keith5700

Ha Ha! Yes I'm afraid I built everything from scratch. Go in the garage with a bar of aluminium, then 6 months later a helicopter pops out. Vinz I'll try and give you a ring from work tomorrow, otherwise my home no. is 01332 556237

Making a helicopter, telescope and a fish tank at the moment........

Nick, I think you'll have to try it as it is first and see what happens. It would be better if the connections were on top of the oil cooler, rather than the bottom. With both connections on the bottom I don't know if a check valve would work. The oil could obviously drain down the pipe without the valve in it, and just drag the oil through the valve. If you have a thermostat in line then it may not be a problem, because on cold start the oil wouldn't go through the cooler, so you'd build up pressure fairly quickly, and then as the thermostat opened slowly the oil would fill up the cooler over a short period and you'd probably not notice a bit of a pressure drop for a while, whilst it was filling. This is assuming it did drain out over time. It may not. From my own experience I'd scrap the oil cooler and keep it as simple as poss on the oil side. you shouldn't need the cooler really, especially if you're running a roller cam.

Nick, do you think you may have a problem with the oil draining back from that high mounted oil cooler, when you switch the engine off? I had an oil cooler on mine for a while and it was mounted fairly low, but it did drain back, and took a while to build up pressure after start up. I re-mounted it lower and it worked better, but I scrapped it in the end as it was more trouble than it was worth.

Hi Nick, that seal blowing looks very strange. Is the orange thing the actual hydraulic seal or is it a dust seal over the top. If it's the actual seal then to me it looks like the piston was maybe at the very end of its travel and the seal then blew out as there was nothing left to constrain the inner diameter of the seal. I can't remember how it was in my car but should there be a spacer behind the hydraulic unit to bring it closer to the flywheel? When it's fitted you only need, say, 6mm of gap between the bearing and the clutch fingers, with the piston fully home. You have to have some gap 'cos as the clutch plate wears the fingers move closer to the bearing. I'd double check the gap before you bolt everything back up. You should be able to see how much gap there is by looking through that square hole in the bellhousing where the clutch fork used to go. Did you dismantle the piston or just fitted it as it left me? If the gap is ok as you had it, and you didn't dismantle it before it was fitted then the only other thing it could be is if the seal stuck to the inner piston over the last 18 or so months, athough that's a long shot. I'd go with the gap being wrong at the moment. Cheers, Keith.

All I ever do is send it back for a re-issue with a different engine size and engine number. Don't change anything else at the same time tho. If it comes back ok then that's it, just carry on like it was a normal car.

Nick, have you got a reg. document for the original car?

Bloody ell Pete, I only wanted the spark plugs changing!

What a coincedence, I bought a 54 plate st220 last week. Paid £7000, with 46k on the clock. Wanted a monaro but couldn't scrape the cash together really. First impressions, brakes crap, ride quality good, seats crap, engine really smooth and quiet but don't know why people get so excited about the performance, it's not what you'd call a fast car. S'pose it depends what you're used to. Tried an overtake on a country road two days ago, blimey, could have done with some nitrous halfway through. Not much low down torque, not much power below 5000rpm. Feels very heavy and not much feel through the wheel. Clutch feels a bit wooly too. Yes I know I'm used to bigger engines but I was still a bit dissapointed with the acceleration. Having said all that, looking at it purely as a family saloon it's very nice and we actually like it.

John, that sounds brilliant, bit better than the Chevy really, when it's on full chat. Very nice. I'd better go now else I'll be wanting another one!

Nick, remember it's rods 2 and 5 which may hit the cam.

Thanks for that Richard. I just assumed the manual was the more desireable, but I'm probably living in the past, where autos were horrible grandad things. I need to blag a test drive at the main dealers here, try the auto. Cheers.

Richard. I'm just saving for my next car now. Have decided on either the SLK or a Monaro. I don't think I could stretch to an AMG55 but have my eyes on the 350 manual. Would you say the 350 is still pretty quick as sports cars go? Do you think it's worth finding a manual. Never driven a tiptronic auto, don't know anything about them at all. Do owners generally take out extended warranties on them, or is that only really essential with the AMG? ie, what's the worst that can go wrong/blow up on them. Cheers, Keith.

Seems I paid £295 with del. So, £175 delivered.

