DevilZ

That's okay. No problems. A lot of the answers to your questions could be found through the web on things like wikipedia and places tho. A cam regrind is where the cam profile (lobes on the cam) are grinded to change the profile of the cam. There are a tonn of different cam grinds and what it basically ends up doing is shifting your power curve so it makes more power in different areas. The cams whats opening and closing the valves so by regrinding it to a different profile you can change the lift (how far the valves open) and duraion (how long the valves are open for) which will changes your engines characteristics along with power. As for high compression pistons. When the piston goes down the cylinder it draws air into the cylinders. When it goes back up it compresses the airs its drawn in, into the cylinder head chamber. So you can increase compression by making or getting a smaller cylinder head chamber (hence different cylinder head combinations) or by increasing the displacement (engine compacity eg 2.8litres, two ways of achiving higher displacement, increasing bore or increasing stroke. You'll find this on wikipedia) while keeping the smaller size chambers. The last way is to use higher compression pistons which are pistons that have a bigger top to them. So basically when the piston moves up to compress the air mixture since the top is larger on them it reduces the chamber size effectively. As there is less area for the air to be sqeezed into due to the larger top of the piston. This results into an increase in power however if you go to high you need to increase the octane of fuel etc.... to stop engine detonation. It gets complex after that. But basically 98 octane fuel is good for around a 11:1 max compression ratio safely.

Hey. Well an L28 is just the 2.8 litre L-series engine. They came in things like a 280zx and a few other cars. There are also 280zx turbo engines which came out of a 280zx turbo. Both of which stock dont produce very impressive power but can be moddifed as with anything. With cheap good power the best option is to use an L28 as they have a fairly large compacity and bolt straight into a 240z. They are the same engines as an L24, L26 etc... just larger capacity. There are a lot of things you can do with these engines as the cylinder heads are interchangable with 240z and 260z ones etc to give higher compression etc... Lots of different people around Datsun will have different opinions on how to modify your Datsun and what head is best however as you'll find they are often biased to what they own and drive. Almost every Z owner wants to have the best and fastest Z. Thats were it starts to get expensive. There are a huge number of ways to modify a Z so you really need to think about what you want the car for and how much your prepared to spend. There are Z's out there with over 40k spent on modifing them. If you after something thats fun to drive on the street and cheap to build I suggest using an L-28 with some higher compression pistons. A mild camshaft grind. Good extractors and exhaust along with twin SU carbs properly tuned and balanced. That should give you an engine with lots of torqu and good power to about 5500rpm. Very cheap to make and useable on the street. The car wont be the fastest thing around but to get more gains it costs big money. You'll really have to make a decision on how long you want to spend building the car, how long you want to keep it, how much you want to spend on each area of it and most importantly what is the purpose of the car? Hope this helps but just some advice from past experience.

Sorry but there's no such thing as building a good, fast cheap Z to rival new cars. As you will find these things cost a lot of money to get perfect. The problem with running webbers is that you can either tune it (jet it) for bottom end power or for top end power but never both. If you build an L-Series race engine using webbers the car wont pull till well after 4000rpm. If you have is streetable (good bottom end torque) it will drop power before 6000rpm. The only way to get the best of both worlds is fuel injection but that alone could set you back 9k.Then you have all the engine work ontop of it. If you go down the path of building a Z for what it is......a 70's car then you could be really happy and not spend a packet. A Z with over 200 engine HP is good enough to give most thing s a decent run on the street and still be a bit of fun on the track. You can get that from running a L28 with 10:1 compression, extractors, a decent cam, mild port work and even twin SU carbs. The engine will probably cost you less then 3k to build and last a very long time. Then you could do suspension and brake work. By the way webbers drink fuel like crazy too but they do look and sound the part.

I thought about the path of running an RB in the car initially too just on the basis of fuel injection, power etc....Back 7 years ago there was a lot of hype about DYNO power (princesses) and everyone wanted 1000hp+ hahaha but after racing in enough cars you find that power doesn't automatically transform into speed. For example this guy who used to race with us had a 400kw at the wheels Honda CRX and he got smoked time and time again by a stock SS Holden. Anyway I liked the idea of running the origional L-Series better because i didn't want to take away from the character of the car but I did want more power and easy starting etc...(the benifits of new engine). The old L-Series are already very reliable as they are fairly simple engines. Thats why i went down the path of multi throttle body injection. The car starts and runs like any other modern engine now and is putting out fairly decent power. The L-Series scream is still there too !!!

Is it just me that thinks an S30 is complete junk with anything except an L - series engine in it? I cant understand why anyone would want to fit another engine to an L series like an RB, SR20 or VG30 etc..... especially not V8's !!!! An R33 skyline goes for less then 10k now a days. If you want an Rb why not buy one of them. There chasis and gearbox is already built to take the engine and its a tonn cheaper to upgrade the suspension etc on a skyline then a Z plus the brakes are decent too. Anything but an L series in a Z just seems like junk to me. Also significantly drops the resale value.

I've got over 150RWKW and i can tell you it doesn't feel like enough at the moment!!!! Power delivery rather then peak power is far more important. I still have to change exhausts to get the proper power out of the car but just from experience having a strong power spread over a wide range is far more important then an end bragging right figure. Racings the only true test of speed.