wstar's Journal

wstar · 08-13-2013, 11:31 AM

Well, that project's hopefully a long ways off (famous last words!).

Right now the car's undergoing a lot of change as it is. I feel like I have 10 different projects on it in a half-complete state, and I really don't know if it will be track-ready again in time for the planned Sept 29th TDE event.

I'm done gutting interior wiring and have started cleaning up the remainder with new conduit, etc. The steering member is out for cleanup, but I haven't done that yet (cut off excess brackets, sand, paint). I've sorted out the wiring logic and layout for the new center-dash controls (stock start button + hazard button, future remote killswitch, uprev map-switch buttons, on/off for RaceKeeper, on/off for gauge alarms) and gauges (just oil pres and trans temp for now, using stock oil temp still...), but haven't actually wired that stuff or assembled the panel(s). I still need to run a new battery feed to my second fuel pump relay through the new harness layout. I still need to hook up the Evo2 battery with some 4-gauge cable and the existing breaker.

The doors are gutted and the glass is out. Need some kind of strap handle solution for the interior handle cables. Would like to have some pop-in Lexan just for rain protection when the car's parked, but I doubt I sort that out during this sprint of work. Exterior trunk latches are kinda in the same boat - I can live without them for now but it would be nice to get it done as well.

Still waiting on the final bit for the new seats (driver's side base, backordered...). Steering wheel + QR hub is on the car (but I haven't wired up my planned shift buttons on the wheel itself - that can always be left for later as the paddles are still there too). Still need to sort out the last bits of the current cooling system (either switch to the 2013 tank setup or replace my radiator cap). And then get it to Dallas and have a guy weld in a rear cage, and weld in the harness mounts, and paint the cage. Oh and swap out my fluids again.

And I have a two week trip out of town in the middle of September, so there's that in the way :P

It'll be worth it in the end, but the timing of this hypothetical "end" is a little fuzzy right now...

VoBoy · 08-13-2013, 01:55 PM

Is there a reason to go to the shop in Dallas? I can highly recommend Lucas Racing on our side of town. The two that run it are very easy to deal with and lots of knowledge on building cages.

Lucas

Example of their work

wstar · 08-18-2013, 08:51 PM

Well, I may check them out. I saw another cage that was done well locally over at Bumbera's as well. I think early this week I'm gonna swing by both places and at least get a quote and see how they are. But the guy in Dallas might end up beating them on price by enough that it's worth the drive, and his quality looks good as well. We'll see how it all goes

I got the car put back together enough for a test drive today, and everything went well. Nothing fell off or caught fire or failed to work

I still haven't done my center-dash-area panels for various switches and gauges and whatnot, I just taped the engine start button in place and taped the other wires out of the way for now. I also ended up running my catch can back through the firewall and putting in the interior (also just taped up for now, not properly mounted), I think I like that setup for a number of reasons.

I can confirm now that the Evo2 16-cell battery starts the engine fine. In fact, I think it actually cranks the engine better than my PC680 did (some of that may be due to the huge positive cable run on the PC680 from the trunk area, vs having the Evo2 right up in the stock location on very very short cables).

Pic of the dash area in the current in-progress state that I test-drove it in (well, and you can see the battery cover and the Evo2 charger through the window - I was using them to check out the battery's charge state after):

wstar · 08-19-2013, 09:29 AM

Late last night I was able to finish up my 7AT wiring experiments. It was mostly a failure - there's no simple method (e.g. just cutting/splicing/grounding whatever one or more pins on the wiring to the Control Device) to force D to act it's in M without causing other problems. Had some fascinating partial failures though, including getting the "S" to light up over the dash gear indicator like S-mode in a 6MT

There probably is a way to do it, but you'd have to disassemble the control device itself and change some of the switches' wiring within it, rather than just doing simple work at the harness connector. I may or may not get around to playing with it anytime soon.

