Jeff G 78

Tom, on your '78, the paint under the wood false floor in the cargo area will be the closest to the original color. Chances are good that it has been covered up for the past 30 years and still looks like it did the day the car rolled down the line. That said, I don't think the exterior of your car is the original color. Nissan never made a teal Z. That color looks to be from the mid to late eighties when it was a popular OEM color. Are you looking to match the current, or the original color? Take a quality picture of the cargo floor paint and post it. Someone will be able to tell you what the code is.

I have a follow-up question for Jon or Rob. I will degree the cam as soon as I can get a degree wheel, but in the meantime, do you think that low compression and low vacuum are more likely caused by a retarded cam or an advanced cam? Also, how much would the cam have to be off to cause a 33% drop in compression test readings and a 45% drop in vacuum? I'm just trying to get a feel for whether or not I could get it to run any better with the stock gear until I can get a Nissan Comp gear. If the cam is currently retarded, I can advance it 4 or 8 degrees with the stock gear's adjustment holes. If it's currently advanced, I'd have to back it off a tooth which would be (if my math is correct) 18 degrees in hole 1, 14 degrees in hole 2 or 10 degrees in hole 3. Normally, I would simply order the gear and wait for it to arrive, but we have a Z meet this weekend and I don't want to miss it. It's unlikely that I'd get the gear in time to get it andjusted and back together by Saturday morning. If I can't get it close, then I'll hold off until I get the gear, but if I can get it in the ballpark I can at least drive it to the meet.

Here are the specs. Web Racing grind #91 It is a new cam with stock base circle .450/.450 lift 260°/260° duration 238°/238° duration @0.050" Their website doesn't list it, but I'm pretty sure I remember the lobe centers are the same as stock at 108°/111° Thanks Jon and Rob. I will do a sanity check to make sure nothing is way off and then pick up a degree wheel. I do have a stopper and dial indicator. I will likely swap back to the stock cam until I figure out what to do. Carbs or a new FI system are not in the budget right now. Is there any harm in running the stock cam with Schneider springs?

I am at a loss and need some help. Here's the background on my car: I rebuilt the engine a few years ago and it has about 6500 miles on it since the rebuild. It has an N47 head and flat top pistons. The head was brand new when I built the motor. It was a takeoff head that had been sitting on a shelf since 1977. It didn't even have a wear pattern on the cam when I got it. I had a new Web Camshaft that I was planning on using, but chose to rebuild the engine with the stock cam that came with the head until I knew it ran right to take a variable out of the equation. The engine ran great for two years. I had 180psi across all cylinders, <10% leakdown, 18" vacuum at idle and it got between 23 and 26 mpg on 93 octane. I drove it to the Cleveland convention last October and then parked it for the winter. Over the last few weeks, I began upgrading to the mild performance cam, springs, and rockers. First, I pulled the rockers off and swapped the springs. Once that was done, I set the engine to #1 TDC and painted match dots on the chain and cam gear. I wedged the chain, pulled the gear and slid the old cam out. I slid the new cam back in and turned it so that the dowel was at 12 o'clock. I put the gear on the chain with the dots matching and the cam's dowel lined up with the #1 hole in the gear. I reinstalled the cam gear, lash pads and rockers. I set the lash to the cold specs and buttoned up the engine. Once the radiator was installed and all the fluids were filled, I fired up the engine. It popped right off, but wouldn't idle at all. I had to adjust the idle screw from almost all the way in to almost all the way out to maintain a ~800rpm idle. The engine revved smoothly and sounded fine, but idle was unstable and "lopey". I drove the car around a bit and it ran OK, but felt weak and continued to idle poorly. Once warmed up, I checked the vacuum and did a compression test. Both were bad. My vacuum was stable at only 10" and the compression was between 115 and 120psi on all cylinders. :mad: The engine is obviously down on power and testing confirms that something is wrong, but I don't know what it is yet. I still need to recheck valve lash now that it has run a bit, but they were all set properly when cold. I know I set the cam timing correctly by lining up my paint dots, but that's the only thing I can come up with that would cause these conditions. I will also check leakdown on at least a few cylinders to see if it's sealing properly. Any ideas as to what is off? I have rebuilt many engines and I was very careful to make sure timing was right, so I really doubt I messed it up, but SOMETHING is obviously wrong. If the timing IS off, I hope I didn't get any contact :tapemouth. The only other thing I can come up with other than an error by me is if the cam was made wrong. If I can't figure anything else out, I will get a degree wheel and see if it matches the specs.

