nickz32

For those of you who are running dual intake Would someone be willing to measure the internal diameter of both ends of the elbows please? Thanks Nick

All will be revealed next week :P

Well, I finally committed to it, the BGW is no longer part of the look of my Z All being well, my new spoiler will be despatched from the US today and arrive mid next week

I’d love to commit, but will wait until the Z is ACTUALLY on the road before I do so. Fingers crossed 6 weeks or so I will know

Looking forward to seeing the progress that is to come buddy

Yeah, one of the companies I keep a saved for when I want to rebarrell by SSR’s

http://Www.Augmentwheels.com will do them. They have reproduced various Porsche wheels in different sizes and they look proper. It’ll be expensive, but it’s certainly possible to do it ***edit*** about $4000 before shipping expensive for forged aluminium wheels, so compatible to top end wheels

I know somewhere stateside that will do them, but not over here

Good to see you still around Andy The auctioneers are certainly doing well promoting the sale of that Z. Hopefully it’ll make headline grabbing news to keep the Z in the recent lime light it’s had recently

Happy birthday fella

Since th car has been in the bodyshop I’ve been umming and aahing about going back to completely stock rear lights. I’ve been on the 99 spec “conversion” for a long time but I’ve never been that impressed with how the diffuser sheeting sits in the lens, with gaps across the bottom of where the diffuser is meant to sit flush against the grey frame. I’ve never been a fan of the pinstripe lines in the proper 99 specs, although I do like the later centre panel with the red 300ZX text, I may have to purchase one in the future. To be honest I never particularly disliked the stock lights. Sooooo...... ....from a collection of spare bits I had purchased over the years I rebuilt the rear lights with the original orange diffusers. I think having a black car I get away with it more than other colours, so while it does “age” the rear of the car a little, I don’t think the whole car suffers as a result. I’ll keep the clear side repeaters and front indicators as they are. Once I’ve given the lenses a good going over with the DA I’m sure they’ll look perfect

Started off promising but the ground was soaked from the rain yesterday so the roads are fine

You can speak directly to PayPal And query the payment. But I 100% wouldn’t release the car until funds are cleared

[video=youtube_share;v6ojbqLjW2I]

22 December 2017 The final piece of the fuelling setup turned up this week. A Turbosmart FPR2000 Yes, it’s complete overkill with its 2000 BHP handling capacity, however there are reasons for choosing it. Firstly with the addition of the WinFactory fuel rail much entire fuel system was -8 sized (I.D of about 12.6mm) all apart from the Tomei FPR, which was 3/8NPT (around 6mm ID). While it would affect pressure that much, it’s a bit of a bottle neck for flow. The Turbosmart FPR uses -8AN ports, so my entire system is now equalised. Secondly, as you can see in the data log there is oscillation in then fuel pressure when on load. This maybe caused by a lack of fuel dampener in my set up. This can effect fuel injector performance by causing inconsistency in how the Injector delivers fuel. After a bit of research I found this article by Adaptronic ECU’s. They too had an issue with fuel pulse oscillation with Injector Dynamics injectors. The article also compared some of the after market FPR’s as well as a factory item from an RX7. http://www.adaptronic.com.au/fuel-pressure-regs-is-there-much-of-a-difference/ ***spolier alert*** the Turbosmart came out as the most accurate and consistent FPR Yesterday I popped to the car and fitted the new unit. I need to adapt the mounting bracket as it currently forces the FPR to sit in a way that causes a clearance issue with the fuel pressure sensor. The car has changed a fair bit since I last saw it, virtually ready for primer. Best news is that no unexpected tin worm or gremlins have been discovered. Can’t wait to see it painted! And there we are, bang up to date. Obviously posts won’t come quite so thick and fast from now on. I still have a few things in the pipeline that will really change the look of the car. Bring on 2018!