The basic problem is that the car doesn't like seeing the M-mode signal while in Park (or reverse, or neutral, etc). I was hoping it would just ignore it, but no such luck. Down inside the control device, of course, you could rewire the D<->M switch itself such that both sides are attached to the M side's wire and the D side's wire is unused. The switch is in series (electrically and also in a physical sense) with other controls inside the unit, which is why you can't just do the same thing out at the harness sanely.

wstar · 08-19-2013, 10:02 AM

Also, here's a pic of the Evo2 battery install:

My install is mostly like ChipsWithDips's install over here: Ballistic Performance EVO2 16cell battery in 370Z - Imgur . The key differences are:

1) I used 2x 6AWG wire for each of the main connections. I was originally going to do 1x 4AWG, but the 6AWG is easier to bend and work with, and a pair of them is electrically equivalent to a single 3AWG wire. No issues there, the wires aren't hot or anything right after starting.
2) I re-used the same Lightning Audio LCB-200 breaker I had on my old relocated setup. It's nice to have a fail-safe in the case of a massive short-circuit somewhere in the car, and it's also a convenient switch to shut off the battery when doing electrical work. I hard-attached it to the negative post of the battery by screwing a terminal lug directly between the two. This is a temporary solution, I'll eventually remove the breaker whenever I get around to upgrading to a nice racing kill-switch system, probably this one: Battery Isolator XS, or something similar.
3) I dug in my old parts bins and found my old stock battery tray to use as a base instead of fabbing a metal one. The only thing I changed about the stock tray base is I drilled out the 6 rivets that attach that metal bracket to the underside that's used for the stock hold-down, and removed that piece.

I did several more engine starts (something like 5-6 starts and stops in the space of 20 minutes?) last night while playing with the transmission wiring and every start was snappy, so I think it's got plenty of excess cranking capacity. I can't speak to how well it would hold up to the residual drain on a stock car's electrical system if the car's off for days though, seeing as mine's so minimized. After all that and then sitting off overnight though, mine was still reading about 13.2V this morning, so at least I know I don't have any serious problems in my new wiring draining it.

VoBoy · 08-20-2013, 12:49 PM

Are you gonna be working on the car over the weekend? I'd love to check it out on Saturday.

wstar · 08-20-2013, 01:15 PM

Working on the car seems to be all I do lately, so almost certainly

wstar · 08-20-2013, 06:08 PM

Went by Lucas Racing today and talked a bit. I think I'm going to use them now, wasn't a bad deal at all money-wise (all things considered), and they'll be going the whole 9 yards with a 6 point cage with nice door bars and taking care of my harness mounts, etc. Saw some of their other cars in the shop as well, really nice work. They're a bit backlogged, so it'll be a few weeks before he can get to my car, but that just gives me time to keep messing with dash wiring stuff.

wstar · 08-29-2013, 11:13 AM

Still making small bits of progress on various things here and there, mostly waiting to get the cage done before I move on to other post-cage items. A friend and I spent several hours yesterday on this little project:

We took my 330mm Sparco wheel and installed a couple of buttons in it, to be wired for 7AT down/up-shift (red on left for down, green on right for up). It was a huge pain in the *** to figure out the first button (how to cut through the suede/plastic/foam neatly and then drill the switch barrel hole in the underlying metal and get everything mounted), but the second button only took like 30-45 minutes start to finish once we knew what we were doing. A drill press helps a lot. Buttons came from Mouser, it's the round ones from this datasheet: http://www.mouser.com/ds/2/204/Series_59-10372.pdf . They have a really nice feedback feel on push and seem pretty stout. Going to use the same ones (but in black+green) for my dash-panel-mounted uprev map switch buttons.

theDreamer · 08-29-2013, 11:15 AM

Why did you migrate to buttons versus using the paddle shifters or did the paddles come off when you tore out everything?

wstar · 08-29-2013, 11:20 AM

The paddle shifters are still on the car, they still work fine with virtually everything else gutted. I just think this will be even better than using them. When I first wire them up, I'm going to splice into the existing paddle wiring and leave both options functional. Then I can play with both at a track event and see if I really like the button setup better from a practical perspective. If I do, then I'll ditch the paddles at that point just to clean things up.

carlitos_370z · 08-29-2013, 12:13 PM

looks great my friend!!!

wstar · 11-08-2013, 11:38 AM

It's finally time for an update. The thread has been dormant, but the car work has been very active the past couple of months. The big news is I just got the car home from Lucas Racing and they did an awesome job building my cage and a few other related things. It's a full 6-point with door bars on both sides and the little footwell support add-ons that are allowed.

Also notable are the new fixed Sparco seats (Evo driver, Evo-II-US passenger) mounted on Sparco's mounts (but removed the slider system and drilled some new holes to make them fixed), and some nice 6-point Sparco belts. The cage builder did the welded-in mounts and eyebolts for the belt system as well, including eyebolt-style mounts for the shoulder harnesses as opposed to wrap-around mounting.

