Captain Obvious

Nice! Now let's hope you can get at least a year out of it without any significant surprises!! I mean, there will always be surprises, but lets hope for no "big" surprises.

Hahaha!!! So you're going to take the entire car completely apart and go over everything with a fine tooth comb?

Sounds like a plan. Just don't leave the power connected to the injector for very long. The injectors aren't designed to stay open for long periods of time, regardless of what you're powering them with. It's not the voltage that's the problem. It's the amount of current. But the reason a 9V might be safer is that it just simply isn't capable of supplying the vast amount of current that you can pull out of your 12V lead acid car battery. But you're right about the leak... If you're looking for a leak, you won't even need to open the injector. 40 PSI air and dunk it in a container of water and look for bubbles. Of course, seeing the spray pattern is interesting too, but if you're focused on the leak, it might not matter. My prediction? It's an intermittent leak. Sometimes it will close completely, and other times it'll remain open a tiny bit resulting in a "seeping" kind of slow leak.

I'm not coming up with any real easy to fire them using the car as a test mule. I'd be wary of connecting wires to the pins on the ECU connector. That would work, but you have to be very sure that you don't make any sparks there, and if you're making and breaking connections with a wire, you run the risk of making sparks which will damage the connector pins. Order of connection and connection integrity are important. Have the rubber booties on the back of your injector connectors rotted and fallen off yet? If so, you could easily determine which wire goes to the dropping resistor and which wire goes to the ECU. Once you know that, you could stick a wire down into the back side of the injector connector on the ground side and intermittently connect the other end of that wire to ground. Turn the ignition to run, block the AFM open (to get the fuel pump to run), and when you ground the other end of the wire that injector will fire. In fact, three injectors will fire because of the way they are connected together inside the ECU. Two wires on two different injectors and you could get all six to fire. Sorry, not pretty, but that's the best I got.

Cool. I love background info like that. Even if I'm not going to do anything with it. Did you actually measure the taper, or did you determine the value empirically by verifying that the K6024's fit properly?

Thanks guys. I'm no woodworker, but I'm doing my best! The question about stain has an interesting answer... I'm still of the opinion that the original knobs may have been impregnated with a resin of some sort. I've cross-sectioned an original knob to get a good look at un-weathered grain in the middle, and on the inside, the grain and rays are clearly visible. There are no visible air cavities however. Seems completely and totally solid. Also, it's much harder than the rock maple that I'm working with, and when machining a factory knob, I get the distinct odor that you get when you machine most plastics. Thirdly, it's of a significantly higher density than the maple I'm working with. So... With all that in mind, what did I do? Well, I tried to impregnate the wood with resin, of course! I mixed up a concoction of polyurethane sealer and a custom wood stain blend as an attempt to replicate the factory coloring. Then I dunked the wood portion into a small jar and put the whole thing under vacuum to draw air out of the knob. That way, once returned to atmospheric pressure, it would draw the colored polyurethane into the wood to replace the air that was sucked out under vacuum. Poly and stain concoction mixed in small jar: Under vacuum inside my chamber drawing some of the air out of the wood. Bubbles out, poly in: So the answer to the question is that there is some finishing done to the knobs, but maybe not the kind of finish you were imagining?

A while ago I made a couple wooden shift knobs (http://www.classiczcars.com/topic/44856-making-a-wooden-shift-knob/) and while I think they turned out pretty well, I've always knew there was some room for improvement. They were "close" to the original design, but just different enough to bug me. So with that in mind, I set out to make couple more with the intent to see how close I could reproduce the original knob. After a completely unprofitable and unreasonable amount of time, effort, trial and error, and raw materials, this is what I've got. The knob I made from scratch is on the left and the original Datsun knob is on the right. Only catch is that since the shift map from the factory knob was crazed and cracked into multiple pieces, the shift maps in both knobs are reproduction pieces that I made: Here's a side view. Note that my base is real metal instead of metalized plastic: I was on a roll, so I also made another knob to accepy my red 5-speed emblem as well. Here's the happy family: I'm still working out some of the bugs, but I'm pretty happy so far. Under magnification, I can still see some remnants of the damage from the original shift map that I used as a pattern, but I'd challenge the casual viewer to discern the difference between mine and an original factory knob in excellent condition. I don't have an older style 5-speed knob, but if I had one to use as a guide (hint hint), I could probably go through the same process with it as well.

Well if we do decide to go with the substitution route, may I humbly suggest the following: fargincorksuckerbastageiceholedworksomanambatch There are obviously holes in that list, but it's a working start, right?

Awesome! I like the substitutions! I've never seen that before. I mean, I know I don't get out much, but that's a new one to me. I like them more than just replacing everything with asterisks. Since the classic seven now posts different I assume you're still messing around with the substitutions? $^!#, wizz, ****, c***, ****sucker, mother****er, tits And here's a test sentence for ya... I assume my friend d*** (Richard) is still messing around with his petcock.

I'm sure you'll feel all better once you have that timing cover off. Since everything is clean and recently budged, it won't be bad at all. Hang in there!!

Good vibes to ya!! At least you caught it before you went for a drive. Didn't you get some number of miles on the car last time before you realized the tensioner was out of place? This way, at least you'll know that you've got everything into correct position before you button it up.

