Jeff G 78

Welcome! Rust is always the enemy. Many of us started out with Z cars like yours and eventually learned to buy rust-free cars instead. You can't go wrong for $800 and it will be a great learning experience, but I don't think I would consider dumping huge money into this particular car. Fix it up cheap and learn everything you can about Z cars from this one. Then, when you are ready, go find a rust free car or a good shell and use all the mechanical parts from this car. Rust is a pain to deal with. You will break bolts off constantly, so get good at extracting the twisted-off remains. Soak everything in a good penetrating oil first and use a lot of heat. They will all come 1/2 way out and then snap when you try to pull the rusty exposed bolt threads through the nuts. Trust me, I've been there and have broken more Z bolts than I can count over the past 30 years.

I still haven't given up on my puller design that I've been talking about making for a few years. I finally got a section of 1" acme all thread and now I just need to actually make the tool. The small, cheap tools will fail, but the right tool, I think, will make the job easy.

I get 404 error when I click my garage or try to search by user name.

I think that's a fairly popular pump in the Z world. BTW, why the name change?

In the past 14 months, I've been hit three times. The first was because some jackass decided to wait his turn in traffic, so he blew past 1/4 mile of stopped traffic and dive bombed in when he saw a small gap. Of course he couldn't go from 50 mph to 0 in 25 feet so he rear ended the car in front of the hole he found. I was three cars in front of that car and I still got hit. His bonehead move wrecked four cars and my neck still isn't right even after months of physical therapy. Luckily, I was in a company vehicle and there was very little damage. The next hit was in the winter and a girl was going too fast for the icy conditions. I was two lanes to her left on the highway and I saw her car rotate 90 degrees towards me. I tried to avoid her, but she still clipped me, putting a small crease in my truck's bed. Finally, last week, I was approaching an intersection in the left turn lane. When I was about 50 feet from the red light, an SUV was turning right from the road I was going to and she failed to turn tight enough. She took the turn at about 30 mph using three lanes to do so and hit me LF corner to LF corner. She did enough suspension damage to total my truck. She was cited and told the cop that she had a glass of wine with dinner. She was below the legal limit, but I'm thinking it had to have played a role. She wasn't even close to making the turn and it was as if she was never in control of her truck. Had I not stopped short when I saw her coming, she would have T boned me right in the driver door. So yes, I think driving has gotten much worse. I see stupid driving every day and I have three accidents to show for it. In two of the three, I wasn't even moving and I tried my best to avoid contact in the third one. At least I wasn't in a Z.

FYI, here are my 16x7 zero offset Panasports with 225/50R16 tires. And here are my fenders AFTER almost 10mm of flange trimming. To check clearance, I removed the springs and went through full suspension travel. I trimmed until the tires just barely quit rubbing. If you look at the tire shoulder, you can see what happened before I trimmed the flanges. The rubbing peeled a strip of rubber right off the tires. :tapemouth

Hey Robert, Catching the ZX in the background was just a coincidence and there were likely lots of them around as it was only a few year old car at the time. The photo was taken at my sister's apartment complex, so I had no idea who owned that car. I was trying to post old photos of a few more old Z's I had, but the forum crashed last night as I was uploading them. I'll try again tonight.

OK, I finally dug out my old photo album and scanned a few pics. Here is my first Z taken in 1984. I bought a pair of Z's for $600 that had been sitting in a field with the hopes of making one good car. They were an orange '72 and a brown '76, but both were way too rotten to save. I learned a ton stripping them and working on them and I still use the carbs and wheels on my 260Z race car. I took this pic on the day I brought them home, but I had already swapped a few body panels between them as you can see. After I gave up on the two rusty cars, I drove to Atlanta from Ohio in the spring of 1986 and bought a rust-free auto trans '76 280. Here I am washing it the day I bought it before I drove it 750 miles home on expired GA plates. As soon as I got it back to Ohio, I swapped the auto trans for the 4 speed I took out of the '72 and I removed the headlight covers and Libre copy wheels. I still have both the headlight covers and wheels in storage. I plan on painting the headlight covers and putting them on my BRE tribute race car and if anybody wants the wheels they are for sale. Otherwise, they will probably stay in storage for another 27 years. Wow, I was about 100 lbs lighter back then.