I highly recommend Lucas if you're in the Houston area or can drive here. They did top-notch work at a fair price and turned the car around and had it back to me in no time, and they really know what they're doing. I only did cage work there, but they're clearly skilled and equipped to handle any other kind of racecar work you can imagine.

I just got home, so there's still cage padding and misc parts laying around in the car, I haven't yet built my center-dash panel for the switches/gauges, and obviously haven't painted the cage yet, but I took pics anyways!

Rear View: - note direct horizontal bar between rear shocks

Driver Harness: - note the bar is bent outward slightly here to allow the seat to sit further back from the wheel

Passenger Harness: - this side is straight since the passenger has plenty of room to the front. Also note in this shot the geometry of the rear half of the cage in general, the triangles on the sides.

Roof:

Door bars!

More Door bars!

Passenger Footwell - it's hard to get a good angle for a pic of these, but they run to mounting plates in the corner of the firewall up there.

wstar · 11-08-2013, 11:41 AM

Starting today I've got 2 weeks to the next Driver's Edge event at TWS that I'm booked for. The job list between now and then:

1) Paint cage
2) I still have a very small coolant leak somewhere to track down and fix
3) Build some kind of dash switch/gauge panel
4) Install SPL FUCA
5) Put on new tires/wheels (18x10 square Forgestars + 275/35 RS-3's)
6) Play with alignment (I picked up one of those DIY home alignment kits from Quicktrick)
7) Swap all the fluids and do basic track prep

Rusty · 11-08-2013, 12:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wstar

Starting today I've got 2 weeks to the next Driver's Edge event at TWS that I'm booked for. The job list between now and then:

1) Paint cage
2) I still have a very small coolant leak somewhere to track down and fix
3) Build some kind of dash switch/gauge panel
4) Install SPL FUCA
5) Put on new tires/wheels (18x10 square Forgestars + 275/35 RS-3's)
6) Play with alignment (I picked up one of those DIY home alignment kits from Quicktrick)
7) Swap all the fluids and do basic track prep

Have fun.

08-13-2013, 11:31 AM	#616 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3594	Well, that project's hopefully a long ways off (famous last words!). Right now the car's undergoing a lot of change as it is. I feel like I have 10 different projects on it in a half-complete state, and I really don't know if it will be track-ready again in time for the planned Sept 29th TDE event. I'm done gutting interior wiring and have started cleaning up the remainder with new conduit, etc. The steering member is out for cleanup, but I haven't done that yet (cut off excess brackets, sand, paint). I've sorted out the wiring logic and layout for the new center-dash controls (stock start button + hazard button, future remote killswitch, uprev map-switch buttons, on/off for RaceKeeper, on/off for gauge alarms) and gauges (just oil pres and trans temp for now, using stock oil temp still...), but haven't actually wired that stuff or assembled the panel(s). I still need to run a new battery feed to my second fuel pump relay through the new harness layout. I still need to hook up the Evo2 battery with some 4-gauge cable and the existing breaker. The doors are gutted and the glass is out. Need some kind of strap handle solution for the interior handle cables. Would like to have some pop-in Lexan just for rain protection when the car's parked, but I doubt I sort that out during this sprint of work. Exterior trunk latches are kinda in the same boat - I can live without them for now but it would be nice to get it done as well. Still waiting on the final bit for the new seats (driver's side base, backordered...). Steering wheel + QR hub is on the car (but I haven't wired up my planned shift buttons on the wheel itself - that can always be left for later as the paddles are still there too). Still need to sort out the last bits of the current cooling system (either switch to the 2013 tank setup or replace my radiator cap). And then get it to Dallas and have a guy weld in a rear cage, and weld in the harness mounts, and paint the cage. Oh and swap out my fluids again. And I have a two week trip out of town in the middle of September, so there's that in the way :P It'll be worth it in the end, but the timing of this hypothetical "end" is a little fuzzy right now... __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details Last edited by wstar; 08-13-2013 at 11:36 AM.

08-13-2013, 01:55 PM	#617 (permalink)
VoBoy Base Member Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Chicago/Houston Posts: 37 Drives: 06 350z Rep Power: 16	Is there a reason to go to the shop in Dallas? I can highly recommend Lucas Racing on our side of town. The two that run it are very easy to deal with and lots of knowledge on building cages. Lucas Example of their work Last edited by VoBoy; 08-15-2013 at 09:32 AM.