Yeah, easy money. They're brightly colored, have a reputation for "performance", and are often cheaper than the OEM bushings they replace. Ooooooo... shiny, "better performance", and cheaper to boot! What more could a 20 year old want? Add that to the list of "stage two" mods that he's made to his car and impress all his friends. Easy money! I'm not poo-poing poly at all. It's just that if you don't understand how they're supposed to work, you're likely to cause more problems than you're solving. Suspension is one of my weakest skills and I'm so glad this part came together for me. Really helped me understand some of the bonehead moves I've made in the past.

No lube on the rubber. That's exactly how the rubber bushings are supposed to work. The suspension movement is derived by torqueing the rubber part of the bushings. Here's some pics I whipped up a while ago to try to show how the rubber bushings operate. This is what makes them different in application than poly: http://www.classiczcars.com/topic/49405-front-end-alignment/#entry449585 Lube won't do anything good for you. At worst, it'll do bad things to the rubber. I would grease or anti-seize the bolt going through the center of the bushing just to help prevent it from rusting into place in the future, but for the rubber portion? No. On edit: Here's one of the pics from that other thread just so one resides here as well:

Haha!! Mike, you can delete that post if you'd like after you've got your answer. Happy to be of service.

You can say "Well you've made a perfect arse of yourself tonight. But you can't say Hey... Let's go get some arse!" If I'm remembering correctly, here's the classic original seven from the late great George Carlin: $^!#, wizz, ****, c***, chickenlicker, mother****er, and tits. And just because I like them... Tater-tits. Let's see how many of those make it through!

I've seen the same thing with the urethane bushings. Seems like the people who make those things should be able to figure out how wide to make the bushings and how long to make the internal spacer tube so they work right and don't require excessive crush. Once on my 300ZX I had to use poly (because I needed aftermarket camber adjustment) and I had to remake the spacer tubes myself so they would control the bushing crush a little. The bushings fit snug between the ears (at stock width) before the bolt was tightened, but bound up with the bolt tight. In other words, the bushing width was good, but the spacer tube was too short causing the ears to be pulled in until they were crushing the poly enough to squeeze inward to contact the spacer tube. I'm no suspension guy, but it seems you need some crush on the poly. Just enough to insure no play and maybe a tiny bit more, but certainly not so much as to introduce too much rotating friction.

. Those kinds of conversations happen a lot at my place as I'm often using items for purposes different than their mainstream intent.

I'm guessing that Mike recently had to hunt up and engage the censure controls for the site and may have swung the pendulum a little to the conservative side? Too bad... I find the ** stuff distracting. No doubt a result of the recent unmentionable ZX thread with lots of bad language. I understand the why, I just wish it was unnecessary.

I've also heard they removed them on the 280. So my question is... Did they seal the hatch hinges in some OTHER way on the 280, or are they just letting them rust?

Fantastic idea!! My work here is done. Mission accomplished.

Wow. Glad you caught that one before it was too late! I don't remember the last time I had that sick to the pit of your stomach feeling when you realize that you just screwed up royal and it's irreparable. No no no no no no no nobody's fault but mine! I think the last time I did that was when it was already midnight, the car show was the next morning, and I had just realized that I forgot to slide the flare nut up the brake line before I put the flare on the end. It was already too short... "I did NOT just do that."

Probably the safest way to go. I believe the consensus (of the long thread on HybridZ) is that you can block off the heater core lines completely if you don't want any of the heat in the interior. Don't loop the lines one to the other, but block them. But even if you aren't using a heater core ever, you'll still want to be able to connect something to that water pump inlet because you'll still want some small amount of flow through the thermostat housing so you don't end with a cool stagnant pool. That's what the water through the intake manifold would do for you. In addition to warming the intake manifolds, of course. I guess.... If you're POSITIVE that you've got a bypass hole through the thermostat AND you've got the heater core connections blocked off you could do without that nipple. But you (and all future owners) will have to be sure from that point forward that you've got that bypass hole through the thermostat plate. Not sure it's worth the trouble? You got bigger fish to fry right now anyway, right?

There has been much debate about changing the coolant flow scheme of the engine and many believe that blocking that off completely would be a bad idea. There are two things that normally flow into that smaller inlet nipple: 1) Flow from out of the back of the head, through the heater core, and then into that inlet, and 2) Flow that bypasses the thermostat, goes through the intake manifolds, around the back of the engine, and then into that inlet. Here's a brief discussion the last time a related topic came up. The link to HybridZ will lead to a more in depth discussion: http://www.classiczcars.com/topic/50855-rear-by-pass-water-tube-in-back-of-engine/

Nice chart. I did a little digging into the entomology of the designation numbers and came up blank. Seems like the 31 would be length, but as for the 75, I don't know. If I had to guess, I would say maybe diameter? 7.5mm? So when are your amazon bulbs due? You know... If you don't like the hue, you could pick up one of the warm whites from superbright that I used (the ones with the 2x3 matrix swapped from what you bought) and desolder the LEDs from both and swap them. You got nothing better to do with your time, right?

Yes. Very different horn culture. If you used your horn in the states like they do in Barbados, I can guarantee many many finger salutes though the course of your daily commute! I unfortunately wasn't in Barbados long enough to decipher the differences between greetings, gratitude and anger. I just remember lots of beeping and being overwhelmed with the frequency. I'm assuming (hoping?) that the beeps directed at my taxi driver were the friendly kind. At least most of them...