wstar's Journal

wstar · 06-19-2014, 05:39 PM

Also, I took the still-unused 265/645 Wets off of my extra 18x10 wheels and had the 285/645 slicks mounted. The rims *still* aren't well-protected, even though I'm sure 10 inches is a good width for these 285's. Part of the issue is probably that race tires don't have rim-protectors built into the rubber mold, and that these Forgestars have particularly thick rim edges. When stacking these on their sides, the metal of the wheels don't touch each other or the ground, but it's just by a hair's width. Set them down too hard and you can hear them click into each other. I think I just have to live with that for now, because otherwise this setup should work great for trying out these cheap slicks.

Assuming no other major issues get in the way (like my car blowing up and/or dying), I think my general plan at MSR-H this weekend is to spend most of the weekend on my existing RS3's, then maybe switch the slicks on for the 3rd or 4th session Sunday and scrub them in over a whole session slowly coming up to full speed. Then they'll sit for a week for that whole mfg-recommended rebonding process and I'll try them again at COTA the next weekend (with the remaining life on the RS3's as a backup option. I might even start out on the RS3's and then switch to the slicks later in the weekend instead, so that I'm super-comfy with the track/event before adding that new challenge back into the mix. All depends how things feel during the scrub-in session this weekend).

Pics, off the car sitting at 25psi cold pressure (I suspect I might need to start them even lower than that, still researching):

sig11 · 06-19-2014, 06:56 PM

You won't want to go back to the RS3s!

Mike · 06-20-2014, 10:14 AM

I shoot for 36 hot on them. Not quite the same grip as the A6s, but still a great tire.

wstar · 06-23-2014, 07:51 AM

Had a great weekend at MSR-H!

New engine seem to be running great! Only have a couple minor things to look into: oil temps looked a little higher than expected (240-ish but it was a very hot weekend), and upshifts were a little slow and clunky on Saturday (but gradually got better for some reason; could have been me subconsciously adjusting shift timing or lifting throttle. Could also be that the fluid level's a little off?). Car's already back on my mini-lift for basic maintenance. Going to swap out the engine oil (since this was the first fill for that engine since the salvage lot), check trans fluid level, replace front rotor rings (finally, and replace studs+lugs while I'm in there), bleed brake fluid, etc for the coming weekend at COTA.

I did my Red-group check ride for MSR-H (Driver's Edge does these per-track, so the one at TWS was separate from this) on the first Sunday session and that went great, so I got to spend half my weekend in Red. Kevin was my check-ride instructor; his line advice was amazing, but it will take a while for me to get out of my old habits and pick up speed from what he was saying

I did scrub in the Conti GT-O slicks in the final session Sunday. As usual, my fears were all in my head. There was no problem controlling that tire, and it felt amazing. We had about 8 hot laps that session. I spent the first 6 slowly edging my way up on laptime and trying not to put any big slip angle in them, then the final 2 laps I ran at my normal pace for the RS-3's and I could finally start to feel a little slip. You could tell the tires were nowhere near their limit at my RS-3 pace. At places (and speeds) where I'd feel unstable or fighting the car way out at the edge of acceptable traction in the RS-3, the Contis were just rock solid and predictable. There's clearly 2-3 seconds I could take off my laps here if I adjusted my pace up to the tire's limit with slicks like these. (Then again there's also clearly 1-2 seconds I could shave if I made some basic line fixes; who knows how much those two figures overlap).

Also, they look great on the car

--
Fastest lap for the weekend was 1:52.21 (second-to-last session of the weekend, still on the RS3's):

wstar · 06-23-2014, 08:31 PM

I went ahead and encoded the whole session that the fastlap above came from. Spent that whole session chasing down the same red Lotus (well, once he got back in front of me around the end of Lap 4). Lots of data to pick up from it on how and where he was faster than me. Mostly, it seems like he was doing better pushing out of the inner carousel wider and earlier on the throttle, and he was way more gutsy staying in the throttle before, during, and just after The Launch (the little hill):