08-18-2013, 08:51 PM	#618 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3594	Well, I may check them out. I saw another cage that was done well locally over at Bumbera's as well. I think early this week I'm gonna swing by both places and at least get a quote and see how they are. But the guy in Dallas might end up beating them on price by enough that it's worth the drive, and his quality looks good as well. We'll see how it all goes I got the car put back together enough for a test drive today, and everything went well. Nothing fell off or caught fire or failed to work I still haven't done my center-dash-area panels for various switches and gauges and whatnot, I just taped the engine start button in place and taped the other wires out of the way for now. I also ended up running my catch can back through the firewall and putting in the interior (also just taped up for now, not properly mounted), I think I like that setup for a number of reasons. I can confirm now that the Evo2 16-cell battery starts the engine fine. In fact, I think it actually cranks the engine better than my PC680 did (some of that may be due to the huge positive cable run on the PC680 from the trunk area, vs having the Evo2 right up in the stock location on very very short cables). Pic of the dash area in the current in-progress state that I test-drove it in (well, and you can see the battery cover and the Evo2 charger through the window - I was using them to check out the battery's charge state after): __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

08-19-2013, 09:29 AM	#619 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3594	Late last night I was able to finish up my 7AT wiring experiments. It was mostly a failure - there's no simple method (e.g. just cutting/splicing/grounding whatever one or more pins on the wiring to the Control Device) to force D to act it's in M without causing other problems. Had some fascinating partial failures though, including getting the "S" to light up over the dash gear indicator like S-mode in a 6MT There probably is a way to do it, but you'd have to disassemble the control device itself and change some of the switches' wiring within it, rather than just doing simple work at the harness connector. I may or may not get around to playing with it anytime soon. The basic problem is that the car doesn't like seeing the M-mode signal while in Park (or reverse, or neutral, etc). I was hoping it would just ignore it, but no such luck. Down inside the control device, of course, you could rewire the D<->M switch itself such that both sides are attached to the M side's wire and the D side's wire is unused. The switch is in series (electrically and also in a physical sense) with other controls inside the unit, which is why you can't just do the same thing out at the harness sanely. __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

08-19-2013, 10:02 AM	#620 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3594	Also, here's a pic of the Evo2 battery install: My install is mostly like ChipsWithDips's install over here: Ballistic Performance EVO2 16cell battery in 370Z - Imgur . The key differences are: 1) I used 2x 6AWG wire for each of the main connections. I was originally going to do 1x 4AWG, but the 6AWG is easier to bend and work with, and a pair of them is electrically equivalent to a single 3AWG wire. No issues there, the wires aren't hot or anything right after starting. 2) I re-used the same Lightning Audio LCB-200 breaker I had on my old relocated setup. It's nice to have a fail-safe in the case of a massive short-circuit somewhere in the car, and it's also a convenient switch to shut off the battery when doing electrical work. I hard-attached it to the negative post of the battery by screwing a terminal lug directly between the two. This is a temporary solution, I'll eventually remove the breaker whenever I get around to upgrading to a nice racing kill-switch system, probably this one: Battery Isolator XS, or something similar. 3) I dug in my old parts bins and found my old stock battery tray to use as a base instead of fabbing a metal one. The only thing I changed about the stock tray base is I drilled out the 6 rivets that attach that metal bracket to the underside that's used for the stock hold-down, and removed that piece. I did several more engine starts (something like 5-6 starts and stops in the space of 20 minutes?) last night while playing with the transmission wiring and every start was snappy, so I think it's got plenty of excess cranking capacity. I can't speak to how well it would hold up to the residual drain on a stock car's electrical system if the car's off for days though, seeing as mine's so minimized. After all that and then sitting off overnight though, mine was still reading about 13.2V this morning, so at least I know I don't have any serious problems in my new wiring draining it. carlitos_370z likes this. __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

08-20-2013, 12:49 PM	#621 (permalink)
VoBoy Base Member Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Chicago/Houston Posts: 37 Drives: 06 350z Rep Power: 16	Are you gonna be working on the car over the weekend? I'd love to check it out on Saturday.