November 2017 Dropped the Z off at the bodyshop After a week or so I popped over to grab a couple of parts I needed to do some bits to. One of my headlights had a dirty projector lens one of my rear light clusters was cracked. They had already started the prep work, focussing in the rear arches. They had been rolled and flared in a bit of a rush for Vmax to fit the new Varrstoen wheels. Because the flare is effectively 3 skins of metal, it’s been formed as close to perfect as possible and then filler will have out the dips from the spot welds on the rolled lip. The bit of filler at the leading edge of the arch is an old repair that I could see through the paintwork since I’ve owned the car. Once they removed the glass I took the rear quarter glass and rear screen home to remove the tint. I’d had enough of trying to reverse at night through limo tint glass! The quarter window tint came off without too much trouble The rear screen on other hand was a pig of a job. No matter how much heat we used the glue wouldn’t release the tint without taking sections of the heated screen with it. So I employed the help of the Mrs and her steady hand and we set about repairing the elements

September 2017 After establishing what options I had with the bodywork side of things, I decided to bite the bullet and go for a full glass out panels off respray. It seemed like a false economy to spend £1500 on a “blow over” to sort the various bits that needed doing and having a proper respray a few years in the future. I ended up choosing a bodyshop fairly local to me who works on prestige cars. Further more the owner of the business has owned and repaired several Z’s since the mid to late 90’s. His knowledge of how these cars come apart meant less time was wasted figuring out how certain parts come off and how to get them aligned again properly once painted. To go along with the new paint I bought all new roof mouldings, door mouldings, rear window seals, center targa bar, clips, grommets etc etc. If I was going to do it, I wanted the car to be compatible to some of the nicest cars in this club. The car was booked in for mid November and I started hammering the overtime at work. As ever, another small problem emerged. While I was confident in my work around the fuel system, I could very occasionally smell fuel around the plenum. There was no way on Earth I was going to let a small fuel leak cause the car to burst into flames and ruin everything I worked for. So over a few weeks, the plenum came off and everything was triple checked. And yet, no sign of any leaks, no torn seals, no weeping connectors. The smell was fairly localised around cylinders 1/3/5, but I just could not trace it. The final test was to place some UV dye in the fuel, run the car and then check the fuel system with a UV light.... nothing. Not even a dot of UV ink. I spoke to Jaffa at length about the issue as I knew his whole fuel system wasn’t dissimilar to mine. One theory was because I had used nitrile rubber braided hose rather than Teflon braided hose, the smell could be emanating from the hoses themselves. But I didn’t want to take the risk of a fuel fire and the smell seemed too localised for that theory to entirely fit the bill. Further more, I was getting thoroughly cheesed off having to keep removing the plenum to get access to the fuel system. Secondly, after the promising performance in the dyno I knew I may end up getting close to the safe limits of the NISMO 740cc injectors I had fitted during the rebuild. Only one solution fitted the bill. The latest version of the WinFactory top feed fuel rail mates with Injector Dynamics 1050X (1065cc) top feed injectors. By fitting this I reduced the amount of joins in my fuel system between the feed line to the regulator from 9 to 2, vastly reducing the likelihood of leaks. It added simplicity to the system of one inlet and one outlet on the rail itself, it further raised my safety net in the fuel delivery department, and finally meant I didn’t have to remove the plenum any time I wanted to work on the fuelling system. A bit of modification was required to get the rail to fit. As my car has the late design plenum, it has a few extra lugs and mounting points that weren’t used until after 1996. So I had to cut, grind and repolish those areas. Further clearance was needed on the “bridge” that connects the throttle pulleys to the plenum over cylinder 1. (Pics taken from WinFactorys installation guide) A bit more faffery wiring up new pig tails for the injectors and she was in and back together again To finalise things I decided a bit more thermal protection was required for the fuel lines, so I wrapped the lines that ran in the engine bay with suitable protection It was an expensive bit of kit, but the smell of fuel appears to have completely vanished. The Injector details on the map were changed to suit and she was running again (the joys of Volumetric Efficiency based mapping means changes such as injectors don’t require a full remap) I had moved house in August, so for the first time in a while I brought the old girl home.

Subscribed member???? Don’t you mean Supreme Emperor! I dunno mate, ruffling around in Simons carpet is something that requires serious consideration and copious amounts of alcohol.... I know where he hangs out!!! Oooooooh I do miss my SSR’s. I must check to see if they clear my brembos without spacers on. I took this pic just after I sourced the brakes, but can’t remember if I had my big hubcentric spacers on when I took it...... I do remember clearance being toight.... toight as a toiger ***Edit*** For those of you don’t havent seen or don’t remember, I have a set of SSR Indy 500’s which are pretty rare. Unfortunately a crack in the road around Lake Bala slightly buckled all 4 wheels and the barrels aren’t repairable. I’m hoping to rebuild them with new barrels one day because.... well... they look fapping awesome

