Whittie

Sounds like you've got out under control then Be sure to keep us updated on how it all goes. I'm sure I'll see you round the traps too, the Perth zed scene is fairly small, but all a good bunch.

Don't get me wrong, poly it's still a very worthwhile upgrade around the whole car, you just have to be careful with the t/c rods. Everywhere else benefits enormously from the installation of poly bushings and they're likely cheaper than oem parts too.

I went the full poly route and snapped the T/C rod and almost my neck in a possible accident so now religiously tell people to avoid full poly! I was barreling down the back straight at 200 kph, down hill in to a 90 degree right hander, and had the right hand T/C rod snap at the bush. I can tell you I made the corner without hitting the sand, I even didn't brown my pants but MY GOD it was close! If you want to keep the standard rod then you use poly on the front to keep from compressing and away from all the altering geometry goodness under braking and a rubber bush on the rear to make sure there is still play enough so the rod doesn't snap due to stress. Think of the rod like a paper-clip. If you use poly front and rear there is so little movement in the mount that the rod is constantly bending under suspension movement, eventually, just like the paper-clip, it will snap. Rubber on the rear allows the rod to move vertically without allowing it to squirm around under heavy braking loads. Personally, I have gone to and swear by Techo Toy Tuning spherical ball jointed T/C rods, but they really are a race only mod and are excessive on a street car, not to mention likely illegal.

It works through a specific bluetooth protocol that I hear is not all that common / very expensive to get ecu attachments for. Something that could circumvent the cost of expensive dongles would be a big selling app.

If you're really serious and looking for something local, then get in touch with the WA Z Register, there are usually people buying/selling fairly regularly through that group. Martin Falconer (tuneright) is also a VERY handy contact for zed cars and parts in WA, he's worth a buzz too, just google 'tuneright' to get in touch with him. Unfortunately, I don't think yo'll find your dream car at 11k, depending on your definition of 'good condition' you could easily be looking at 20k+, but it'll certainly be a good starting point for a fantastic relationship with her! (him?)

Thanks for the kind words guys, it's great to hear it all!

Cheers Haha, I'm sure I'll be putting it in several shows for a while. At least while the paintwork is still looking good anyways! The first show I'd like to enter is in January, but we'll see how the car goes, I suspect it won't be ready by then. Really tho, I just want to own a really nice car that's been done properly. For me it's about personal enjoyment rather than shows, however the car will be show worthy when it's done, I'm sure.