Mike · 06-23-2014, 09:10 PM

240 is probably just normal in summer. I saw 230 at road atlanta weekend before last, and Russell from Z1 and Brian Kleemans Pirelli challenge car were around 260-70, but my stillen bumper probably helped me. this weekend at AMP which doesn't have long straight and is shorter, I was in the 230-240 range. It is summer!

wstar · 06-23-2014, 09:17 PM

Time for hood vents I guess

wstar · 06-30-2014, 05:42 PM

Your points are well-taken. I have no doubt the math makes sense on a racecar. You lose a little tiny bit of throttle response and power and you gain reliability. It's also a spec engine putting out gobs of power with insane throttle response, so the damper hit is hard to feel in the first place, and no matter what it does to your power you're going to tune the thing right back to your desired spec horsepower or whatever. On a plain stock engine, the throttle response difference is notable (and I suspect, a reason for my perception of felt changes in upshifts on my new block - revs just aren't falling as fast).

Your random data point about 40-80 hours is interesting as well. Using very approximate, rounded-off, numbers, my stock engine had 40K street miles on it before it left the street for good, and ~4K track miles on it (I had mis-estimated this as more like 5K earlier on). Those 4K track miles occurred over the course of approximately 80 hours of track time (The rough figures I'm using for easy approximation is 40x singular days of DE, ~100 miles over 4x 30minute sessions per day).

Keep in mind this block was sealed up at the factory back in late 2008 and never opened or worked on again. That it survived this long was a miracle (and maybe thanks to religious maintenance where I could on things like regular high-quality oil changes, and the baffled oil pan I picked up from AM Performance, and good cooling). I really think the flywheel flopping around is what did in the crank bearings at the end. Had I thought to check that and correct it earlier, the engine might've gone longer. Still, something had to give. I highly doubt I'd have made it to 10K miles no matter what I did (well, short of actually rebuilding the block before it fails).

Which brings me around to the situation I'm facing now: how to adapt to and cope with where I'm at in my ever-evolving hobby. If I keep up with anything like my current schedule of DE events and expect engine failures at about this sort of interval, I'm looking at a dead engine block every 2 years if nothing goes unusually-wrong. It's tempting to say "Yeah but I can't afford the time or labor cost of having the engine rebuilt correctly on regular maintenance intervals", but that's probably not true. If I don't, I'll be doing the same rebuilds but with less predictability and more downtime. Of course there's all the other components to keep track of as well. How long do good-quality spherical bushings last? Shocks? Rear ends? Transmissions?

Figuring all this stuff out from scratch the hard way is a trying experience at best, given I'm a one-man pit crew with no qualifications to speak of and doing this for fun with no sponsorship dollars or any real plan to go after real racing (I'm closing on 40 and started too late in life to ever be good enough for a top-tier race series, and I like my well-paying day job).

While all of the above sounds pretty depressing and daunting, in many ways it's kind of awesome, too. In the same way that track-driving stretches my skills and my brain in painful but ultimately rewarding ways, so does all the rest of this stretch me in other areas. On the days when it doesn't totally defeat you, it feels pretty awesome to still be doing it at all

Rusty · 06-30-2014, 09:57 PM

When I was hanging around a few race teams back in the day. What they would do is change the crank and rod bearings every so often. Never pull the engine. Just drop the pan. Remove the caps, mike the journals. Replace with new bearings and bolts. Never seen them have a bottom end problem. We're talking about the old 427 big block chebys used for roadracing. A lot of weight spinning around. Think you could do something like this to keep the engine alive longer.

wstar · 06-30-2014, 11:37 PM

Sounds plausible. Now I just need to figure out how to reliably do that sort of work myself in my garage.

