m0n1xX3r

Me, I think it's great. I wouldn't dare drive it myself because I think I'd just look like an idiot, but if you can carry it off and have deep pockets for the upkeep.... it's fantastic. A really tight piece of work.

OK, so having just recently shelled out for a Z after 6 months of looking around I've spent a fair amount of time off and on getting insurance quotes. Now I used to think I had a reasonable idea how insurance worked; y'know, what made it go up and what made it go down and blah blah blah (age blah,blah, powerful car blah blah). But then I found this Z -- now mine -- and I really started looking in earnest. So here's a cautionary tale. My Z is a J-spec TT 2+2 manual. Right, so here we go. I looked into insurance companies using the forums here, and managed to get a quote of just over £600 from one of the sites mentioned here (can't remember which one at this point because it's probably 3 weeks ago). The details I put in were basically as above. I said the car was a 300 ZX (watch this, it's very pertinent). Anyway, I saw the car, loved it, went back for more quotes to the same site (gives you top 3), but this time said the car was a Fairlady. Now saying the car is a Fairlady automatically makes it an import, and this was a horrible moment, because having handed over a deposit on the thing the lowest quote I got was £1700.... just because it's an import. Some extra info: I'm 28 years old (29 this Thursday) and a software engineer, 4 years no claims, and an SP30 conviction from February 4th 2001. Ouch!! So then I went back to the original £600 quote, and found the name of the company giving this quote, then googled for them and found their website. Turns out they're another company that searches loads of different insurance companies. Anyway, various tinkering around with quotes ensues, and for a imported 300 ZX I get a quote of £600ish. However, by this time I've realised that specifying a voluntary excess of £0 will not increase my quote over specifying a voluntary excess of £250 - you learn something new every day because I'd in fact been led to believe that if you increase your excess your premium will decrease. Yeah, well that's clearly rubbish then. Anyway, I then change the car to an imported Fairlady, and the quote goes up (as expected) but this time to only £700. Phew. My relief was palpable I can tell you. So then there's this button on the quote screen that allows you to see what the quote would be if you added a £100 voluntary excess (at this stage I'm still using £0), so I click it thinking that it might go down a bit further, but guess what? Quote goes UP by £200 to £900. Unbelievable. How does this work?!? I mean how does this actually work???!? So anyway, I go back to my £0 voluntary excess and phone these people up. Now hilariously the insurance provider they're dealing with is Norwich Union (who I was insured with on my previous car), but so anyway I deal with these people who are basically middlemen, and confirming the details with the lady on the phone she's saying, "Oooh no, the quote's a bit higher than that. At least £200 more." She says she'll call me back. That's fine, so I decide to phone Norwich Union directly as an existing customer, give them all the details, and guess what? Additional amount payable for the new car brings cost of policy to around £700. Just for additional info my Clio cost just under £400 to insure, and it had a piddly 1.6 8v engine pushing out 92 bhp. Makes it from 0 - 60 in 10.4 seconds, but now that feels more like 10.4 years... whereas the Z will do it in just over half that time and has three times the power. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about the disproportionately low quote, I'm just commenting on the lack of logic or reason behind it.) Wild. Like I said, I used to kid myself that I had some vague understanding of how car insurance works but not any more. Now here's what I think they actually do to calculate your premium (I admit, this is a very geeky suggestion): What I think happens is that you fill in all your details on the online form or on the phone, and they take all these details and use them to generate a checksum. They then use this checksum as the seed for a random number generator and they take the first number produced by this generator and perform some sort of mathematical transformation on it based on the date you want the cover to start, and then apply a scaling factor to get it into sensible currency units, and that's it: there's your insurance premium. One of my housemates is slightly more sensible and suggested that the insurance companies involved possessed a risk profile that suggested drivers who wanted to take on a voluntary excess were more likely to make insurance claims than those confident enough to specify a £0 excess but I'm not really sure I buy this. In any case I think my explanation is more fun. My explanation also gives me license to brand insurers as wicked and tricksy hobbitses and suchlike. ;-) Sorry to hear you're having so much trouble with them. A necessary evil though unfortunately.

