Rob

It seems like every second house in America has an old 240Z in its garage! First derk, then ZmeFly, and now steve-o all find nice original Zs that seem to have been forgotten about for years, all in the last fortnight! I'm jealous! Can anybody in Australia report a find like this?

How could they possibly compete with Australia when our currency is the South Sea Peso?

From my understanding of what you described you may very well be mad, good sir. But if it was stuffed anyway then why not? I'd love to see some pics!

Yep, think it's a great idea. And if anybody in Australia wants to do the swap I'll happily trade my 260Z tailights for some 240Z ones (I reckon the 240Z ones look better)

I thought I saw a 240 in the shorts for Vanilla Sky.

Sounds like you are running the ballast resistor without the bypass circuit. Ballast resistors are meant to be bypassed during cranking so the coil gets a temporary hit of 12v instead of the 7 volts that it normally runs on. This is to counteract the voltage drop that affects all cars during cranking. Say if the voltage drops to 10v during cranking then the coil wired through a ballast resitstor will be trying to run on about 5v, so it won't generate much in the way of a spark. Best thing to do is find out what setup the '81 car had and mimick that. At an educated guess I'd say that it didn't have a ballast resistor and used a coil designed for EI. Hope this babble helps.

Yep, that's true. Datsun 5 speeds are no problem at all, except the housings can be a bit of a bugger to separate. There is a post about separating housings somewhere on this forum. TO get mine apart I had to bolt a piece of angle iron to the gearbox mounting lugs, hook the bellhousing over a lip in my (quite solid) workbench and whack the angle iron 956 times with a mallet! I've heard of others that just come apart though. Good luck!

Some ideas that might help: An easy mistake to make in an efi conversion is to connect the ignition feed to the computer to acessories wire of the ignition switch. This will cut the power to the computer while the engine is cranking and give you no squirt from the injectors at all. How long was the motor sitting for? More than a year or so can clog up injectors. Maybe get the serviced. Got the fuel lines on the right way round? If you put the feed line into the pressure regulator instead of the injector rail then you will have bugger all fuel pressure at the injectors. A silly one - you are using the efi fuel pump right? Does the fuel pump run for a few seconds when the ignition is switched on? If it doesn't then check pump connections and power to the ecu. Hope something in this drivel helps. Good luck.

I ran my 260Z with a 180B (I don't know what that is stateside but it was a 1.8 litre four) clutch for a long time with absolutely no probs so it isn't like the clutches are weak. There are a few different of release bearing carriers (the lengths vary), and if the one you use is too long for your clutch it will not let it engage fully and it will slip. Check if the carrier (not just the release arm) has freeplay. If it doesn't then wander off to your friendly wrecker and see if you can find a shorter one. Good luck.

No worries Michael, I see your point about the $$$. I still highly recommend going on a course at some point. I couldn't believe the difference it made to my welding! Another thing, when welding sheet metal you get much better results by setting the voltage high and welding one dot at a time to create a series of stitch welds (ie press the trigger for one second, wait a second or two for the steel to cool down a little, then weld another dot overlapping the last one and so on...). I usually overlap the steel if it isn't an overly visible area and weld in about one inch stitches about one inch apart: ----------********----------********----------******** Then a good dob of seam sealer to finish off. Once again, good luck!

Hey mperdue I was looking at your site (and wincing at your rust) when I noticed that you were having a go at gasless MIG welding. I thought I might be able to offer a bit of advice. I've been successfully MIG welding for about four years now. I've never tried a gasless MIG as the wire is so expensive it seemed to make more sense to pay for gas, and I'm told it's a lot easier to weld with gas. I started to try and learn on a little machine like the one you describe and hated it. It may have just been my particular machine but I could not get a half decent weld out of it. I concluded that MIG welding wasn't for me and I reached for the old oxy torch. Then my dad bought a decent UniMIG which I had a play with and discovered it was much easier than the little machine, and I could get good welds out of it, but not all the time. I decided to sign up for night course and after eight weeks I could do welds I was proud of! Now I've bought a Kempii welder and couldn't do without it. It even came in handy with my bathroom renovations! The morals were: * do a course - don't try and teach yourself - a local tech college will be the go here. * buy/rent/borrow/<please don't steal> a good welder and use gas. Hope this helps, good luck!

