LanceM

Ok, Looked at your pic again then my car to be sure. Pull the dog leg trim panel off from the inside and take a look with a good light down through one of the holes there. I think you may find that you have some serious problems inside. probably a hole through from the front of the wheelwell into that lower rocker area. I don't think there is a drain hole there so if anything gets in it stays and rots... The problem with that area is that I don't think there are replacement panels available, you either have to fab something up or find a good doner car to cut the inner/outer panels from...

I think you are yet to see the really bad part. I would sugest cutting into that and see what is going on inside, maybe more than just a little sheetmetal replacement. If the pic is where I think it is, there could be a whole lot of work waiting inside.... I would guess 14 gauge, .080" thick. 16 gauge is .062.

I have mine apart there currently and no foam, nothing but steel in the whole compartment besides the wiper motor. My whole area there was a nightmare, found that the mice had been using it for a bathroom for the 15 years the car was stored!!! Pulled out 5 pounds of $hit and after hours of cleaning, scraping, sanding got the mess and rust cleaned up. I am using a rust converter made by Permatex, Don't know if it is available in NZ but in my limited testing seems to work well at stoping rust.

I have 235/60-14 all the way around on 6 3/4" rims, no clearance issues.

Got me on that one, I was thinking old days, bench seats, long shifter handles, cut it off and weld on a bolt screw on a knob and reach over the seat to shift! Not Z, where the knob could stick out of the console and be in easy reach

Don't know what the stock lenght is but a shorter shifter will make for faster shift times, but it will also reduce your leverage, not that leverage should be a problem with a healthy transmission. To visulize what a shorter shifter will do for you, draw a 10" diameter circle and divide it in let's say 4's for the example, measure between two of the points where they cross the circle, now draw a 6" circle and do the same thing. By using a shorter shifter you have effectivly reduced the circle and so reduced the travel between two points. I remember in high school a guy had a shifter in a chevelle that was pretty much a ball sticking out of the floor, talk about a short and fast shift! If I remember right he blew alot of second gears too! With the Z's short stick taking off an inch or so will probably make it feel crisper but if you are young with good reflexes your shift times probably won't change enough to notice time wise. One thing I would think about is if the stick was shorter would you have to lean forward to pull to second or push to third? If you would any benifit would probably be lost.

Yes scary and nuts, like I said "don't try this at home" It didn't make it through the gallon of gas before it froze up. Man was it screaming though, had to be running 12K + with WOT and no load! And it ran for what seemed like a long time, we figured it would just over rev and blow, when it didn't we ah, sort of started running It didn't blow either, at least nothing sticking out anywhere, it just stopped, dead in an instant. We never looked but always figured we spun some of the main bearings. Ah to be young and wild again, well ok, maybe not So Texasz, your experiance shows that the only thing to do is a leakdown test if it is on a stand. Probably the best test anyway since the results are more specific if there are problems that need to be figured out.

Here's a link to a homemade leak down tester http://www.xs11.com/tips/misc/misc3.shtml Perhaps you know someone who has a compessor you could borrow? Looking at the leakdown tester I would say that the air volume required is extreamly low, perhaps one of those 12V ones for blowing up tires would be enough to get the job done without a big outlay of $ and be useful later on. Or another thought is a small air tank, they are not that expensive and you could fill it at a gas station as required. Here's a wild thought, since you'll have it on a stand with the flywheel off you can't use a starter, how about a 1/2" drill driving a socket on the front of the crank? With all of the plugs out and checking the compression on just one cylinder at a time I bet the drill would turn it fast enough. Take a cheap 3/8" extention and cut off the ratchet end so it will go in the drill, 3/8 to 1/2 adapter and plug on your 27mm socket and go! Know anybody with a 1/2" drill? If the engine is complete and ready to drop in, carbs, starter, fan, etc, something I've done and falls into the highly not recommended catagory is bolt it to a couple of hunks of 6 x 6 with a chunk under the back to hold the flywheel off the ground. Hot wire the ignition, stick the line from the fuel pump in a gallon can and use jumper cables to start it up. If you are going to run it very long a garden hose shoved in the bottom inlet works fine, but makes a mess Great way to check for bad spark plug wire Like I said this falls into the "don't try this at home kids" catagory but is a way to see if it will run. The neighbors will love the sound of that short stack exhaust I must say though when I did this it was a duration test, wired the throttle wide open, no water, and let it go. I didn't think it was ever going to quit, gotta love them Datsun engines! Don't flame me too bad here, that was 25-30 years ago, there were plenty of them around then.... OK, ya done run me out of ways to check it without putting it in a car or tearing it down..... who knows maybe one of them might really work!

Glovebox is the way to go. I also found that the plastic insert (glovebox) from a 81 280ZX can be made to work as a very nice but not stock replacement.

I'm pretty certain that the car came with cast iron from the factory. Few engines come originally with chrome from the factory, the only one I can think of off hand is the old Pontiac 455. Chrome rings are harder than cast iron and will last longer but can be a bear to seat. I've heard of cases where chrome rings never seated. I would go with the cast iron, that's probably what you would have gotten from the dealer if he still stocked them. Properly fitted they should give you good long service.

What kind of rings are you wanting to put in if not cast iron? Chrome?

I think the colors are important more than the style or placement of the stripes. Done right I think they really add to the cars styling, but in the wrong color they seem to pull your eye away from the lines of the car and it seems to become just another car with stripes...