Mac, for what it's worth... the website background is awful, but that's one sweet looking Z you've got there and it more than compensates. Respect.

No worries. You're more than welcome. I know exactly how much of a hassle it is when you're PC starts messing you around. Work with the things all the time. Glad everything's sorted.

All right, this sounds like a right swine. I'm fortunate enough not to have got infected with anything for the past year, but my old Windows 2000 box is (still) lousy with CoolWebSearch from goodness knows where (but I'd like to see it rise from the dead when I install gentoo over the top of it -- snee hee hee). Seriously, if you do manage to get it off without going down the route of a complete system re-install, which I'm inclined to think will be a struggle I'd recommend the following (I'm assuming you're on WinXP): (i) Put your box behind some sort of hardware firewall. A router will do fine for this, wireless ones are great (you usually get a few ports for wired connections too) but switch the encryption on. (ii) If you're on XP upgrade to SP2 and switch the firewall on. (iii) Get Norton Internet Security Professional edition. You can choose whether to use the firewall with this or the XP firewall -- I honestly can't remember which one I'm using at the moment. (iv) STOP (and I mean STOP) running Internet Explorer. Only run Internet Explorer for Windows Update (which you should run regularly: be anal, check for updates even when it doesn't prompt you), or websites that you absolutely HAVE to access using Internet Explorer. (v) For everything else use Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/. I'm not saying it's exploit free (there have been a few for which patches have been applied to the latest version), but there are nothing like the number available for hackers to exploit in IE. Note that if a site says you *MUST* use IE you can sometimes get away with changing the user-agent setting in Firefox (think this needs a plug-in) to tell it to lie to websites by telling them it's really IE and then they'll magically work. That should sort you.

OK, I might've answered my own question here. Had a look at the FAQs but couldn't find anything there, and at the service manual, which goes into a great deal of depth about how to dismantle your manual transmission... but, well I kind of got bored. Then I did a web search and by a fairly circuitous route found this stuff: http://www.redlineoil.com/products_gearlubricants.asp?pvID=74&prodID=57&subcatID=18 So, anybody got any opinions on the MT-90? Does anybody use it? Cheers, Bart

Thanks Mark, that's spot on advice. I've written everything down so far. I spoke to the dealer earlier on as well and he was fine about it all. Oddly I noticed just a few minutes ago the ABS light has now gone out again. Gremlins, you gotta love 'em. :-)

Hi All, Just a quickie here. I've got a manual and was just wondering what you guys recommend, or what should be used, in the transmission. I just ask because the place I bought my Z from stuck the wrong MTF in the Honda Prelude my mate brought from them (they just used some standard MTF or something instead of the Honda one, which over the longer term is a very bad thing according to the owners forum) so I suspect it's a possibility they've done the same to mine. He's got a pretty notchy gearbox at the moment, which the dealer is sorting out after he provided them with the right fluid. So, anyone who's in the know I'd be extremely grateful if you could pass on the knowledge. Cheers, Bart

OK thanks. I think it can take 5 working days so may not get there until Friday.

Sorry to see this. Like you say, not too pretty... but from what people are saying, perfectly fixable. And the main thing is that you're still in one piece.

Oh yeah, forgot to say. She's already black... although now she looks rubbish because she's covered in salt. Ever since loads of people got stuck overnight on the A14 and M11 a couple of years ago, at the slightest hint of snow the highways agency goes ballistic with the stuff round here. I kid you not, the drier weather today has meant the roads are white but it's not with snow.