I have two blocks now anyways for better or worse, so I'll probably try to work out a system of rotating the two blocks once a year or so and then working on beefing up the previous block before the next swap. Maybe for the first iteration I'll just fix any obvious damage, replace wear-items, and stick in a Nismo oil pump. Then we'll see if I can go further for the next one once I at least halfway know what I'm doing

wstar · 07-18-2014, 08:32 PM

Random updates: I chunked a front brake pad at CotA. These were the Carbon-Lorraine RC6E. They had plenty of thickness left, but they've been on the car for nearly a year, so I guess their age and the excess heat from hard braking at CotA did them in. While I'm interminably waiting for 2x sets of RC6 fronts from Essex, I ordered some Hawk in DTC-70 front and DTC-60 rear to hold me over since those ship out much faster. Assuming the Hawks still have life left when the RC6 arrive, I'll save the used Hawks as backups for the next time I destroy a pad or two

Hawk pads should be here Tuesday. Will be doing my brake pads and some related overdue work in the wheel wells (front brake rotor discs, replacing studs + lugs, etc).

I'm also going to take a stab at venting my hood this next week with a cutoff wheel and some mesh and whatnot, we'll see what happens as that project evolves

Revised remaining schedule for the year (assuming I don't miss any of them!):

Aug 2: MSR-Houston - Race 4 Charity
Aug 23-24: TWS - PDS (maybe!)
Sep 6-7: TWS - The Driver's Edge
Sep 20-21: NOLA - NASA
Oct 4-5: MSR-Houston - The Driver's Edge
Oct 11-12: TWS - NASA
Nov 1-2: Eagle's Canyon - NASA
Nov 22-23: TWS - The Driver's Edge

wstar · 08-01-2014, 08:11 PM

Well I never got around to messing with hood vents this week. The wheel stud thing got more complicated than I expected

ARP Wheel Studs:

Pros: ridiculously long - way longer than the Nismo 60mm (I'm sure they'll stick out of any wheel, which makes lugs very easy), well-made, and have nice bullet noses for easy threading.

Cons: the ones made in our normal thread size (that e.g. Z1 sells) actually don't have the correct knurl pattern for our hubs. They *will* go in, but it requires a ton of force because you're basically destroying the knurl pattern on the hubs or the bolts or both.

I thought it was going to be a quick job like my last stud replacement: press them out with a ball joint separator thingy, and then press them back in with lug nuts and a stack of washers (and/or an appropriate socket as a spacer). However, because of the force required to press them in, you end up partially damaging the threads if you apply enough torque to seat them. So the only reasonable way to install them is to use a hydraulic press, which means taking the hubs off the car to carry them over to the press, adding a ton of labor and finagling to the process.

Because of that, I only did my front studs today. I didn't have the necessary socket + puller handy to pull the rear hubs off the car. The studs are pretty awesome once installed, but grrrrr at having to pull off the hubs to install them.

Pads:
Other than that, replaced front rotor rings and swapped all my pads out to Hawk DTC-70 front + DTC-60 rear as a temporary setup for now. I'd rather still be on Carbon-Lorraine, but Essex still hasn't even gotten back in touch with me about a shipping estimate for my front pads (it's been a month since the order, and I've emailed them about the order twice and gotten no response

). Could be 6 months out for all I can tell at this point. I absolutely *love* the CL pads, but if I just can't reasonably source them, I may have to try something else. I've heard Cobalt Friction is similar and made in the states, but I'm not sure they yet carry the shapes I need.

Charity Race Tomorrow
So I'm basically as ready as I'm gonna be for the Charity Race tomorrow: new studs in front, old studs in rear, some super-hardcore Hawk pad compound I've never tried before all around, and oh yeah unlike the CL's they need proper bedding, and I have no idea if I'll be able to bed them right during the first practice session in the morning or not. Sometimes you have to learn to embrace the unknown and wing it I guess

Rusty · 08-01-2014, 11:44 PM

Did you not read my thread on installing the ARP studs? LMAO.

Installing ARP wheel studs

I've used the CL pads on my race bike years ago. Loved them. Thinking about trying them on the Z.

Good luck on the race.

wstar · 08-02-2014, 04:42 AM

Nope, I missed it somehow. Still, I probably would've read it and then said "Yeah but why'd he take the hubs off at all?" (well, bolt length, but even that you can maybe manage on-car). The root of my problems is that with the correctly-knurled Nismo studs, I was able to get away with cheating and just sucking them back into the hub holes with an impact gun, lug nut, and some kind of spacer setup. Can't do that with these. If I had been pressing them in correctly all along I might not have noticed that my cheat stopped working :P

Rusty · 08-02-2014, 07:18 PM

Used to install studs with a bunch of washers, lug nut, and an impact. No longer doing that because it will pull too hard on the threads. Ended up with gulled threads on some studs.