08-20-2013, 01:15 PM	#622 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3594	Working on the car seems to be all I do lately, so almost certainly __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

08-20-2013, 06:08 PM	#623 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3594	Went by Lucas Racing today and talked a bit. I think I'm going to use them now, wasn't a bad deal at all money-wise (all things considered), and they'll be going the whole 9 yards with a 6 point cage with nice door bars and taking care of my harness mounts, etc. Saw some of their other cars in the shop as well, really nice work. They're a bit backlogged, so it'll be a few weeks before he can get to my car, but that just gives me time to keep messing with dash wiring stuff. carlitos_370z likes this. __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

08-29-2013, 11:13 AM	#624 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3594	Still making small bits of progress on various things here and there, mostly waiting to get the cage done before I move on to other post-cage items. A friend and I spent several hours yesterday on this little project: We took my 330mm Sparco wheel and installed a couple of buttons in it, to be wired for 7AT down/up-shift (red on left for down, green on right for up). It was a huge pain in the *** to figure out the first button (how to cut through the suede/plastic/foam neatly and then drill the switch barrel hole in the underlying metal and get everything mounted), but the second button only took like 30-45 minutes start to finish once we knew what we were doing. A drill press helps a lot. Buttons came from Mouser, it's the round ones from this datasheet: http://www.mouser.com/ds/2/204/Series_59-10372.pdf . They have a really nice feedback feel on push and seem pretty stout. Going to use the same ones (but in black+green) for my dash-panel-mounted uprev map switch buttons. synolimit and carlitos_370z like this. __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

08-29-2013, 11:15 AM	#625 (permalink)
theDreamer A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Texas Posts: 30,879 Drives: 370z Rep Power: 4210	Why did you migrate to buttons versus using the paddle shifters or did the paddles come off when you tore out everything? __________________ theDreamer's Z // Fast Intentions // Uprev // GTM // HKS // TEIN theDreamer's Silvia // URAS // GREDDY Houston Zs // Facebook // Twitter // Instagram

08-29-2013, 11:20 AM	#626 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3594	The paddle shifters are still on the car, they still work fine with virtually everything else gutted. I just think this will be even better than using them. When I first wire them up, I'm going to splice into the existing paddle wiring and leave both options functional. Then I can play with both at a track event and see if I really like the button setup better from a practical perspective. If I do, then I'll ditch the paddles at that point just to clean things up. carlitos_370z likes this. __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

08-29-2013, 12:13 PM	#627 (permalink)
carlitos_370z A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Jul 2013 Location: Puerto Rico Posts: 7,157 Drives: 13 Nissan 370Z SP M6 Rep Power: 7585	looks great my friend!!!

11-08-2013, 11:38 AM	#628 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3594	It's finally time for an update. The thread has been dormant, but the car work has been very active the past couple of months. The big news is I just got the car home from Lucas Racing and they did an awesome job building my cage and a few other related things. It's a full 6-point with door bars on both sides and the little footwell support add-ons that are allowed. Also notable are the new fixed Sparco seats (Evo driver, Evo-II-US passenger) mounted on Sparco's mounts (but removed the slider system and drilled some new holes to make them fixed), and some nice 6-point Sparco belts. The cage builder did the welded-in mounts and eyebolts for the belt system as well, including eyebolt-style mounts for the shoulder harnesses as opposed to wrap-around mounting. I highly recommend Lucas if you're in the Houston area or can drive here. They did top-notch work at a fair price and turned the car around and had it back to me in no time, and they really know what they're doing. I only did cage work there, but they're clearly skilled and equipped to handle any other kind of racecar work you can imagine. I just got home, so there's still cage padding and misc parts laying around in the car, I haven't yet built my center-dash panel for the switches/gauges, and obviously haven't painted the cage yet, but I took pics anyways! Rear View: - note direct horizontal bar between rear shocks Driver Harness: - note the bar is bent outward slightly here to allow the seat to sit further back from the wheel Passenger Harness: - this side is straight since the passenger has plenty of room to the front. Also note in this shot the geometry of the rear half of the cage in general, the triangles on the sides. Roof: Door bars! More Door bars! Passenger Footwell - it's hard to get a good angle for a pic of these, but they run to mounting plates in the corner of the firewall up there. __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

11-08-2013, 11:41 AM	#629 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3594	Starting today I've got 2 weeks to the next Driver's Edge event at TWS that I'm booked for. The job list between now and then: 1) Paint cage 2) I still have a very small coolant leak somewhere to track down and fix 3) Build some kind of dash switch/gauge panel 4) Install SPL FUCA 5) Put on new tires/wheels (18x10 square Forgestars + 275/35 RS-3's) 6) Play with alignment (I picked up one of those DIY home alignment kits from Quicktrick) 7) Swap all the fluids and do basic track prep __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

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