Don't know about 240s but 260s are definately the same pedal box for auto and manual (well mine was anyways)

The clutch pedal isn't that bad, just involving. It took me half a day as I had to replace the pedal box as well due to what appeared to be old disabled-driver mods making it impossible to just change the pedals of my existing box. So my car wasn't off the road for a long time I changed the pedal box one morning and then drove around with a superfluous clutch pedal for few months until I found time to change the gearbox (I found time when the old autobox decided it liked neutral better than any other gear).

I'm with Dan. My 260Z auto felt like driving a household appliance compared to what it was like with a manual. Much more fun! Easy to convert too - everthing just bolted up!

aussie240, They are either Panasports, Compomotive MLs, British Racing (A Japanese brand), Watanabes (also Japanese), Minators (UK) or they could even be genuine Minilites. I've found that the only wheels of that style that are available in australia are the Compomotives, at about AU$350 a piece (sorry Dazza, but the Performance Superlites have two spokes too many for me - still a nice looking wheel but )

Yes, being able to stop is a good thing! Years ago I had total brake failure (handbrake didn't even work as it was hydraulic) in my rally car while driving to uni. As I didn't want to leave my car on the side of the road I decided to keep going, and learned the meaning fear as I slowed the car down with the gearbox, and stopped it by turning off the engine and gently using the clutch as a brake. Stoopid!:eek:

Sounds to me like the diaphragm in the booster is kaput. If the line was leaking you would get a constant vacuum leak and the motor would idle high. I think it's possible to service these yourself but I've never actually needed to do it.

I haven't done this conversion but I've done similar things. This will sound obvious, but it won't be hard to wire up if you know where everthing goes. By that I mean if you are starting with a bundle of wires in a box marked 'wiring loom' from the wreckers you are screwed from the start. The best way is to pull the stuff out of the donor car yourself. Work slowly and takes lots of notes, pictures, and tag everything you can. What's even better is if you can buy the donor car so you can have it there as a constant source of bits while you are doing your conversion. You can always drop it back to the wreckers later!

A 240k five speed will fit fine. So will just about any other Datsun gearbox! I had a 180B box in my 260 for a while, and it was fine. Bolted right in and didn't break. Another option is to buy the synchro & a workshop manual and fit it yourself. Datsun gearboxes aren't hard to work on. You can also get a silvia box to fit. Take a look at http://www.usq.edu.au/users/degroot/240z/main_default.htm There is a page there somewhere about how to do that. $240 Isn't that bad a price for the work involved (I'm assuming you are talking aussie $$$ and they are doing the removal/replacement of the gearbox), but you shoudl be able to do it yourself for less than $100. Good luck.

If it was a real one it would take up the whole parking space

Yes. Check the way the half shafts bolt on though. Some Datsuns use a single bolt through the spline into the diff centre, some use four bolts around a flange. Don't know which cars/years used which.

Hello everybody There are cracks in the drivers door of my Z near where the stainless window frame bolts on. By the look of them they have already been welded over once. I could weld them up again but by I think they would only reappear as there is no room to weld a plate over the top of them, and I don't think I could get behind them to weld plates over the inside. What I'd really like to do is get a new door skin so I can cut the old one off (It's not quite straight anyway), weld plates over the cracks from inside, and then fit the new skin. Are good door skins available anywhere? Has anybody else had this problem with their doors? Thanks in advance

<scottish voice> G-O-G-G-O...</scottish voice> You forget how small those things are...

Think you have problems finding parts for your Z? Spare a thought for NASA! http://www.iht.com/articles/57527.htm