Arne

Ditto, except we still have them all. Dad (in his 70's now) has all his old R&Ts from the mid 50's until he stopped getting it in the mid 90's. My collection started when I left home around '76 and is still growing today. Great fun paging through a 30 year old car magazine. And some of the ads are the best!

Very true! I expect to spend more than that before my car is done. Of course, I enjoy the restoration process itself, so I wouldn't want to buy a finished product myself.

When my wife and I decided that my next project car would be a 240Z, we discussed color. We decided we would buy whatever was available, but our preferred colors were orange first, and yellow second. Baby-poo gold was third. (We ended up with 919 yellow.) Sporty cars of the seventies were frequently yellow or orange. Porsche 914 for example?

Looks like dual Webers, not the original SUs. Much harder to tune properly than SUs. But fairly reliable once they are tuned properly. (Of course, so are the SUs.) Also looks like it still has a ballast resistor, so it's probably still got the points ignition. That's probably a more likely reason for the hard start.

I don't think it is a square port in the pic, but it's hard to say for sure. When I did the swap I used a generic round port gasket from a local parts house. It was listed as fitting all non-turbo L28s from '77-83. Worked (and still works) fine.

You know, those half-bumpers up front look pretty good, as does the whole car. It's exactly not the way I'd have done it, but that's just fine. That's why we all have our own cars. Anyway, very nice job!

Mine are also one for ignition, and one for everything else. In addition, the key code sticker is still on the inside of my glovebox door, and it seems to confirm that as well (as best I can read it).I'm kind of fussy about my keys also, and if my car were closer to complete, I'm sure that I would pay a sizeable amout for proper original key blanks. Unfortunately there are SO MANY things right now that I need far worse than nice keys. By the time I'm ready for them, who knows how much I'll have to pay?

Yeah, no ballast on mine either. I'll probably look into a Bosch, MSD or similar coil designed to run at 12 volts. Thanks for the input, folks!

The ZX coil is larger than the 240Z coil?? Then I wonder what it is that I have in mine? The bracket in mine appears to be the original one, but the coil is a smaller diameter. Whoever installed it wedged some chunks of heater hose in the bracket with the coil to try to hold it in place. I had assumed that it was the ZX coil (along with everything else ZX under the hood) and that was why it didn't fit right.Obviously I do need a new coil.

Definitely some truth to that. On the other hand, for cars like mine which will not have a big sound system, but just a pair of hotter headlights, the electronic ignition and perhaps a simple un-amplified head unit in it, 60 -70 amps should do just fine. Why mess with the pulleys if you don't need to. And frankly, is the 35 year old wiring in these cars good enough to make use of the extra output of the Maxima alternator? Don't know. I certainly won't discourage anyone from the 90 amp upgrade, if you need the extra power it'd be the way to go.

It looks like the coil in my 240Z is failing. I have the later 280ZX electronic ignition on it, so I need a good coil to use with that. What coils are you guys using? Any favorite brands or models? I really don't care what color it is, but it needs to work well with the ZX ignition, and either come with it's own bracket, or fit into the factory 240Z bracket. Suggestions?

Actually, all you are concerned with is the temp of the oil under pressure, in the bearing shells, etc. The temp as it lays in the sump is immaterial.

That sounds right. I just took my pan off to replace the gasket. My thread gauge didn't match with either 1.5 or 1.25 pitch, both were close but not quite. and it was bigger than 16 mm, but smaller than 17 mm. So I think you've got it figured out.

Part of the problem has always been that the necessary round connectors for the 280Z have not been available. Even when Dave was making them, they were for 240Z only.

The Victoria harness has been pretty thoroughly dissed in an old thread, by people who bought it. I have been planning to look into making these later in the Spring. I thought I'd get my feet wet doing alternator upgrade adapters first. But I've got some diagrams that Dave did some time back, and with that and my knowledge (from doing this on non-Datsuns) I'm pretty sure that I can come up with something viable even without Dave's actual plans. I've even got a couple of ideas for some changes, for more reliability and easier installation. So I may yet get to this. But I've got to admit that as a person who enjoys wiring and electrical mods, but is also fussy about doing it clean and right, the hassle of finding suppliers for the OE style terminals and connectors has discouraged me. I'm not sure it's worth the headaches. But I haven't given up yet.

This picture of mine is very bad, shows my car as it was when I bought it (pretty ratty), but you can clearly see the pattern on the tunnel. Interior of early '71

The quilted vinyl was used in the early cars, yes. You should find it on the transmission tunnel, the rear shock towers and the rear wheel arches. I'm not sure when they stopped using the quilted vinyl, but your '70 should definitely have it.

As you pointed out, most of this was covered in the earlier thread. And the answer is almost always money. The L-series engine design was cribbed from the Prince engine which was more or less a Mercedes engine built under license. Why spend a pile re-engineering a new solution when a perfectly reasonable one already exists in-house? And lastly, the valvetrain is much simpler to design on a non-crossflow head - all the rockers go the same way.

And here is a set of the narrower 14x6, complete with caps. http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/JDM-Watanabe-AE86-Corolla-510-Datsun-240z-4ag-L28-240sx_W0QQcmdZViewItemQQcategoryZ43954QQitemZ8025279970QQrdZ1

So if it were mine, my question would be, "Are BPE's really worth all that much more than the run of the mill '78 280Z?" If keeping it stock is worth a lot, maybe I'd do it. But if the value is only a little more than other 280's, maybe I'd sacrifice that premium so that I could build the car the way I want. In other words, originality is fine, if that's what you want. But if you want something else...

I just looked to be sure, and mine has that same ground terminal as well. Looks to be original, but who can tell. Maybe only the later matchbox dizzies came with the ground terminal. The one in mine is from an '83 ZX and it still has the later E12-93 box on it. (I'll be swapping to the E12-80 later. Bigger fish to fry first.)

No offense taken. Don't sweat it.

I too will be getting my rust repair parts from Zedd Findings. I'm not sure if Charlie (the owner) sells the frame rails separately, but I know they do come with the floor pan replacements he sells. Definitely worth a call.

I'm more concerned with the 38 mm offset than the (admittedly) odd weight. With that offset you are not going to clear the strut tubes. Gonna need some serious spacers for them, at least 30 mm or so. I'm betting those wheels were designed for a Honda, not early RWD Datsuns.

The latest - Thanks to those of you out there who helped my research by finding and sending me the part numbers off of your harnesses. At this time my plan is to purchase a complete harness from a single car, either a late '70 or early '71 with a manual transmission. Once I have the harness in my possession, I will (before I put it in the car) test the resistance on each wire, disassemble and clean all the terminals, and resolder terminals as necessary. Basically I plan to refurb the harness before I put it in the car. Time consuming and tedious, yes. But when done, it should all be good. For reference, I will try to find a matched set of 24012-E4601 (engine harness), 24013-E4601 or E4602 (dash harness assembly) and 24014-E4601 (rear body harness). Interestingly, although the two dash harness assemblies listed above are supposed to fit different build dates (2-9/70 and 10-12/70 respectively) the sub-harnesses found in cars in both ranges have been the same in the reports I've seen so far. The sub-harnesses are 24013-E4650 & E4651.