Found out it's just better to remove the spindle/bearing/axle and either press them in or beat them in.

06-19-2014, 05:39 PM	#1 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3595	Also, I took the still-unused 265/645 Wets off of my extra 18x10 wheels and had the 285/645 slicks mounted. The rims still aren't well-protected, even though I'm sure 10 inches is a good width for these 285's. Part of the issue is probably that race tires don't have rim-protectors built into the rubber mold, and that these Forgestars have particularly thick rim edges. When stacking these on their sides, the metal of the wheels don't touch each other or the ground, but it's just by a hair's width. Set them down too hard and you can hear them click into each other. I think I just have to live with that for now, because otherwise this setup should work great for trying out these cheap slicks. Assuming no other major issues get in the way (like my car blowing up and/or dying), I think my general plan at MSR-H this weekend is to spend most of the weekend on my existing RS3's, then maybe switch the slicks on for the 3rd or 4th session Sunday and scrub them in over a whole session slowly coming up to full speed. Then they'll sit for a week for that whole mfg-recommended rebonding process and I'll try them again at COTA the next weekend (with the remaining life on the RS3's as a backup option. I might even start out on the RS3's and then switch to the slicks later in the weekend instead, so that I'm super-comfy with the track/event before adding that new challenge back into the mix. All depends how things feel during the scrub-in session this weekend). Pics, off the car sitting at 25psi cold pressure (I suspect I might need to start them even lower than that, still researching): iceman21_23 and jlo370z like this. __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

06-20-2014, 10:14 AM	#3 (permalink)
Mike The370Z.com Sponsor Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Loganville, GA Posts: 5,944 Drives: 370z Rep Power: 2187	I shoot for 36 hot on them. Not quite the same grip as the A6s, but still a great tire. __________________ NISSAN: 75 280Z / 86 300ZX GLL /87 Sentra SE / 03 350Z / 23 Z Porsche: 93 968 / 23 Macan GTS / 93 968

06-23-2014, 07:51 AM	#4 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3595	Had a great weekend at MSR-H! New engine seem to be running great! Only have a couple minor things to look into: oil temps looked a little higher than expected (240-ish but it was a very hot weekend), and upshifts were a little slow and clunky on Saturday (but gradually got better for some reason; could have been me subconsciously adjusting shift timing or lifting throttle. Could also be that the fluid level's a little off?). Car's already back on my mini-lift for basic maintenance. Going to swap out the engine oil (since this was the first fill for that engine since the salvage lot), check trans fluid level, replace front rotor rings (finally, and replace studs+lugs while I'm in there), bleed brake fluid, etc for the coming weekend at COTA. I did my Red-group check ride for MSR-H (Driver's Edge does these per-track, so the one at TWS was separate from this) on the first Sunday session and that went great, so I got to spend half my weekend in Red. Kevin was my check-ride instructor; his line advice was amazing, but it will take a while for me to get out of my old habits and pick up speed from what he was saying I did scrub in the Conti GT-O slicks in the final session Sunday. As usual, my fears were all in my head. There was no problem controlling that tire, and it felt amazing. We had about 8 hot laps that session. I spent the first 6 slowly edging my way up on laptime and trying not to put any big slip angle in them, then the final 2 laps I ran at my normal pace for the RS-3's and I could finally start to feel a little slip. You could tell the tires were nowhere near their limit at my RS-3 pace. At places (and speeds) where I'd feel unstable or fighting the car way out at the edge of acceptable traction in the RS-3, the Contis were just rock solid and predictable. There's clearly 2-3 seconds I could take off my laps here if I adjusted my pace up to the tire's limit with slicks like these. (Then again there's also clearly 1-2 seconds I could shave if I made some basic line fixes; who knows how much those two figures overlap). Also, they look great on the car -- Fastest lap for the weekend was 1:52.21 (second-to-last session of the weekend, still on the RS3's): Megan370z, guru, Rusty and 1 others like this. __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details Last edited by wstar; 07-18-2014 at 08:41 PM.