I can feel a summer jaunt to the island coming on

July 2017 With the car now fully mobile and driveable it MOT’d it for the first time in 4 years. It had a bit of an issue with its headlight aim but otherwise it flew through. Another little proud moment for me was the result of the emissions testing. It goes without saying that I don’t have catalytic converters, yet it only produced 0.75% of Carbon Monoxide (upper limit is 3.5%). That wasn’t the best bit... Hydrocarbon reading of 63ppm (upper limit of 1200ppm). This car burns ZERO oil! Can’t beat quality machining. Another benefit to this is that burning oil lowers the knock limit of a combustion cycle. Therefore a lack of oil in the combustion cycle means I can get closer to the engines theoretical ignition advance limit before encountering knock....... wins all round! I still hadn’t decided what I was going to do on the bodywork front, so I decided that I would take the car to a number of bodyshops to gauge opinions and prices in order to make an informed decision. I honestly had forgotten how much I enjoyed driving a Z. Even just pottering around it put a smile on my face. I resisted the urge to give it a boot full until I’d tested the fuel setup on the dyno, but even with the odd squeeze of the throttle it felt like a puppy wanting to be let off its lead, keen to let rip down the road. I will freely admit that, when it’s all tuned up and finished, I’m a little nervous as to what it will be like to drive. I’ve pretty much decided that next year I’m going to do a couple of Airfield based track days to reacquaint myself with my car and how it feels after all the changes I’ve made. Anyway, the car sudden developed an electrical fault (which I posted another thread about). The speedo would intermittently die and the power steering would load up. Speedo converter was the likely culprit, so out came the dash Something else I will freely admit, I SUCK at automotive electrics, I don’t know why but it’s something I’ve never managed to get a handle on. So I drafted in a mate who is very very very good with them and set about swapping it for another Unit. During the diagnoses state, we’d noticed that the Haltech was receiving a speed signal of about 11kmh when the car was stationary. So I chose a replacement converter that had the facility to send an unconverted signal back to the ECU. This meant both the Haltech and the power steering and hicas ecu’s saw a signal as Nissan intended rather one that had been altered. It appears that I’ve been driving around for all these years with the HICAS adjusting at vastly different speeds to what is intended. Once wired in, a quick check of the Haltech showed a stationary speed of 1kmh. A bit of recalibration will be required to get it bang on accurate, but I’ll save that for the dyno. Annoyingly it doesn’t appear to have completely solved the problem. When I first start up the car and initially manoeuvre at slow speeds, the steering is nice and light as expected. Once up to speed it loads up nicely, but as I slow down again it stays loaded up, especially on right hand turns. Something deffinately isn’t right, but I know the car needed it’s geometry sorting again. Once everything is pointing back in the correct directions and angles, I’m going to have to go through the power steering system and make sure all the solenoids are behaving as expected etc. Speaking of geometry, I was getting a little fed up with bloody rose jointed suspension components! The rear camber arms had a little bit of play that was coming from the rose joints. Time to get rid of them and the nasty driftworks arms that i had fitted many moons again. A bit of research around options for adjustable poly bushed arms and I pulled the pin on a set of these: I’ve always rated White Line suspension components, and these are no exception. Such a shame they make so little for the Z32. I plan on replacing as many of my adjustable suspension components with bushed items to help get some of that silky Z32 ride quality back into the car. I’ve always felt that the Z is a GT car, a sporty one, but still a GT car. And that’s what I’m going to try and stick to when it comes to the chassis and interior aspects of the car. It needs to be comfortable for touring in, but capable with things get twisty and hairy. To add to that interior feel I decided to get rid of my Veilside evolution gear knob. As much as I liked it, it was like changing gear with an icicle in the winter and a hot coal in the summer. I’m similar to Joely, Andrew, Fungal and others in that I like the OEM+ look. While I don’t think my car will ever be an OEM+ car due to the extensive modifications, I take inspiration from the ethos around it. So I chose to go back to an OE gear know with red stitching I plan on keeping the interior very close to stock, Bar the wheel and gauges, as I think Nissan did a cracking job. One day I’ll look at changing the materials on some of the surfaces, but that’s in the very very distant future!

