zguitar71

I would go to around 7200. I do not think you get much out of the SU's past that. Your cam probably makes power to that range too.

What pictures? They are most likely Tokico Illumina's. If they are, 1 is the sofest and 5 is the hardest. The adjustment area is rather small and the numbers should be indented into the plastic ring around the part the small screw driver goes into. The numbers should have psint on them and so should the part you turn to indicate where it is pionting. Sometimes the paint does get worn off but you should still be able to see the numbers and tell what is going on. If there are no numbers on the top they might be some other type of shock in which case I do not have any advise.

I hope you are not saying the stranded people in NO are being greedy. If you are you should realise they are surounded by people dying and already dead people. There are people being murdered infront of many other people. In the paper this morning a man told a story of him and a large group of other people watching a man get beaten to death by another man with a pipe. Another person reaccounted watching a woman being raped, that was right after he had been carjacked and shot at while he was on his way to try and get to his daughter who was being helied from a hospital to another one somewhere else because she has brain cancer. A person jumped off the Super Dome, other people have killed themselves incuding 2 NO police officers. On top of that they have no info on what is going on and no water and no food. The air is hot and humid and smells of decomposing bodies. It is very much hell on earth. The only greed the stranded people have shown is the natural greed instilled in all of us called survival. The stranded know better than anyone else how bad things are. Fortunatly most of them are out of there now. Mabey if there was a memorial service they would see the light and not be so greedy.

I think that is the best idea. The place has been flooded for centuries. The French settled there in the 1500's and instead of moving to higher ground (the 1st flood happened 1 year after they started a settlement there) they started to build levees around the settlement. The same thinking has been in place now for a long time, only it has gotten more technilogically advanced. So I guess we sould really start blaming the French!

Unfortunatly the plans for the levees are shaped by politics as well. The plans will probably be changed to cover a catigory 5 now, and I bet they get funded. As far as the time frame, being that it is a government job 10 years will probably turn into 20. I work for the local government here in Missoula as an Arborist. We have delt with FEMA on occasion. Once for a June snow storm that hit the city trees and caused a few million in damage (a lot for a small city like Missoula) and on a yearly basis for the inspection our own levee systems in the valley around the Clark Fork River. The amount of red tape to start the flow of money is incredible. It is a very slow process.

The lack of funding for the flood mitigation system including the levees goes back to the Clinton era and beyond. There has been too much complacentcy from all parties.

The air is not rare in higher altitudes, O2 levels stay constant; however, there is not enough pressure to allow absorbtion by the lungs. Missoula is only 3200 feet in elevation, not enough to make a difference. I never ment they did not have an evac plan. What I ment: the plan is/was inadequate. Every city has evac plans for the natural disasters that may strike the area, but are they good enough? Many cities will probably review their plans from this event. I do believe the populants of a disaster area weather poor or wealthy should be given shelter until rebuilding can take place regardless of the impracticality of the undertaking. We should take care of our own people, and I think that will happen in this situation, not to would be criminal. Again I do not think the President needed to get his hands dirty, an of course an earlier presents would not stop the flood but it would help reasure some of the people there and in the rest of the country.

The people that chose not to leave were also most of the poorest people in the city, a city with over 23% at or below the poverty line. Could any one afford a car or gas or a place to flee too at $12,500 or less a year? Given the option I bet most would have left. Most of the poor do not have cars though, and the trains and busses out of town quit running 1-2 days before the storm hit. It has long been known that this type of disaster could hit the area, why were there not evac plans including bussing out the poorest people or people with out means to leave before the storm hit or have a stock of food and water for the people that could not leave? It is entirely ignorant to believe the people traped inside the city chose to stay. Some did and always will but most did not. Bush is very late in responding. He should have flown to the area directly after the storm exited not 5 days later. No one is asking Bush to get his hands dirty in the rescue effort but he could have listened to the different agencies that were warning of this eminent disaster for many years now and given funding for an update of the levee system as opposed to cutting of the funds. Bush could have not stayed on vacation until Wednesday. Chainey, where is he? Last I heard he is still in Wyoming on vacation. And Mrs. Rice was in N.Y. City on Thursday buying over a thousand dollars in shoes while on vacation. Though the Cabinet is surley concerned, they do a poor job showing it. Evidently Hurricanes are to be taken lightly judging from the reactions of the Bush Cabinet. If they were not taken lightly then the proper plans for evac and aid and an updated levee system would have been in place many years ago. For a long time it has been known a storm of this magnitude in New Orleans would leave the city flooded, breach the levees and strand many thousands of residents. I am not the only one that thinks things are not giong well, President Bush announced today the relief effort has been sub-par.

This will end up like all other disasters in this country. 9/11 is still being probed and in the end they found many stupid mistakes were made, many out of pride as evident with the FBI. This will be investigated and the probe will find that the levees were in bad shape and they should have been repared years ago and upgraded for larger hurricanes along with so many other problems in the evac plan for the city and so on. And in the end the probe will be too late like the releif is, a probe might change the future but hindsight is not 20/20 it is just an admission of , and usually purposfull, blindness. I watched a NOVA show on PBS about 8 months ago, it took place in N.A. The topic was about the problem with the out of date levee system and what would happen if they were hit by a large hurricane. Their prediction was 100% correct, meanwhile the Army Corps of Engineers budget for repairing the levee's and other projects was cut by more than 20% this fical year to help fund the Iraq war and Home Land Security. The U.S. Government should be ashamed for too many reasons.