06-23-2014, 08:31 PM	#5 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3595	I went ahead and encoded the whole session that the fastlap above came from. Spent that whole session chasing down the same red Lotus (well, once he got back in front of me around the end of Lap 4). Lots of data to pick up from it on how and where he was faster than me. Mostly, it seems like he was doing better pushing out of the inner carousel wider and earlier on the throttle, and he was way more gutsy staying in the throttle before, during, and just after The Launch (the little hill): Rangerz, carlitos_370z and Limeybastard like this. __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

06-23-2014, 09:10 PM	#6 (permalink)
Mike The370Z.com Sponsor Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Loganville, GA Posts: 5,944 Drives: 370z Rep Power: 2187	240 is probably just normal in summer. I saw 230 at road atlanta weekend before last, and Russell from Z1 and Brian Kleemans Pirelli challenge car were around 260-70, but my stillen bumper probably helped me. this weekend at AMP which doesn't have long straight and is shorter, I was in the 230-240 range. It is summer! __________________ NISSAN: 75 280Z / 86 300ZX GLL /87 Sentra SE / 03 350Z / 23 Z Porsche: 93 968 / 23 Macan GTS / 93 968

06-19-2014, 06:56 PM	#2 (permalink)
sig11 A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Detroit Posts: 1,294 Drives: 09 370Z Red Sport-MT Rep Power: 19	You won't want to go back to the RS3s!

06-23-2014, 09:17 PM	#7 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3595	Time for hood vents I guess Mike likes this. __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

06-30-2014, 05:42 PM	#8 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3595	Your points are well-taken. I have no doubt the math makes sense on a racecar. You lose a little tiny bit of throttle response and power and you gain reliability. It's also a spec engine putting out gobs of power with insane throttle response, so the damper hit is hard to feel in the first place, and no matter what it does to your power you're going to tune the thing right back to your desired spec horsepower or whatever. On a plain stock engine, the throttle response difference is notable (and I suspect, a reason for my perception of felt changes in upshifts on my new block - revs just aren't falling as fast). Your random data point about 40-80 hours is interesting as well. Using very approximate, rounded-off, numbers, my stock engine had 40K street miles on it before it left the street for good, and ~4K track miles on it (I had mis-estimated this as more like 5K earlier on). Those 4K track miles occurred over the course of approximately 80 hours of track time (The rough figures I'm using for easy approximation is 40x singular days of DE, ~100 miles over 4x 30minute sessions per day). Keep in mind this block was sealed up at the factory back in late 2008 and never opened or worked on again. That it survived this long was a miracle (and maybe thanks to religious maintenance where I could on things like regular high-quality oil changes, and the baffled oil pan I picked up from AM Performance, and good cooling). I really think the flywheel flopping around is what did in the crank bearings at the end. Had I thought to check that and correct it earlier, the engine might've gone longer. Still, something had to give. I highly doubt I'd have made it to 10K miles no matter what I did (well, short of actually rebuilding the block before it fails). Which brings me around to the situation I'm facing now: how to adapt to and cope with where I'm at in my ever-evolving hobby. If I keep up with anything like my current schedule of DE events and expect engine failures at about this sort of interval, I'm looking at a dead engine block every 2 years if nothing goes unusually-wrong. It's tempting to say "Yeah but I can't afford the time or labor cost of having the engine rebuilt correctly on regular maintenance intervals", but that's probably not true. If I don't, I'll be doing the same rebuilds but with less predictability and more downtime. Of course there's all the other components to keep track of as well. How long do good-quality spherical bushings last? Shocks? Rear ends? Transmissions? Figuring all this stuff out from scratch the hard way is a trying experience at best, given I'm a one-man pit crew with no qualifications to speak of and doing this for fun with no sponsorship dollars or any real plan to go after real racing (I'm closing on 40 and started too late in life to ever be good enough for a top-tier race series, and I like my well-paying day job). While all of the above sounds pretty depressing and daunting, in many ways it's kind of awesome, too. In the same way that track-driving stretches my skills and my brain in painful but ultimately rewarding ways, so does all the rest of this stretch me in other areas. On the days when it doesn't totally defeat you, it feels pretty awesome to still be doing it at all BGTV8 and 12nismo like this. __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details Last edited by wstar; 06-30-2014 at 05:55 PM.

