jmortensen

Your alignment looks pretty good except for the left rear toe setting. That's a lot of toe in on the LR. The only way to adjust that out is with the eccentric adjusters or custom control arms that have toe adjustability. If you replaced the 30+ year old worn out bushings with new, you could recheck again and it would probably be different and hopefully better. Your steering wheel issue sounds like a tire issue, not an alignment issue. Rotate the tires front to back and see if it goes away. Make sure the wheels are dynamically balanced (weights on the inside and outside of the rim) and that the tires aren't mounted improperly. Sometimes tires will set the bead wrong on the rim and the tire has to be pulled off and remounted on the rim to fix. Also look for a bent rim. You could throw in checking the wheel bearings for tightness, but it doesn't sound like a wheel bearing issue to me. Sounds like the tires are either out of balance or out of round or a wheel is bent.

I was never going for mileage, so .8V is about 13:1 and I just checked at WOT and ignored everything else.

I used a narrowband $30 O2 with a $6 voltmeter. Just shoot for .8V. Rich reads higher, lean lower. There have been several reports of less than stellar results with the Autometer AF ratio gauges, and the culprit is the O2 sensor, so if that happens to you replace the sensor before you give up on it.

Yep. That's pretty much your only option, unless you could figure out where it is dragging and tweak the dust cover without disassembling the whole thing again.

The pictures are cool, the post is fine, and I will admit I'm a little sensitive on this particular subject. I'm just really really tired of hearing how evil we are and how we are destroying the planet. I think AGW has absolutely nothing to do with the tornados pictured, and wanted to point out that they aren't as "rare" as you might think. To connect the two and claim causality is unscientific and misleading, but it is done every day in the news and even more frequently on forums and blogs like this one. If you look closely, you'll see that the sky isn't falling...

My guess for the tight spot is the that dust cover might be rubbing something, maybe the strut housing, maybe the seal. There is a spec for drag in the FSM if you're really wanting to be sure about it. What's hard is getting the nut off without damaging the threads on the stub axle, especially for people who don't have an impact gun.

Well it seemed pretty clear that Jason felt that the tornado was unusual ("wow") and caused by global warming ("and to think, people still believe that we have no effect on our environment"). That's what I took from his post anyway. I was just making an attempt to show that just because something is unusual doesn't mean that it is unprecedented and that not everything is the fault of humankind, despite the flagellant propensities of the enviro-crowd.

Yeah, that's probably the first tornado in CA history, huh? Well, maybe not... http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/askjack/watorhty.htm

It's not starvation that is the problem, it is flooding. On right handers the fuel sloshes out the float bowl vents and goes into the engine. A really good float level adjustment will minimize the issue as much as possible, but Tom Holt posted a much better fix a couple years back in this thread: http://www.classiczcars.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18948

Good advice. The ZX distributor has a nice advance curve for use with triples.

I KNOW there is a difference in the pp clamping force on the series I vs the 280. Not sure if there is a difference between series I vs series II.

Were all of the 240 clutches weaker than the 280 clutches, or was that just a series I thing?

Just a SWAG, but probably to keep rain from getting into the FI plugs.

For the record, I don't think this was the fault of the rockers. The fact that it is worse from one end of the head to the other is extremely weird, makes me think the head was warped or the cam was bent or something. Very funky, never seen that one before...

I don't honestly know how to read that dyno printout. It doesn't look like the ones with SAE hp and torque that I'm used to seeing. I'll tell you this though; for my money, I want the peak hp to come about 1000 rpm before the redline of the engine. Getting a camshaft that peaks at 7000 rpm with a 7000 rpm redline doesn't do you very much good, nor does using one that peaks at 5000 rpm. And for my own project I've repeatedly made the error of going too small, while "experts" told me that I was going to regret buying something so big.

This issue is overhyped and has more to do with Schneider using crappy cam billets than anything else in my opinion. Even ISKY now regrinds cams for Z cars. I've used the same set of rockers on 3 cams now. They ran for 250,000 miles on the original E31, then I put them on one aftermarket cam, and finally a second. Still running fine. I'm thinking about changing the cam again, and if the rockers still look good they'll go on a 4th cam. Every one of my friends running 510s or Zs has done the same, none have changed their rockers, and I've never seen a cam lobe go flat in person. As far as compatibility, if the head you have doesn't have a cam spraybar to oil the lobes, then you need a drilled cam (holes in the lobes where oil comes out). If it does have a spraybar, you can use either the solid cam or the drilled cam.