Nah, I'm not panicking yet. Now if this were 3 months time and the warranty had just expired THEN I'd be panicking. Zs: cheaper and more reliable than my old Renault (cost me two grand this past year).... well, perhaps not. But it IS a lot more fun to drive. Cheers, Bart

Guys, thanks to all of you. That's great. I should be able to get all this sorted out under the warranty anyway: if it is the prop-shaft and the dealer won't sort it I'll either slap him or sue him, but I don't think either of those should be necessary: he seems pretty sound. I have also found another bizarre noise: a tapping (just started this morning) in time with the engine note -- seems to be coming from LHS. And, more worrying the ABS light came on this morning and something in the boot of the car on the RHS (presumably to do with this) kept buzzing / humming away for 10 - 15 minutes after I shut the engine off. Any ideas / insights would be much appreciated. Apart from that it's all peachy. I've been driving it quite a bit to try to find problems so that when I take it back to the dealer next Wednesday hopefully everything that's wrong with it will already have manifested itself. I actually paid up my membership a day or two ago but I doubt it will have cleared yet. Looking forward to my first meet. Thanks again to everyone for their help and advice to a delicate noob'. Cheers, Bart

Hello again, Thanks for all the replies so far. I particularly liked the comment about the privacy glass being a "triumph of bling over function". I'm going to need to remember that. I'll be keeping my eye out for a pair of those Fairlady mats as well. I'm going to post pics as soon as I get chance. I'm just off out again unfortunately but will try to get them up tomorrow. The stereo is NOT in fact the original Bose unit as I had first suspected and appears to be a real antique. I've taken a picture of it just for the comedy value. The tape and CD units appear to be made by different manufacturers: the CD player is from Bijo (whoever they are) but the tape deck (complete with really naff 80s EQ controllers) doesn't have any kind of branding on it. I suspect all of the speakers are after market units though I haven't looked closely since there are Pioneer tweeters on the doors, so I'll initially just get a new head unit, see how it sounds and then maybe get some new speakers from there. I'd kind of budgeted for this anyway so it's not a big problem. As a result of your advice I can definitively say there is no (and never has been any) cruise control, but that's cool. The steering wheel is original and there are no buttons on it. I've also decided to ditch the spoiler at my earliest opportunity, probably once the 3 month warranty has expired. I'll check out zcentre as suggested, so cheers for this. Now this is where things get slightly worrying. I took her out for a drive earlier on this afternoon, along the A14, A11 and M11. Took her up to the red-line a few times. Checked that she'd been delimited and all that kind of gubbins. All fine (apart from the vibration obviously) apart from this one thing. When I started her up she was cold (not driven since last night) so she was idling at 1500 rpm, and oil pressure was 4 kg / sq cm. Once warmed up the idle was around 750, with oil pressure at around 2 kg / sq cm. I was a bit concerned about the boost guage, which was indicating a little further to the right at first than I expected, but when the revs dropped so did the boost pressure, so that once warmed up it was nearly at -700 mmHg. All good so far. Now, about 20 - 25 minutes into my drive I noticed that the oil pressure guage was indicating 0, but then the checklist warns that they tend to go wrong so I figured it had literally just died. However, when I eventually got back home and tried to put the car in the garage she was obviously idling again whilst I opened it up... in the end I couldn't get her in: I'd originally been worried about the length, and it had never occurred to me that she might be too wide, but guess what.... too wide. Actually she probably would go in but it's REALLY tight, and I just didn't fancy trying it at this point. But then when I went to park her I noticed that the oil pressure guage had returned to life again and was reporting just under 2 kg / sq cm, which is in the expected range for idle. Yikes! Anybody know what this is all about? Is it just a dodgy guage or might there be some problem with the oil pump? Gotta go for now. Cheers, Bart

Thanks for the info guys. Like I said, I wasn't too worried about traction control. I think originally I might have read about that on a US Z site anyway, although that may not make any difference. I don't know if US Zs were ever available with it either. Mine's a J-spec so there are bound to be differences. As for the spoiler I think I might well end up dumping it, but that's not a huge issue at the moment. The rest should be covered by the warranty. What I'm planning to do is take the car down on Wednesday. Martyn's going to jack her up and take a good look over her tomorrow afternoon. That said, if anybody in the Cambridge area has got a bit of time before Wednesday and wouldn't mind taking a look at her (particularly with respect to the turbo noise) I'd be more than willing to show my gratitude by shouting them a beer or three. Cheers guys, Bart

Just paid by bank transfer. Finally I'm a member! Be grateful if you could let me know when it clears. Thanks, Bart