I agree, if you can afford the extra cash I would go for the Tokico's too. The HP's are great for a street car. I have the Illumina's for autocrossing but the adjustability is not really needed for a street only car. I bet you can get a set new in the box for $250 or so on Ebay.

I like the car with out the bumpers. It looks more agressive.

Our prices went from $2.54 at 7 am to $2.64 by noon and $2.75 by 4 pm today for 78 octane. Like the gas in the tanks under the filling pumps was affected by the hurrican. Should it not take a few days for the effects of the storm (in reference to gas prices) to hit places as far away as Montana?

I hope so. Montana has been truck and SUV crazy since before the term SUV exsisted. All those big trucks are so tall I know they cannot see me in there side mirrors, I have been pulled over on top of more than once this year.

Well that aughta' stir up some arguments.

They work just fine for Z's with stock or not too far from stock springs. I had them with the Arizona Zcar spring and the car bounced too much, the springs were too strong for the shocks. When I had them with lighter springs they were just fine though. If your Z is more than 1" lowered they might not work either.

here is a link for the Hybridz discussion on wheel offsets. http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=103719

Add some one way valves one on the engine air intake side and one on a cold air intake side. and if that does not work them the hole thing could be modified to administer the other type of smoke that SavannahZ refered too.

With a stock suspension you will not be able to go past an 8" wheel with a 0 offset or a 4.5" back space. You might be able to get away with a 4.75" BS (+7 offset) but that would be pushing things. With the right coil over set up people are running 9" wheels with 245/40/17's and with the fender lip rolled I have seen pictures of a car with 9.5" wheels with 275/40/17's with out using flares. I do not have first hand experience with coil overs but recently there was a post with a picture on www.Hybridz.org of a wheel with a 5.5" back space on 2.25" diameter coil overs. Most people run 2.5" springs on the coil overs so the max BS on that set up would be 5.25" or a +7 offset on a 9" wheel. Therer are a lot of people on Hybridz running 17" wheels with all typs of suspension set ups, you might try giong over there and searching around a bit you should be able to find enough info to answer every wheel tire suspension combo question you can think of. Just a thought, Many prople run honda bolt pattern and offset wheels with adapters because the wheels are cheap and easy to find. IMO this is a bad move. The adapters are around 40+ MM thick ("1.5+), they bolt to the hub and the wheel then bolts to the adapter. The wheel never bolts to the hub, this is a weak link. Some people swear by them and have never had an accident but I think it is an accident waiting to happen. I cannot think of any sactioning body, SCCA for example, that would let that type of set up on a track, the reason, they are not strong enough. For that same reason I would not run them on the street either. Sorry for the long rant.

When I corner weighed my car the heaviest corner was the LF (drivers side) corner. I thought it would be the RF too, but the LF ws 40 LBS more than the RF and the heavies of all the 4 corners. One person at the scales speculated that the weight on the LF was due to the extra equipment on that side like the entire carb set up and the headers, distributer ect... When I looked at it that way it made sence to me, most of the equipment on the motor sits on that side and right over the wheel too. "the LF was 628, RF 589, RR 588 and the LR was 510 totaling 2315. So the car is weighted so the driver increases the weight over the LR." I said this in my post earlier, I think this is the reason for the corners to be weighted as they are. What do you guys think?

You will need a Fly wheel ( might as well buy a light one for $350-450) and all the components for and including the clutch pedal. You will need the master and slave cylinder and all the lines for them too. It would propable cost around $450 to have it done + the cost of the 5 speed and the correct drive line. There really is not much in the way of fabrication just 3 or 4 hours of work. Changing the dash is not hard but is time consuming, there are a lot of things to unbolt and then put back on. Be very careful will all the stuff that comes off it is all easy to loose. A new dash is around $800 or so and there are companies that refurbish them for less but not a lot less. It is also a 3-4 hour job to pull and put back in a dash (if you know what you are doing). Those are my best guess estimates judging from the time it took me to do some of the things like this on my car.

When you are getting tires you might want to get some flares and go with the widest possible tire, 275/45/16 on 16x10's or bigger, with that much power you will need to have as much grip as possible. It will be a blast too. At my last event there was a Lotus Elan in D mod that has a power to weight ratio of 5 LBS : 1 HP, you could see the car surge forward on every up shift, your car should have nearly the same power ratio. The car had me by 5 seconds. The best run I had was 57.1 and it had a 52.1 I think. Now that I think about it that is not to bad considering I have an under prepared F prepared Z with a 12.5:1 power ratio and an extra 1100LBS of mass to move around the track.

A lot of people go from Z car site to Z car site, I am one of them. I think I responded to your question on Zcar.com. I think the SM needles will not do any thing for the stock 2.4, they can make the mixture too rich too. I know a person with them on a 2.4 and he has not had any problems but I do not think he has gained much from them either.

I would put the taller one on the drivers side. My 240's driver's front corner is the heaviest corner of the car (40LBS heavier than the passengers front corner). In theory the longer spring should be weaker (assuming the two springs have the same inside/outside diameter and wire diameter and the longer spring has more coil thus making it longer) but with the slight difference in lengths I do not think the longer one will be that much weaker and the extra length will give the proper ride height. When I had my car corner weighted (no driver) the LF was 628, RF 589, RR 588 and the LR was 510 totaling 2315. So the car is weighted so the driver increases the weight over the LR. I was not able to get in and record the weights on the corners, it was weighed at a race (to make sure I was not under weight for my class) and there was not time to let me experiment.