I am running zero offset wheels and the 225/50R16 tires rub on the rear wheel lips and the front valence when turning and backing up. I have been told that a +6mm offset keeps this tire size from rubbing. I have rolled my rear fender lips, but I need to notch the sheet metal flange and roll them more. My car is lowered with Tokico springs and Tokico Illumina struts.

The speedometer in every Z car I've owned has read high. Ignore the speedo and check the odometer over a long highway trip. Watch the roadside mile markers and see how they compare over as many miles as possible. My speedo reads about 5-10mph high on the highway and yet my odo is exactly correct. Last year I checked it on the drive to the Cleveland Z convention. Over close to 100 miles on the Ohio Turnpike, my odo was withing 1/10th of a mile. I have 225/50R16 tires on 7" rims on my 78 and they rub. Diameter should not be larger than stock or you will have trouble with 225 or wider tires.

Nice Z Squeeks!

That's really cool Dave. Thanks for the road info. Something didn't look right when I saw no signs, no yellow centerlines and no guard rails. Makes sense now.

Welcome! You must share the pictures with us. Think of it as a membership fee.

Very cool road. From the 350Z footage, at appears to be a road to nowhere. I saw no road signs either. Is it patrolled much? It also looked to be relatively windy from the first vid, but the wind turbines were all stationary. Seems odd.

Wow, that's nice.

Our local Michigan dealers gave up on S30s YEARS ago. I tried to order rocker arms around ten years ago for a cam upgrade and was told to buy them elsewhere. They had no interest in selling me the parts since they couldn't look up any part numbers. Once they got rid of the micro fiche cards and reader, they were out of the old parts business. That was before CZCC came out with the micro fiche on CD, so I had no choice but to get them from MSA. Even with the CD, they don't trust P/Ns if they can't look them up on their own. I quit trying and call Courtesy or MSA for OEM parts. If I don't need OEM for mechanical parts, I try a local import auto parts store that sells mostly Beck Arnley. They are fine for wheel cylinders and such.

It's hard to believe that there are 87 users looking at CZCC at this moment, yet we have only 105 pins in the map. There are what, 15,000+ members??? That's only 0.7%!

Yes, I am done. Luckily, I was just able to snake the cam past the fuel rail bracket without removing the intake-side rail bolts. I just had to remove the two fuel hoses and the bolts at the right and front of the head. It flexed just enough. I haven't fired it up yet. I need to run to the auto parts store and get oil, coolant and some new fuel hose. The old ones were a bit loose at the rail.

Once you have an account with them and they have your Z club membership number, they automatically give you the discount on future orders. I didn't know they use this site - heck, I didn't know we HAD numbers. I use my IZCC number that I got many, many years ago.