Incredibly flat, no real clarity but no proper distortion. Even at low volume you could see the illumination of the headinit flickering when it was trying to drive the base and then if you turned the volume above 18 (which isn’t particularly loud) the head Unit shut itself down. We tested them on the amplifier we have at the workshop and they sounds a million times better

JULY!!!!!!!! 2017 Yes, flipping JULY. A whole 7 months to the day after the go ahead to make the real things I finally got some shiney bits of billet in my grubby mitts Like a kid in a candy shop I whizzed over to the workshop and fitted them. Happy bunny. Fitted a set of EBC BlueStuff NDX lads after some good reviews by a number of mates and the whole brake system was the flushed, refilled and bled with ATI SuperBlue (which oddly isn’t blue anymore) I was hoping to brakes that feel like my wife’s BMW 4 series M-sport that has similar brembo 4 pots fronts/2 pot rears. Didn’t quite work out that way. I took her out for a spin and wow were they bitey! However once I’d bedded them in, they were a lot better. The bite is a bit to close to the top of the pedal for my liking, but there is absolutely no doubting the stopping power these have. Super impressed, but they still need work. Too little pedal effort is required to get them really stopping, which makes modulation of the pedal a little difficult. I’m not used to it, however I know if someone else drives it as it is, they’ll end up head butting the windscreen! I’m now on the hunt for a new engineers/CNC machinist to make something for the rear brembos. I want to see if having the rear brembos on calms the biting point and lack of required pedal effort. If not, then I will probably look at down sizing the brake master cylinder. Muchos ponderings to be had! Still, they look bad ass behind my wheels

Welcome back to the fold!

JANUARY 2017 What can I say, I picked a very very lazy CNC machinist! I won’t got into the finer details, but after lots of tooing and froing and arguement, I FINALLY got a design for my brake brackets (a 7 month wait!!!) The combo of Evo X brembos and 370Z discs did cause a slight issue in that there was only 7mm of space for a bracket to fit between the calipers and the mounting lugs in the hub... certainly not thick enough to last a 180mph plus braking situation in a 1600kg car! But I’d committed to buying the parts I had and pushed forward with the guys to engineer a solution to the problem that would be strong enough to take anything I could throw at it. And here it was One sturdy bracket to be made from billet (I forget the grade, but it’s something like Alpan T56, but don’t quote me on that). The backer would sit behind the hub lugs and wrap around it making a very strong piece of engineering. The fitment was designed to be extremely snug against the hub lugs to share the load across the entire hub lug rather than just around the mounting hole. This would require the casting marks in the metal of the hub to be sanded down a smidge as their could have been very small casting differences between the Spare hub I supplied to them to those actually on my car, so s little bit of care and attention was needed to get the fit right. 12.1 tensile grade bolts would be used to secure the bracket. A few days later a prototype was CNC’d out of a bit of hard wood they had laying around. Which was then test fitted to the caliper There needed to be a bit of an adjustment to the design as the support webbing on the rear of the caliper fouled the top edge of the mating sufrace of the bracket causing the caliper to tip forward away from the bracket. A 45 deg chamfer was added to the top of that surface to clear the webbing and it was time to test fit to the car A couple of small adjustments were required to ease fitment, but otherwise the prototype was proven and the go ahead was given to make Version 2 of the bracket out of billet.....

Something else that’s been on my hit list for quite some time has be audio related. The “sound system” in my Z has been dire since day one, so I thought it was about time that I did something about it! I managed to source a set of Bose speaker boxes from a mate of mine, banzai beakers, and set about removing the old Bose sub ohm speakers for something my head Unit could actually run. I’m a bit like Fungalbumpkin himself and I like Alpine audio equipment. So a set of Alpine SPR60C 130W RMS component speakers went in the rear with some new acoustic packing, with the tweeters nestled away by the rear quarter windows (I’ll take a pic and add it to this thread when I next get chance, but it’s nice and subtle) And a set of MB Quartz 10cm 100W RMSspeakers replaced the Bose 10cm in the front Another leaf I took out of Funky’s book was an Alpine in-line amp . A nice little solution to not wanting to mess around with an amp in the boot (I have other plans for the space under the false floor) And provides 45W RMS to all 4 corners, more than enough to provide a vast upgrade in acoustics to the three knackered stock sized speakers that this lot replaced! And the resulting sound was..... crap. One of my closest friends works with AV equipment ALOT and he’s pretty convinced that the internal amp inside my old Alpine head Unit has seen its best days and given up the ghost. So a new version of my alpine head Unit is now on the shopping list!