06-30-2014, 09:57 PM	#9 (permalink)
Rusty Ronin Samurai - Assassin Join Date: Dec 2011 Location: Fayettenam,Pennsyltucky Age: 69 Posts: 35,549 Drives: 2011 Nismo GM 6M Rep Power: 2684439	When I was hanging around a few race teams back in the day. What they would do is change the crank and rod bearings every so often. Never pull the engine. Just drop the pan. Remove the caps, mike the journals. Replace with new bearings and bolts. Never seen them have a bottom end problem. We're talking about the old 427 big block chebys used for roadracing. A lot of weight spinning around. Think you could do something like this to keep the engine alive longer. __________________ 浪人 - 殺し屋 "The Difficult Anytime, The Impossible By Appointment Only" http://www.the370z.com/members-370z-...o-journal.html

06-30-2014, 11:37 PM	#10 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3595	Sounds plausible. Now I just need to figure out how to reliably do that sort of work myself in my garage. I have two blocks now anyways for better or worse, so I'll probably try to work out a system of rotating the two blocks once a year or so and then working on beefing up the previous block before the next swap. Maybe for the first iteration I'll just fix any obvious damage, replace wear-items, and stick in a Nismo oil pump. Then we'll see if I can go further for the next one once I at least halfway know what I'm doing __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

07-18-2014, 08:32 PM	#11 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3595	Random updates: I chunked a front brake pad at CotA. These were the Carbon-Lorraine RC6E. They had plenty of thickness left, but they've been on the car for nearly a year, so I guess their age and the excess heat from hard braking at CotA did them in. While I'm interminably waiting for 2x sets of RC6 fronts from Essex, I ordered some Hawk in DTC-70 front and DTC-60 rear to hold me over since those ship out much faster. Assuming the Hawks still have life left when the RC6 arrive, I'll save the used Hawks as backups for the next time I destroy a pad or two Hawk pads should be here Tuesday. Will be doing my brake pads and some related overdue work in the wheel wells (front brake rotor discs, replacing studs + lugs, etc). I'm also going to take a stab at venting my hood this next week with a cutoff wheel and some mesh and whatnot, we'll see what happens as that project evolves Revised remaining schedule for the year (assuming I don't miss any of them!): Aug 2: MSR-Houston - Race 4 Charity Aug 23-24: TWS - PDS (maybe!) Sep 6-7: TWS - The Driver's Edge Sep 20-21: NOLA - NASA Oct 4-5: MSR-Houston - The Driver's Edge Oct 11-12: TWS - NASA Nov 1-2: Eagle's Canyon - NASA Nov 22-23: TWS - The Driver's Edge guru and carlitos_370z like this. __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details Last edited by wstar; 07-18-2014 at 08:36 PM.