Go with +6mm offset if you don't want major rubbing. I run 16x7 zero offset Panasports with 225/50R16 tires and I had major rubbing. Another option is to go with the 225/45R16 Dunlop Direzza ZII tires. They will be slightly shorter which will give you more clearance. Like Guy said above, you will still likely have to play with the front valence, but zero offset will be much worse. There is a thread here that I think was started by Guy (Diseazed) where I posted pics of what I had to do to keep my rears from rubbing. My fronts still rub badly while turning in reverse.

Cool thread Guy. I'll have to find and scan my old pics.

What brand of belt(s) did you use? I tried a store brand belt once on my race car and it kept stretching during the first practice session. I tightened it and it worked fine for a bit and then start squealing on start-up again until finally failing completely. Luckily, it all happened during practice. I now only use Gates belts.

I run the Carter pump in my race car and it works great. My installation won't really help you though. I run a surge tank to maximize the range. Before the surge tank, I could only run about 1:40 on a tank, but now I can run a full 2 hours which is our driver stint limit. I run a Facet pump to get the fuel into the surge tank and then the Carter pump to feed the engine. The Carter is fairly loud, but it is inside the car. The Facet is much louder and it's under the car.

I've tried both the original coil with the ballast resistor removed and the MSA Fireball coil on my race car and I couldn't feel any performance difference. If your car is stock or even lightly modified, I wouldn't waste any money on a performance coil.

There are lots of people successfully running the stock fuel rail, but I struggled for years with fuel starvation issues on my race car. It turned out to be vapor lock caused by heat radiating from the head through the stock steel rail into the fuel. Once I ditched the stock rail, it runs like a champ for hours on end. You might want to at least isolate the rail by replacing the steel spacers with a heat resistant material that doesn't conduct as well. I could only run 20 minutes on the track before I started having symptoms. As always YMMV. Good luck with the triple swap. It will sound glorious!

chaztg, As far as I know, the spindle pins are still available. MSA just sells the OE Nissan parts, so they are one in the same. fuzze, the outer bushings do degrade over time. The ones I removed from my '78 were shot. Other reasons to remove the pins would be to replace bent control arms, upgrade to adjustable arms, paint/powder coat suspension parts during a restoration, etc.

Welcome to the forum! Post some pics of your new purchase. Value is hard to judge without a thorough inspection. It's all about condition. Where in Michigan?

Did you dyno this one yet? What do you expect to get at the wheels? It seems like it should make about 185 or so.

You left out the only important info. Is/was there any rust? If the body is completely clean, it will be worth far more than if it has or had rust. The value should be between $3k and $8k. If the body is rust-free and the paint is great, expect the high end. Bad paint and rust-free brings it down to about $5k and if there is rust the value will be at the bottom end of the scale.

I have a spare pedal box I could sell you.

There was a lot of OBX talk on hybridZ. It's a Quaife/Torsen copy and other than the fact that many of the units are assembled wrong, they seem to work very well. Buyers usually disassemble the units when they get them and make sure that the assembly is correct. If not, it's a simple reassembly in the right orientation to fix the mistake. Once assembled correctly, the buyers have had very good success with the OBX unit. Again, I'm not questioning your decision, I just wondered if you weighed the options. The OBX LSD is fairly unknown outside of the hybridZ world so I understand that you hadn't heard of it. I'm not sure why nobody knows about it, but I've never heard any chatter on this site about the OBX.

I like the upgrade and I understand that you are getting a modern, good condition diff, but wouldn't finding a low mileage R180 or R200 and installing an OBX LSD be a cheaper option? It's not a shot at you, I'm really asking which is better/cheaper. Here in the east, there are countless rotted out S130's with low mileage 3.90 R200 diffs. The OBX sells for about $400 and the S130 R200 can be had for nearly nothing. I paid $500 for an F54 engine, 5 speed trans, 3.90 R200, driveshaft and halfshafts all with low miles.

If I lived close to you Guy, I'd break into your garage at night just to drool on your cars...

Beautiful as always Guy! Are you going to get dyno numbers on it?

After a quick search, I found that the KD 3087 is discontinued, but it can still be purchased as a Sealey VS168. Here it is on ebay. VS168 Sealey Valve Spring Compressor Lever Type OHV OHC Brand New Sealey Tool | eBay

Virto, fighting broken studs is all too common. More often than not, there is at least one broken stud when I remove a manifold for the first time. Take the time now and replace them all with quality new ones. If you find any head threads that are iffy, use a Heli Coil to repair them. Manifolds are fairly forgiving, but headers love to leak, so you are better off making sure everything is good before you drop the head back on the block. Good luck getting it all finished and back on the road.