Does it start and run well at 10? Then that's a good place to set it. If you want to play a bit and see if more is better read my post above and work from there. Every car is different, what is good for one won't work for another.

Gee I didn't think the 5 minutes it took to make the adapter much of a bother Just kidding If you don't have a welder then buying one is the way to go. That's one of those items I never looked to see if they sold! I've made so many over the years I think I have one that will about fit anything. Always seem to have old spark plugs laying around and a bag full of fittings, must be something about being handy and cheap, or cheap and handy, or maybe it good that I'm handy because I'm cheap :0

That price is about right for new, you may be able to save $100 by shopping around. Your best bet is to watch ebay, typical price going there is around $700 or so for used. Thing to remember is that in order for the webbers to work well you need to do head, cam, and exhaust work. Otherwise you will just have an expencive engine decoration that gives you poor performance and bad gas mileage....

Depending upon the tool you use to remove the keepers you may or may not have to remove the cam. In any case you are going to have to hold the valves closed somehow. The tubing as mentioned above may work but I don't like the idea of sticking something in a cylinder that I may not be able to get out. I once used the old trick of using clothes line in the cylinder to keep the engine from rotating while trying to break free some flywheel bolts, damn clothesline got cut and I had a hell of a time getting it out with out pulling the head! Won't ever do that again!!! My suggestion is to take an airline coupler (quick disconnect male end) and an old spark plug. Knock the porcelin out of the plug and weld in the coupler. Place it in the sparkplug hole, remove the rockers so the valves are closed and then pressurize the cylinder with your compressor. As long as the air line is hooked up the valves will stay closed. Do your work then move the adapter to the next cylinder. That way nothing gets into the cylinder but compressed air!

Good deal that is all that it was. In my pre z life (chevy, pontiac) we always spun the pump useing a drill and an old distributor shaft to get things primed along with we always packed the pump with light grease (vasileane?) to be sure it would prime. I'm sure the writer didn't mean to leave it out, sometimes there are just things you take for granted that everyone knows, even though they don't! At least on a Z you don't have to drop the pan to get to the pump!!

Not the same thing in this case, I don't think. It's one of those "you'd have to see it" items. It was a 3 armed flat plastic disk with a bearing ball at the end of each arm, this fit between the breaker plate, for lack of a better term, and the mounting plate, allowing the vacumum advance to easily move the breaker plate which is spring loaded to apply down force between the breaker plate and the mounting plate from below. Sort of a micky mouse arrangement looking at it now, but then, they probably didn't figure anyone would be using it 20 years later. The plastic has become brittle from years of heat and just age, I'm sure when it was new it was much more pliable. Since I have locked the breaker plate in place it wouldn't have been used anyway and the brass shims give it a much more stable base than what it would have had with the plastic anyways.

Never mind, figured it all out. I cut a brass shim to replace the plastic, now that everything is even I can see that there is no adjustment. Seeing how things are suppose to be I'm amazed that the car I took it out of was running! If one more little piece of that plastic part had come out, the distributer would have crashed! Sure am glad I decided to take it apart and clean it up first, I would not have been happy to have installed it and then have it break down the road somewhere!!!

Well I've got a 81 ZX dizzy (modual on the side) that I want to put into my 240, I wanted to clean it up before I install it. I took it apart and found that a plastic bearing holder? had pretty much come apart/disappeared. What is this for? It looks like it is part of the vacumum advance. Can I just put a shim in the right thickness and forget about it since I'm not using the V advance? And are they're any adjustments I need to make when I reassemble it? My manuals only show 240-260 so there isn't anything this new in them...

I am currently polising a set like that. To get the centers polished you have to sand the milling marks off. It isn't as hard as it sounds and really dosen't take long. Using wet dry paper wet I start with 320 and work up to 1500, from there I use Mother's aluminum polish on a buffing wheel in an electric drill, they come out looking like crome. One thing I found that was a problem with getting them to shine was the clear coat that was put on by the factory. Regular paint stripper was used to get it off first. When I'm done I will either recoat them with clear or just figure on polishing them once in a while. I did 2 wheels sunday, and they were pretty ratty to start with, I may get around to the other two this weekend if the weather stays cold and rainy.

OK, You are talking a different animal that what I was. On an empty body I would use more than 4 stands. But to pull a car off the stands pulling yourself up from a sitting position you'd have to admit that it wasn't on very good empty or full....

Yep, The first and I mean first thing I do is try to yank, wiggle, and shake a car off of jack stands. If it moves at all then they are not right and need to be repositioned somehow, and until all 180 pounds of me can't push it off the jackstands trying, and I mean trying, in every way before I climb underneath. That and I got rid of the cheapies 20 years ago, bought some good heavy ones that have wide bases and could hold the car up indivually if it would balance If you have the stands in the right place you can not push it off, it is as solid as being on 4 wheels, OK yeah a forklift into the side.... I don't want anything moving except what I'm yanking on when I'm under a car! My head popping like a watermelon under a frame rail is not the last thing I want to hear in my lifetime!!!

I wouldn't want to stick my nuts not to mention my bolt in anything like that !!! Sorry just had to say it Tumbling would be a slow process, and remember that the rust you remove is the metal from the item itself. So when you are done you will have no rust but pits where the rust was. It will also remove any plating that was left on the part so as soon as it sees moisture it will start rusting again... I would have to agree that if you are thinking nuts and bolts, new are cheaper and are better than cleaned up old rusted ones.

Here's a 3.90 R200 on Ebay http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2434251621