jmortensen

Gotta disagree here. I love old Broncos. Ford 9 in back Dana 44 (in the later ones) in front, V8 power, short wheelbase. Great off road truck. Maybe not a great commuter, but a great rock crawler/trail rig.

I'm sure there are hundreds on Hybrid Z that have run rod ended rear LCAs on the street, you might have better luck there. FWIW, I ran the front with rod ends and had no trouble, and have never heard anyone complain.

Ouch. Sounds like you bought a NEW one... What does that make you? My first car was a 79 Mustang, smurf blue with smurf blue vinyl interior and plastic wood paneling. Bought at silent auction from my high school autoshop. I won the auction and went to get it running and rebuilt the carb which had 13,578 vacuum hoses attached to it. I carefully labeled each hose and it's fitting on the carb, then dipped the carb to clean it and cleaned off all of my vacuum hose marks. Doh! I tried several times to get the thing figured out but it always ran on 3 cylinders. It was a dead heat between my car and my friend's VW diesel rabbit, so that was fun. We drag raced everywhere and people were probably stuck behind us complaining how slow we were going. I think 0-60 was ~23 seconds.

Jay Hitchcock is the owner. Hybrid Z member, not sure if he's a member here. Body kit is a Reaction Research YZ kit.

It has 3 holes in it so it fits regardless of what position the diff is in. At least the one I got from roostmonkey fits in my 70...

I think expecting some dude at MSD to know how to wire your Triumph/Ferrari/Datsun/Yugo/Citroen/whatever is a bit of a high expectation. I'm surprised that nobody with a 280 and MSD has piped up to help you, because I'm sure they are out there. I would guess that if you can't use the built in module that you can get the signal from the coil, as that would still leave the stock ignition circuit intact and triggering the FI.

The alignment tech, if he knows what he's doing, will love your parts because he can easily adjust everything. If you're going to drive the car after installing the front parts, align it. If not, wait for all 4 corners then align it.

Ask me a specific question and I'll try to provide a specific answer. I think the TTT front arms and TC rods are fine. I really don't like their rear arms, not a big fan of MM rear arms either. Basically I don't like any of the aftermarket rear arms I've seen so far. Good thread on Hybrid Z by tholt called something like "yet another rear control arm thread" or something like that. It has the best ideas I've seen on rear control arm design and I built my arms off of the discussions had in that thread.

That sounds like a winner to me.

You put this in parentheses but it's the most important bit, I think. Most of the lowering springs are trying to accomplish the impossible. Lower the car, keep it relatively soft, and give a good ride. They can't do that because when you lower the car it needs to be a lot stiffer to keep off of the bumpstops. They don't make the springs stiff enough to keep the car off the bump stops because that would be very uncomfortable, so you end up with a soft spring that rides poorly because you're hitting the bumpstops all the time. Best solution is the sectioned strut with coilovers. Gives you MORE travel at the same ride height so you can run a softer spring and still stay off the stops. My $.02,

If you're using the distributor to trigger the MSD without using the module, memory of my own install tells me it shouldn't matter which wire goes to which side of the magnetic trigger pigtail. Both wires go to the pickup which gets triggered when the reluctor wheel passes by it. There shouldn't be any timing change in looking at the impulse with the wires reversed. The 280Z distributor is different than the 280ZX, but it's the same basic idea in use. The fact that you're getting spark is the important thing. If you're getting a nice hot spark and the thing flooded I'd be inclined to believe that you have something else messed up, plug wire sequence or something.

I tried to sell my factory master and nobody bought it. It's been sitting for long enough that it probably isn't any good anymore, but you're welcome to it if you want it Dave. I did snip the wires to the lids, but it's otherwise OK. I'll have to dig it out of a box in the shop if you are interested.

Beauty is subjective. I was referring to objective criticisms with my post. There's no accounting for taste.