The fact that the large cam makes low speed running less efficient is what makes high speed running more efficient. The ideas of "contamination" or the other common complaint of "bleeding compression" gives a negative connotation to something that is really a positive when taken as a whole. With my cam, which again was very similar to the Stage IV, I had my idle set at 950, never had a hunting idle issue and the only side effect of the lope was that people would often ask if I had a V8 in my Z. What is the point of adding the cam? For me, the point was to make MORE POWER. When the camshaft was added, the car went faster at autox and at the big track. It was not hard to drive on the street even with a light flywheel and it was not sluggish off the line. What the cam allowed the car to do was HIT the rev limiter instead of TOUCHING the rev limiter. When I later added triples I was able to SLAM the rev limiter instead of HITTING it. The first cam that I installed had high lift and low duration (sorry, don't remember specs). It idled nicely and got better mileage than the stock cam with a very modest increase in mid range power. If that's what you're looking for then go for it. Where my cam fell short was in the upper rpm range. In order to make the high end power you need to bleed compression and contaminate the low speed charge to make power, which again, is NOT a bad thing. When it performs under expectations, get a bigger NA cam and dyno that one too and let us know... ;-)

I ran the equivalent of a Stage IV, with stock compression, SU's and 2.5" exhaust. It ran fine on the street, made much more top end power than the smaller cam I had before (which was probably about a Stage I) and mileage was fine; mid 20s on the highway with 5 speed and 3.70s. I bought the cam from a friend who warned me that it was much too big for my motor and that it was going to really suck off the line, be hard to drive in traffic, etc. I'm glad I took a chance because he was flat wrong. That bigger cam made a whole lot more power than the smaller one once you got up in the revs, say above 3000 or 3500, and below that there wasn't too much to distinguish them, aside from a more lopey idle with the bigger cam. The thing you need to look out for is that when you get above about .480 or .490 lift you run into coil bind on the stock springs and the retainers hit the valve stem seals. Dealing with these issues is well worth the effort.

Right hls30.com, the ZX nuts are peened at three places which makes them a locknut of sorts, but they don't have the thin flat flange that get bent over to hit the flat sides of the stub axle. If you have Z or ZX nuts, I wouldn't be worried at all. If the PO on your car went and found a 20mm (or whatever size it is) metric nut with no locking mechanism I'd suggest you replace them.

It's a trade off. Don't run the sway bars and scrape the door handles with the excessive body roll, or run the sway bars and have eventual damage to the frame rails (or take the time to beef up the rails when installing the bars). As John alluded to, you can also run stiffer springs to combat the roll. In general the rule is stiffer springs and relatively soft bar(s), or softer springs and relatively stiff bar(s).

You could buy a cheapo aftermarket tach and check the stock tach against it. My impression of the stock tachs is not favorable.

That's good advice. Beandip's advice about the struts is right on too. The struts have at least as much to do with the ride as the spring rate. I ran 200/250 springs on the street for 40K miles, but I did it with Illuminas on 1 or 2. Stiffer than that and they were too harsh for my personal taste.

This seems to be a common theme in this thread. I sympathize with the loss of the dog for sure. My dog sleeps in bed with my wife and I, she is certainly a member of the family. But back to the "fault" of the guy who hit the dog, did he drive up on your lawn and run over your dog? My impression was that your dog was in the middle of the street, and last I checked that was illegal in most places. I know a lot of places also have laws that say if you hit a dog you have to stop (in CA I seem to remember that you didn't have to stop for cats) so this guy would be guilty of that, but at least here in WA if you went to the police they'd be more likely to give you a fine for violating a leash law than they would to go after a guy who hit a dog that ran across a street where it wasn't supposed to be. If you took him to small claims you'd be more likely to have to pay for any damage to his car than him to repay you for the loss of the dog. A friend of mine was helping me move into a new house and her dog got hit right in front of us while we were taking a break. The dog had wandered on the road on a blind corner and the car hit the dog. That dog had a ruptured spleen and a broken canine tooth. The tooth was replaced with a chrome one (yeah, it's pretty cool) and the spleen was removed. Total bill was over $1000. Finding the driver at fault in any context was the furthest thing from any of our minds at the time and never even occurred to me until reading this post.

Looks like you used a stiffer plastic skirt for the airdam. It doesn't appear to be flapping around like it used to. That should make a difference.