Is that true again? I had a set of Bilsteins in my 240 about ten years ago. I worked closely with Bilstein for my job as a Vehicle Dynamics engineer, so I asked them if they could rebuild mine since the car I bought with them had been sitting for close to a decade and they were leaking a bit. The local engineer I worked with put me in touch with their lab guy in San Diego. He told me it might be tough as they hadn't made that piston diameter since the mid-eighties, but he said to give him a few days and he'd see what he could find. He called me back and said I was in luck. He scrounged just enough parts to do four shocks. He then joked and said that I better not wear them out because mine cleaned him out of parts for good. I sent them to San Diego and had them back within a few weeks as good as new. I'd like to know if anyone has had 240Z Bilstein dampers rebuilt in the last few years. I believe I had mine rebuilt around 1998. I guess if the demand was high enough, they might have made a small run of pistons and seals, but it would surprise me. I LOVE working with Bilstein and find their products to be as good as anything I have ever used. When we used them on our SVT products at Ford, they were easy to tune and held up great. I remember dynoing an SVT Lightning set before and after vehicle durability testing and the curves were unchanged. That simply does not happen with OEM shocks. Durability testing simulates 150,000 customer miles. Most shocks are lucky to last 40,000 miles before degrading. Here's where the story goes south. When I sold my 240 with it's freshly rebuilt Bilsteins, the guy who bought it restored the car beautifully and replaced pretty much everything on the car. When he bought it, I told him over and over how rare and good the Bilsteins were and the story about them being freshly rebuilt. After his car was fully restored, he showed it to me and told me about everything he had done to it. One of the "upgrades" was the suspension. He replaced the Bob Sharp springs and bars and the Bilstein strut inserts. He took out the Bilsteins and replaced them with Tokico blues. Surprised, I asked him what he did with the old struts. He shrugged and said all the old junk was pitched. :stupid: It was none of my business, but I couldn't help but be saddened. He sold the car a short while later and it ended up in Paris, France. The new owner is a member here. I like Tokicos and have Illuminas in my 280, but I'd never consider them over Bilsteins.

Wow, fantastic job Mike. I love the LeMans wheels in the gray color with the 903 blue.

I too will be doing the mustache bar bushings soon. I don't have a clunk problem (new diff mount and new trans mount), but I do have a vibration that I am trying to eliminate. I will be replacing the trans crossmember bushings soon. I bought Nissan rubber bushings and already installed them into a spare crossmember, so it will be a quick crossmember swap. My vibration is under acceleration in lower gears. If I am going even slightly downhill (i.e. highway onramp) it is completely smooth, but flat ground or any incline brings out the problem. Engine, trans and diff mounts except the mustache bar bushings are new, so hopefully they solve the problem. If not, it might be my diff, I guess. I did buy urethane mustache bushings, so hopefully they don't transmit too much more noise than the old, worn out rubber ones.

Rule number one around here is that you have to post pictures when you introduce yourself. We don't care if your car is a finished show car or a beater daily driver, we are suckers for Z car pictures.

Yep, the bushings are easy to replace. Like ConchZ said, the rubber boots will likely be dry and brittle being an AZ car, but otherwise it's easy. You might want to replace the boots if they show any signs of cracking. They keep noise, heat and exhaust fumes out of the cabin. There is a small boot over the shifter on the trans itself and a larger rubber boot on the body underneath the interior vinyl shifter boot.

Yep, I had to fine tune mine with washers on the LH TC rod to get the alignment correct. John, do you know how much the RH side leads by?

I checked MSA's website and the small B&W pictures don't show enough to tell what they look like. They just say that they sell aluminum and ABS louvers and that they don't require drilling. The ABS ones do appear to be rounded rather than angular and it also appears that they sit on the glass like the angular ones. They certainly aren't cheap at over $260.

I think you can still buy the on-glass ones, but I don't believe the larger bolt-on louvers have been available for years. They can't be too tough to find used. I have at least one and maybe two of the larger style, but they are stored at my dad's house in another state. I haven't decided yet if I will install them. I doubt I will since I don't want to drill a bunch of holes in a perfect hatch panel.

Yes, they will fit. The first pic shows the type that fit over the window trim. They are bigger than the on-glass louvers and don't obstruct the view. The downside is that you have to drill holes in the hatch for the hinges and latches. I had them on a car many years ago and liked them for keeping the car cool, but they will rattle a bit. Given the choice, I'd go with the bigger style as long as you don't mind a bunch of holes in your hatch.

While I replaced the valve springs today, I played with the rail and I *think* I can flex it enough to get the cam out without removing it. As far as the injectors go, everything was new a few years ago. I replaced the injectors and all the hoses, but it's still a major PITA. I should know tomorrow. Today, I pulled the hood, removed the rockers and swapped the valve springs. Tomorrow, I'll swap the cam and install the rockers, pads, radiator, and thermostat. From the looks of it, I'll have to lower the back of the trans a bit to allow the cam to clear the rad support. I have a spare trans mount that I installed new bushing into over winter, so that will be installed as well.