egos. I ought to know... being born in 1960 means that "I are one..." Just barely however...