08-01-2014, 08:11 PM	#12 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3595	Well I never got around to messing with hood vents this week. The wheel stud thing got more complicated than I expected ARP Wheel Studs: Pros: ridiculously long - way longer than the Nismo 60mm (I'm sure they'll stick out of any wheel, which makes lugs very easy), well-made, and have nice bullet noses for easy threading. Cons: the ones made in our normal thread size (that e.g. Z1 sells) actually don't have the correct knurl pattern for our hubs. They will go in, but it requires a ton of force because you're basically destroying the knurl pattern on the hubs or the bolts or both. I thought it was going to be a quick job like my last stud replacement: press them out with a ball joint separator thingy, and then press them back in with lug nuts and a stack of washers (and/or an appropriate socket as a spacer). However, because of the force required to press them in, you end up partially damaging the threads if you apply enough torque to seat them. So the only reasonable way to install them is to use a hydraulic press, which means taking the hubs off the car to carry them over to the press, adding a ton of labor and finagling to the process. Because of that, I only did my front studs today. I didn't have the necessary socket + puller handy to pull the rear hubs off the car. The studs are pretty awesome once installed, but grrrrr at having to pull off the hubs to install them. Pads: Other than that, replaced front rotor rings and swapped all my pads out to Hawk DTC-70 front + DTC-60 rear as a temporary setup for now. I'd rather still be on Carbon-Lorraine, but Essex still hasn't even gotten back in touch with me about a shipping estimate for my front pads (it's been a month since the order, and I've emailed them about the order twice and gotten no response ). Could be 6 months out for all I can tell at this point. I absolutely love the CL pads, but if I just can't reasonably source them, I may have to try something else. I've heard Cobalt Friction is similar and made in the states, but I'm not sure they yet carry the shapes I need. Charity Race Tomorrow So I'm basically as ready as I'm gonna be for the Charity Race tomorrow: new studs in front, old studs in rear, some super-hardcore Hawk pad compound I've never tried before all around, and oh yeah unlike the CL's they need proper bedding, and I have no idea if I'll be able to bed them right during the first practice session in the morning or not. Sometimes you have to learn to embrace the unknown and wing it I guess __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details Last edited by wstar; 08-01-2014 at 08:15 PM.

08-01-2014, 11:44 PM	#13 (permalink)
Rusty Ronin Samurai - Assassin Join Date: Dec 2011 Location: Fayettenam,Pennsyltucky Age: 69 Posts: 35,549 Drives: 2011 Nismo GM 6M Rep Power: 2684439	Did you not read my thread on installing the ARP studs? LMAO. Installing ARP wheel studs I've used the CL pads on my race bike years ago. Loved them. Thinking about trying them on the Z. Good luck on the race. __________________ 浪人 - 殺し屋 "The Difficult Anytime, The Impossible By Appointment Only" http://www.the370z.com/members-370z-...o-journal.html Last edited by Rusty; 08-01-2014 at 11:47 PM.

08-02-2014, 04:42 AM	#14 (permalink)
wstar A True Z Fanatic Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 4,024 Drives: too slow Rep Power: 3595	Nope, I missed it somehow. Still, I probably would've read it and then said "Yeah but why'd he take the hubs off at all?" (well, bolt length, but even that you can maybe manage on-car). The root of my problems is that with the correctly-knurled Nismo studs, I was able to get away with cheating and just sucking them back into the hub holes with an impact gun, lug nut, and some kind of spacer setup. Can't do that with these. If I had been pressing them in correctly all along I might not have noticed that my cheat stopped working :P __________________ 7AT Track Car! Journal thread / Car setup details

08-02-2014, 07:18 PM	#15 (permalink)
Rusty Ronin Samurai - Assassin Join Date: Dec 2011 Location: Fayettenam,Pennsyltucky Age: 69 Posts: 35,549 Drives: 2011 Nismo GM 6M Rep Power: 2684439	Used to install studs with a bunch of washers, lug nut, and an impact. No longer doing that because it will pull too hard on the threads. Ended up with gulled threads on some studs. Found out it's just better to remove the spindle/bearing/axle and either press them in or beat them in. __________________ 浪人 - 殺し屋 "The Difficult Anytime, The Impossible By Appointment Only" http://www.the370z.com/members-370z-...o-journal.html

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
TravisJB Journal	travisjb	Member's 370Z Gallery	1977	11-03-2017 09:39 AM
DannyGT's Journal/Progress	DannyGT	Member's 370Z Gallery	174	10-17-2017 10:25 AM
RCZ's 370Z Journal.	RCZ	Member's 370Z Gallery	1743	08-09-2013 11:55 PM
Edmonton Journal Review of the 370Z	BanningZ	Nissan 370Z General Discussions	13	08-09-2009 05:44 PM
LiquidZ's Journal	LiquidZ	Member's 370Z Gallery	22	05-22-2009 11:42 PM