I think some people just don't want to see ANYTHING criticized. Criticize analytically, and I'll agree with any valid criticism. There was a car on hybrid Z a week or so with the floor pan about 1" off the ground and I caught a lot of flak for criticizing the fact that it was dangerous it because "the owner had a goal and he realized it." My criticisms weren't about his goal or whether he had realized it. They were about the safety and functionality of what he had done. Likewise someone could criticize my race car project by saying that the spring rate used will be so stiff that it would likely cause you to wizz blood if you took it on a cross country road trip. Valid criticism. Not what I built it for, but I shouldn't argue against reality. Now that that's out of the way, here is my analytical criticism of this thing: I can't tell what exactly he did with the "roll bar" but it doesn't look built to any standard of safety that I'm aware of. It looks really really really really bad from a technical perspective, like someone had a bent piece of pipe and welded it to frames on either side to create a main hoop. Main hoop should be one piece of tube that has 4 bends not exceeding 180 degrees and needs to be DOM to fit the regs for most racing organizations

It has interlocking metal plates inside it so it won't come apart even if the poly were to let go. Ron designed the thing years ago so I'm sure there are people with lots of years on them and no issues.

Sounds like what you need are inner rod ends...

Don't know that I have much anymore, most of my stuff is all custom these days, but if you're looking for something in particular PM me. If you need stock parts too, my brother-in-law basically bought a Z junkyard and owes me, so I can get you engine parts, doors, hatches, etc. Not performance stuff, but stock stuff... Autox in Lompoc? How convenient for you! I'll let some friends know and maybe you'll get a couple more Datsuns down there. I wish I could join you. We just hit the rainy season here. We won't hardly see the sun for another 6 or 7 months.

That's quite a collection of cars, and they look like they're mostly leaning towards the modified for racing end of the spectrum. That is not the usual car show crowd and very impressive.

I think it's interesting that nobody is reporting pinion angle issues with the R/T mount. If that were a problem, then using a pinion snubber like you've done is a good solution. Strangely, it doesn't seem to be an issue.

Does "proven aerodynamic track record" mean that more people have run it on their Z, or that it's more effective? Pretty good info on what is effective here: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=121877 and the BRE spoiler doesn't produce the most downforce.

Just as an interesting story on this subject, I was at an autox where a guy snapped the A pillar OFF of the unibody just by running the car. To be fair that guy was hard on everything though. He also snapped an r180 mustache bar in half. His solution was to weld it back together and he added a 4 point roll bar that tied into the roof near the map light. He said that after he installed the bar he could drive into a driveway at any angle and the interior panels no longer creaked and groaned and he thought it made a seat of the pants difference when autoxing.

The last wing with the uprights leaned back like that will have additional leverage over a wing on vertical uprights and will produce more downforce. The spoiler #6 with the highest angle of attack would probably have the most downforce of the spoilers. If you search you might find the C&D article from the 70's that compared drag and downforce for various spoilers. Some of the less aggressive angles, like maybe #5, should actually decrease drag so you'd eliminate some of the lift at the rear and gain gas mileage. You might check the aero forum over at hybridz.org. I think they'll be more receptive in general to the idea of putting wings or spoilers on the Z than this board will be, and they've actually done a wind tunnel test of most of the common aero parts that you can buy for the Z too. I think your splitter and diffuser are not likely to function very effectively on a road car. You need them to be pretty close to the ground to really work, and then you need super stiff springs to keep the car level to keep them working consistently.

You ought to seriously consider returning that poly isolator. It's a bad idea to use polyurethane in that spot. It is too stiff, and requires too much force to change the angle of the strut. Rubber isolators are much better. Mark, I'll be running spring rates that work better with the AD struts. Let me know when you put them on ebay.

I don't think 37's are that huge. That's what I ran on my 44s.

Just an idea, but you could use a ratcheting tie down and pull the front of the wheels together with the car on jack stands and then use a plumb bob on some part of the suspension to measure deflection, then do it again with the full crossmember in place. You'd need to have an extra crossmember cut up to check it both ways. I was going to test with my butt-o-meter.