Dear All, After months of searching for a decent one, and having found one a couple of weeks back I finally picked it up yesterday. Black manual TT. It's great. :-) My mate and I have found a couple of issues with it but I'll get those sorted out under the warranty. I'm also planning to take it out later today and put it through it's paces for a couple of hours to shake out any additional problems as the traffic on the A1 was pretty heavy last night coming back from Watford so my opportunities to really boot it were fairly limited. A couple of observations after driving it for a couple of hours yesterday. The first is that whilst the privacy glass looks fantastic from the outside, when you're trying to reverse into a parking space at night you really can't see a thing, as I discovered when I got home. On the plus side it means that when somebody's tailgating you you don't get dazzled by their lights in the rear view mirror. Related to this I notice that it does seem like every other person with a reasonably powerful car wants to race, which is kind of funny at the moment but might wear a bit thin after a while: on the other hand maybe the novelty of wasting Imprezas never really wears off, I don't know... and as for Mondeo ST220 drivers, I have only one word: no!!! As I said there are a couple of things that are definitely wrong with the car. One is that the N/S wing mirror just doesn't want to fold in. The second is that, only when in gear, there's a fairly loud vibration coming from the rear of the car at around 1500 rpm, which is particularly bad in second, although it's also very obvious in first. Actually probably one of the reasons I notice is that it's got the world's worst stereo in it (the original I'm guessing although to be honest it looks circa 1985), which isn't wired in so you can't listen to it anyway. Back to the vibration: it's clearly not coming from the engine, and I don't think it's coming from the transmission since I'm getting nothing through the gear knob, and as I say it's clearly coming from the back of the car. My mate thinks it sounds worse than it is, and suspects a loose exhaust baffle or something. It got worse as we were driving back for about the first hour or so but wasn't evident when I originally test drove the car. Whatever it is though it needs sorting because it's making my really cool looking car sound truly appalling at low revs. The other thing, which is something I'm slightly irritated with myself for not noticing when I looked the car over, is that the paint on the spoiler is cracking up a bit in a couple of places. It's not too bad, but obviously I notice. Martyn (my mate) knows somebody who does resprays and he reckons it'll cost about £100 to get sorted. Alternatively I could just have it removed because I quite like Zs with no rear spoiler in any case. With the respray I'm just a bit concerned about the colour matching as I know this can be problematic with them, although I understand it's more of a problem for the pearlescent colours (mine is just flat black). Can anyone give any advice on this please? Another thing is the indicators. They do work fine, but the side lights come on when I use them. Is this supposed to happen? Again, I only noticed it because of it being dark: from inside the car it looked like the front indicator had come on but wasn't flashing. Previously I'd just assumed that these were some sort of additional fog light. Something else I probably only noticed because of the absence of any music is the turbos. It was my understanding that you shouldn't be able to hear them at all, however under full acceleration you can just about hear the faintest of hisses. The boost level however seems to be fine, with the guage topping out just to the right of the third line above 0 (this is something I checked on the test drive). Is this cause for concern? Sorry, this is turning into a bit of an epic, but I've only a couple more questions left (honest). First off, where's the cruise control? There's one blank in the set of controls to the right of the steering wheel, which I'm assuming is where it's supposed to live... but it clearly isn't there. On the one hand I'm not so bothered if it doesn't have it, but on the other it's quite useful because there are a few dual carriageways around here with a lot of speed cameras so sticking it on 70 and then forgetting about it would be a great advantage. It's very easy to go a lot faster than 70 without really noticing. Again, this is something I didn't check on as carefully as I should have when originally looking over the car. Secondly, I don't see any traction control anywhere. Now to be honest I'm just really NOT bothered about this, but I thought Zs had it so I was just wondering. Last thing. Anyone know a good place to get mats for these babies? That's it for now. I'm planning to post some pics a bit later, but I'm still sitting around in my dressing gown like a fat waster at the moment. Cheers, Bart

OK, forget I asked that. I've just found them. Ta, m0n1xX3r

Hi, This is kind of interesting. Does anybody know where the Consult schematics are available? I'm not after blagging a free copy of ConZult, just I'm a software engineer by profession so I'm interested in fiddling a bit. I've been wondering for a while if it might be possible to hook a computer to the ECU via an RS232-based link. Thanks, m0n1xX3r

Thanks for the info guys. Handily there's a Shell garage literally just up the road. I might wait a little before souping it up though -- I'm going from a 92 bhp Renault Clio to a 300 bhp Z so I want to get used to it first. One of my mates refuses to get into it until I've had it a few weeks without crashing. Will get some pics up as soon as I've got it. Cheers.

