altezzaclub

Unlikely- you'd need less than zero clearance to hold the valve open a whisker, and I think if the locknut loosens off the gap gets larger. Do a compression test and see how they read. Mine has a rattle that sounds exactly like one tappet not adjusted but I'm dammed if I can find it.

fair enough, you're a third of the weight of the car at that corner, so it will take a lot to bottom out. I assume they are Kings springs, they do bright yellow ones for ZK Fairlanes. No rate written down on their website for them unfortunately.

Its just for rust protection, so a spray of body sealer would do after you treat the rust to neutralise it.

Take out the thermostat. Drive the car for a day or two and see if that solves it. Then park it on a hill facing upwards, turn the heater on full, take off the rad cap, idle the warm motor and rev it occasionally. Squeeze the rad hoses a couple of times. Its just to get out any bubbles that may be trapped in the lines. See if that helps it. Then put the t'stat back in. That's a lot! Check the temp guage with a thermometer so you know if its reading OK (stick a thermometer in the rad when you're idling it with the cap off to bleed it) Either its getting to boiling point or something is forcing that water out.

Track only should be good, no potholes! If you add the size of the spring wires together you can work out how short it will be when it compresses right up. See if your shock will bottom out before then, and see if you can fit in a bump stop just before it bottoms out. The shocks will smash the foot valves if they take all the load when it bottoms out.

Ah- very flash. That solves a of of problems.

Ah- this will tax my sketching skills.... drawings later on. 1)make the passenger's side mount a solid block with a horizontal top. Make the drivers side a solid block with a few degrees angling upwards towards the pass side on the top face. Bolt the spring steel square bar to the drivers side, then force it down to the passengers side. This pre-tensions it, although not as efficiently as... 2)make the passengers side a clevis mount with a bolt that goes through your square bar. Make the drivers side a clevis mount with a sloping face of a few degrees and a closed top with a locking bolt though it. Its like a box on its side with a sloping 'bottom', and your bar has the opposite wedge slope on its face. Put the bar in the box, then drop the pass side in and bolt it up. Then screw the drivers side down forcing the two wadge faces to jam the towers apart. Still not as good as... 3)Make both mounts clevis mounts with bolts through and have eyes in your round tube bar. The pass side needs only to be able to rotate, so make a long neck on the eye-bolt down inside the tube. The drivers side must be threaded and a proper suspension rose-joint used. Bolt both ends in and rotate the bar so the rose-joint forces the towers apart. The only quick images on Google are these- So this is what I mean by a clevis mount, the free-rotating end of 3) and the adjustable end.

Nah- c'mon another decade before you start getting old! i wish I was your age again! Nothing wrong with a good set of carbs- when the north pole inverts and everything electronic stops working we'll still be driving! I've had a play with bits and pieces on ours, although I wish I'd got a square-nose with chrome bumpers really. http://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/42407-the-girls-ke70/

I wouldn't want to! I want to see what its like to drive and what effect those springs have! So... what happens when the strut wants to drop down to follow a hollow in the road or the body rolls in a corner and the zip ties are holding it up?? I've always wondered what tension a zip tie can stand.

Did you top it up before you went?? So it started full of water and when it cooled down it was short of how much?? If its not short by at least a litre the overheating is not due to water shortage, its just not cooling correctly. It may be that it just can't cool enough so it is pumping more water into the overflow than it can suck back. So, new water pump & thermostat, and a clean radiator with good fins. Have you tried with without a thermostat at all?? What sort of driving? Around town and idling at lights, or on the motorways at 100kph?? Ours cooled much better after i cleaned all the rust out of the block, but that was with the motor out and the head off!

Try and build a bit of pre-stress into a fixed on, so you jam it in and as you bolt it up it pushes against the towers. Otherwise the bar does absolutely nothing as there is a mm or two of movement to put it under stress and the towers don't move more than that. Sadly, in the years I was doing all of this back in the 70s/80s I never used a camera at all. :(

sigh... rizzle, like all the kids who ask this question, FIRST you need to tell us- what you want to do with the car- race it, rally it, drift it, drive it to work and back...? what can you do yourself- can you strip motor adn replace rings and bearings? Can you weld up engine mounts? how much money do you have to spend? There is no doubt the best N/A motor to use comes straight out of Honda S2000, but are you man enough to tackle it?

Missing a cyl when it first starts up?? That sort of chugging? Electrics not firing a plug or an injector? Does it runs really smoothly when it starts well, so idles straight away on the cold start system?