Let me look out the paperwork, I can't remember how much I paid for it

I suppose you could tap into the harness if you didn't want to run extra cables but I suspect that would turn a tricky job into a nightmare job. I tried to use the harness wires for the fuel gauge but even that wouldn't work and I ended up running new wires for everything in the end. I couldn't use the original speedo to power the rack as I changed the gearbox too, so had no speedo signal sender.

Hi, I've got a nearly new one I don't need anymore. It's sprayed satin black tho in case that's a prob. Keith.

The problem with a wiring procedure write up is that when I did it, I was using a Chevy engine, so a lot of what I did isn't relevant. Same when Nick puts it in his. At the end of the day most aftermarket gauges are the same, you supply each gauge with + and - 12v and then a signal from a matching sensor. There are a couple of tricky areas, assuming you've managed to actually fit the gauges in place. The first is having to cut up the plastic printed curcuit board on the back of the dash to make room for some of the gauges, whilst leaving certain parts of the curcuit intact so all the warning lights still work. The second would be to sort out the signal from the original speedo to the variable power steering selonoid, to retain the variable assistance bit. I didn't bother with that as mine settled into an acceptable default load so I left it alone. Cheers, Keith.

How to guide? Er, get access to a cad terminal and draw it all up, get some ally plate and a milling machine and spend two weeks chobbling away and finish by hand and ally oxide blast and paint and fit all gauges, and then spend another two weeks wiring it all up. Seriously tho', it depends on your current level of skills as to how you approach something like this. If you're someone like me then you could try and copy what I've done. I have some cad drawings of the plates to start you off. If you don't have engineering skills then you have to either get someone to make it for you or you could simplyfy the design by using say 3mm plate and mount the gauges just on the front. Then just chop the outer case till it fits. An even bigger problem will be wiring it up. Mine was fitted to a different engine which didn't use the 300zx ecu. If you are using the 300 ecu, which you obviously will be, then the speedo will be the hardest thing to wire up. You'll need to find out the type of output from the 300 speed sensor and see if it's compatible with the speedo, or like I did, use a separate pickup from the propshaft. Then you'll find the variable steering assist doesn't work properly as that uses a signal from the original speedo. It's going to be a load of work so you need to think carefully if you really want to go this way. As for the aircon, what do you want to display? just the temp figure or the whole thing, ie. all the little airflow and fan speed symbols? If it's the latter then good luck! If I can't sell my car as it is then I may be stripping it, in which case the whole digi system could be for sale. I know Nick expressed an interest but think he has since decided to sell his car?

Wes, just noticed your email via the Pistonheads site, asking where the dashboard was from. Well you know about the gauges now but the actual dash was made by me on the miller. It was hogged out of 1/2" thick ally plate to sink the gauges in nice, and the slots for the warning lights were milled in at the same time. Then the instrument casing was milled flat and shaped to fit the ally plate properly so it sealed up all round nicely. The centre console panel was out of 16mm plate so I could sink the gauges in, and also angle them individually upwards and to the drivers side. They looked a bit naff when I put them in on just a flat plate. Then I spent a week wiring everything up!

The actual gauges I used in the digi dash in the black car were from a company called Nordskog, and I bought some from them direct and some from Summit racing, both in US. Summit do their own cheaper range but the characters are smaller and look a bit crap. Can't say the Nordskog ones have been ultra reliable, but they have stood by their guarantees.

Yes you've caught me out, I'm actually a road sweeper who cobbles together these pieces of crap in my lunchtimes. This engine was thrown together in about 20mins one afternoon using just two open ended spanners and a hide mallet. My workshop is a mud hut in the middle of a forest, so I suspect there could have been some oil contamination from all the fox poo and branches on my workbench.

Not had any interest yet. Bit of a long shot anyway, but thought I'd give it a go while waiting for my subscription to come thro.

Seeing as my subscribed status still hasn't come thro I got bored and put it up on Pistonheads, just to see what would happen. Would rather someone took it on rather than have to strip it. Could someone be kind enough to put a link up for it, don't know how to do that, assuming that's not breaking any rules. It's the newest ad in the 300zx section. Ta.

Yes looks like it was a stupid poxy echeque. Don't know how that happened, I saw the echeque option and made a note not to click it but to make sure it went the normal way.