Hi All, Just went down to Watford yesterday to see a black manual Z32 TT. Took two hours to get there from Cambridge, and then I couldn't find the place I was going too so it was an additional half hour. I was really starting to wonder whether or not it was worth the effort, and thoughts like, "After all this is it going to be yet another crappy Z with scratched paintwork and a dodgy interior?" kept going through my head... especially because it had started raining after I left home and just kept getting worse. Anybody know why it always rains when I go to look at cars? Seriously I've never been to see one and had the weather remain dry. But one look at the thing when I finally got there and it took all my restraint NOT to stand around grinning like an idiot. The 12-page buyers checklist linked from the FAQ pages came in helpful here, because it forced me to look over the car properly rather than just drooling at it. Thanks to all involved in compiling the information on these pages - absolutely priceless, I would have been lost without it. The dealer is a really nice guy called Mick and he just went into his office and left me with the car to get on with it. Then came the test drive, which was regrettably brief, but Watford on a Friday afternoon is an awful place to try to test drive a car that can do 0 - 60 in less than 6 seconds anyway. Again, he just handed over the keys, stuck some trade plates on the car, and let me go off with it. Here the checklist came in handy yet again as I was able to verify that the boost level was OK, although for some reason I forgot to check the oil pressure whilst driving. I think I was too busy enjoying the roar emitted by the engine when you floor it, which can only be described as wonderful. Anyway, it's black with cloth interior. The paintwork is as near immaculate as you could ask on a 12 year old car. One very minor scuff which will be easy to touch up right down at the bottom of the car just behind the front left wheel arch. Anyway, it comes with a 3 month warranty, and I've got a mechanic friend who is going to check it over for me when I pick it up (assuming all goes well with the finance). I apologise for going on about it -- I'm just quite happy. I've been searching for one of these for 6 months and had begun to despair of ever finding the right car. I have a couple of queries really, one of which is that I need some bags for the targa panels (I've posted this on the items wanted forum). I also notice that the original exhaust pipes are still in place (and looking solid all the way along fortunately), but knowing that they tend to rot after a few years I rather naively wondered if there was anything that could be painted onto them to protect them from rusting through from the outside, and which obviously would withstand the heat? The car is unmodified apart from some nice split rims and a turbo timer. I've never used one of these before, and it doesn't have any documentation with it. Anybody got any suggestions about how long to set it for? It's at 30 seconds currently, but I'm thinking this might well not be long enough. Also on the fuel front, which is one thing I've not read anything about, I'm assuming that being a turbo it needs to run on super-unleaded to prevent knocking due to the extra compression? Finally, many thanks to all who've provided the extremely useful information in the FAQs. I'd probably have got into a lot of trouble without it. Cheers, m0n1xX3r

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Thanks all, Sorry for the delay in getting back to you: been away. Wedding followed by training course. I've basically decided NOT to go for that car, even though it IS a mint 95 TT. This is partly because it's an auto and partly because you guys said it's probably a bit expensive (and it's 150 miles away), so thanks very much for the info. That said, when I do find a car I would be extremely grateful if somebody from the group were willing to come along with me to take a look, and would be more than willing to show my appreciation in beer. :) I also need to hand over cash and properly join this club. Thanks again, Bart

This is what I'm thinking of buying (I'm cursing myself because I missed out on a manual that looked EXACTLY like this, except for 5 spoke alloys instead of 6, a few weeks ago). It's now a grand less than the marked price in the photo (problems? or maybe they just can't shift the thing): So I dunno. Think maybe I should wait.

Probably an auto would be better in Cambridge traffic too. Honestly, it's rubbish! :(