It would also be helpful if everyone (especially those saying "Use Fiat Dominoe rears in the front, I saw them in the wreckers andf they looked good"...). could actually put up some spring rates Measure the wire diameter, the spring coil outside diameter, the number of active coils (the two end ones that touch the seats don't count) and plug those 3 figures into the spring caluculator here- http://www.stockcarproducts.com/pstech10.htm

There is a lot to take into consideration for that, the V8 hotrodders go into deep engineering details and arguments about how to set it up. Keeping leaf springs involves problems, but so does manufacturing coil towers.

A good thing to worry about too... Not only that, they will transmit the road stress straight into the towers and pop the spotwelds in the engine bay, and will do the opposite when you hit a pothole in a corner and overload the tyre sidewalls so they will blow out. Don;t let me stop you doing it though...:laff:

Are you going to have an adjustable or a preloaded strut brace? We ran an adjustable on the rally car, the pipe across the car was cut in half & had a left-hand & a right hand thread cut in the ends. We turned a nut on a shaft in the middle and it tried to push the struts apart & then we clamped it up. We could've threaded pipes on the towers and cut threads on the ends of the bar and turned the whole bar, same principle. A nice one for the Altezza has a slightly flexible square bar across the endgine that attaches to the towers with Allen screws. When you do the screws up they flex the bar and pre-load the towers outwards.

Did you work out the spring rates?? Wire diameter, spring diameter, number of free coils and a calculator like this one- http://www.stockcarproducts.com/pstech10.htm The coils being held at each end don't count, so if you have 6 coils you have 4 free coils that do all the work. It will be interesting to see what spring rates you have and how it rides.

The only way to streamline Mezz's unfortunately accurate process is to buy a donor car or a halfcut coming in from Japan. I don't know all the models that used that motor apart from my son's Levin BZG, but the worst thing you can do is buy just a motor and then try to fit it. I was thinking of a Skyline motor into my R31 Pintara last week and looked at the wreckers... when I saw how they chopped all the hoses and lines I decided I'm really quite happy with the CA20 in there! :laff:

Are you talking a 4-link like a Datsun Stanza, where the lower arms are straight & the upper ones at 45deg when seen from above?? So you go to coils and do away with the leafs... or are you looking at keeping the leafs and fitting the same sort of 4links to them? We turned our rally Stanza to a paralell link with a panhard, but the floor wasn't strong enough to take the pounding the mounts gave it and Nissan got upset. We were a semi-works car at the time.

A leaking head gasket makes it overflow before the thermostat opens, so check it cold before driving it. The compression that leaks into the water jackets can't easily go up past the closed t'stat and as more bubbles leak in they push the water backwards up the radiator and it over flows. Once a cup or two has been pushed out it doesn't lose any more because the bubbles can escape without having to push water out. When the thermostat opens warm water flows upwards and any bubbles do the same and escape under the rad cap. The other thing that a blown headgasket does it make it a bit hard to start on all 4cyl first thing in the morning, but then its fine all day. During the night a trace of water weeps into the cylinder and condenses on the plug, then it doesn't like to fire up easily. Once it has been driven & is warmed up it will stay dry until the next night. The head job is not a biggy in itself, but once the head is off you think.. 'might as well do the valves too, and maybe a little porting out of the inlets and raise the compression a bit..'. and away goes the project. Phone an engineer and see what a head skim will cost, then ask him how much for valves/seats as well. Then get a price on a head gasket set from Repco or whoever. Should total around the $300-350 mark I think, so you would need to be sure the head is crook before you did it. This would point to it not being a head gasket, so hit up a radiator shop and see what they reckon.

First thing would be to strip the motor in there and find out what is ruined and what can be salvaged. Weigh up the cost of rebuilding it to get a good motor against the cost of buying a cheapy that might be almost as bad.

The worst will b inside the channel as stuff gets trapped in there. The inner vertical face is part of the car, which will rust also. The curved outer face is the channel you buy, so that ends up brand new. All you can do is clean the rust off with a wire brush in a power drill and patch any holes, then treat the metal with some rust kill product. Give it a couple of anti-rust coats of paint (no-one sees it!) and then weld on the new channel. If you want it to last more than 15 years you could rustkill spray the inside afterwards to catch the weld spots where the paint gets burned off. The companies who do that drill a small hole in the back of the channel under the rear guard and spray anti-rust wax in with a long tube that sprays outwards. Then they just put a rubber grommet in the hole.

Nope, just old and to the point... Bought my kids up already and got them into shape, so I don't try to do the same for everyone else's. If you want help and advice Sam, you have to ask the right questions. There are guys on here who can tell you the best way to get more power, or more power cheaply, or much much more power, but they will all want to know-

haha- you're right Philbey, but I get carried away sometimes with the amount of BS being forced on us all.