Another update. I will just start here and notify you that this is 3 updates in 1 and is STUPENDOUSLY long. Like 8 pages in word long... Enjoy 31 August 2011 Well, I think it’s the 31st at the moment. According to my laptop it’s 12:56am on the 31st and according to the little screen in the back of the seat in front of me it’s 5:56pm on the 30th… These 32 hour days are just bizarre and hopefully you’re all as suitably confused as my body is at the moment. Not to worry, I have 3 hours left in this forsaken seat so I figured that was enough time to finally sort out the next update so that’s good news for everyone who has been waiting for the next update. At least, I hope people have been waiting eagerly for an update, it would certainly be a shot in the motivation if nobody was…. Either way (please be the former!) Ladies and gentlemen, I present The Rebuild! It’s been the better part of 3 months since the last update and work has finally started on the car, 200+ hours of it in fact. The panel beater has been hard at work and the new car is starting to really take shape. I will apologise in advance for the onslaught of photos, but I really feel this rebuild deserves it. Or is it that the wallet demands it for justification? I’ve sorted through the photos I’ve taken on multiple trips to the shop and I feel the best way to present them is in chronological order, so that’s how I’m going to tell this story. Without further ado: 2 July 2011 This was a painful day. Almost exactly one month since dropping the car off for work to start and we’ve hardly started. I spent a weekend working in the shop with Will and a bucket of ammonia based paint stripper (I really advise you don’t play with this stuff, it’s REALLY nasty, however amazingly well it works it’s SUPER nasty!) and came away with the engine bay and roof back to bare metal: 23 July 2011 Roof! That’s right folks, a new roof! I will finally be able to enjoy a drive in the rain with the rain staying on the OUTSIDE of the car! Also, did I say that the car now has a roof?! A roof! It’s even made of metal! A metal roof, who would have thought that I would be putting metal into this car considering all the plastic coming it’s way. Perhaps I should have used carbon. Hmm, that’s an idea… Actually, that’s a ridiculous idea, this is a 70’s classic and it deserves METAL: Roof aside, Will has been busy with a sandblaster and taken the rest of the body back to bare metal so that we can get the work really going. By going back to bare metal Will can fully assess the shape of the car and get down and dirty with it. You’d be surprised at how bent the car is too Here is the car as I found it in the shop on the 23rd: How the engine bay turned out: You can quite clearly see the work that Will did on the car 5-odd years ago when he replaced the entire length of chassis rails from the firewall forward, note the different colour of the metal. Surprisingly, not too much rust in this part of the car which is fantastic to see, a couple of holes that need patching, but nothing too major. Cowel: Door: Other door: Note how some dodgy bugger has ‘repaired’ previous accident damage: Sand Dog leg rust: Did these cars come with rust as standard?! Quarter window: More previous accident ‘repair’ at passenger side lower edge of windscreen: So, what was a month ago now, the car was back to bare metal and the roof was in (METAL!). In talking to Will and assessing the work to be done in the future I got motivated and ordered some Bad Dog frame rails for the car. There are a LOT of bent things under the car, such as all the sway bar mounts and the chassis rails are collapsed due to be used as jacking points so there will be a heap of work required under the car as well as the body. The Bad Dog frame rails are awesome and will be several kilo’s very well spent on the car. They are 2-3x thicker than the standard rails and should be fairly simple to install due to the way that they weld in onto the current rails. You sort-of take an angle grinder or similar to the current rails and leave perhaps 1-2cm of frame rail protruding from the chassis which you then use as ‘tabs’ for the Bad Dog rails to fit over and weld to. It’s a very simple concept really and for something like $250 delivered from the states is also great value. 7 August 2011 What do Rust, bog and dodgy rebuilds have in common? They’ve all occurred in the last few weeks on this car! Read on: Another trip to the panel beater and another clue to the history of this car has been uncovered: It’s been back to bare metal before! I don’t know who did the work, but for the whole time I have owned this car, going 8 years now, it was NEVER apparent that this car had had any decent work done to it. I can guarantee the previous owner of 10-odd years didn’t do it either; however I do know he did a dodgy respray a few years before I bought the car. Well, I suppose decent work isn’t really the word to use here anyways, seeing as the fool who did the work used acrylic primer, which I’m told is porous and hence the car continued to rust and as Will tells me, it looks like the apprentice worked on the car: Good intentions, but massive short-cuts seem to be taken. Here is a great example of what I mean by that. I present exhibit a: Rear drivers side quarter panel. When it was painted, nothing could be seen, however without paint there is a pretty suspicious spot of bog: Will knows what’s hidden here, despite my ignorance and so grabs the sander to prove his point: The same story is repeated along the doors and the rest of the rear end of the car. It will take Will a week to go around and clean and PROPERLY repair the dodgies that have been done to this car. But hey, it’s all part of the fun of restoring these old cars and it’s good to know that when I’m done this will be one of the nicest zeds I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing. The roof is coming along with every visit: And every visit this car is slightly more and more rust free, but there is still a long ways to go yet. You can see here the rust that was cut out of the passenger side quarter window: How it looks done properly: The driver’s side was not quite so bad, but this is a great shot to see Wills work process: Sand Blast, acid wash, cut, repair, reshape. It’s a whole lot more work to get it done right than I thought it would be but the result is fantastic Acid killed rust around the passenger door frame: You can see in this photo how Will is allowing the body to oxidise after he’s cleaned all the paint off. He assures me this is all part of the process despite it being backwards to me! Allegedly it’s a fantastic trick to show up any blemishes in the metal work and you can see here what the bare steel looks like under that light coat of rust: More dodgy repairs: Here it looks like the ‘apprentice’ has tried to braze the split panels back together instead of properly shaping and welding them back together, hence why they split again. This seems to be the result of someone backing the car into a curb, under the big patch of bog on the right of the picture is a big, dead straight, buckle. 20 August 2011 Rust gone! That’s right folks, 2 weeks since the last visit and the majority of the rust in the ‘body’ of the car has been removed. Lots of pics: Fixed rear panel, done right this time: The rest of these pics are pretty self-explanatory and probably don’t need any more explanation than the 1000 words inherent to each of them: The sum of the parts: Bring it on baby, yeah! 27 August 2011 Body smoothing. This week seems to have been all about finalising the contours of the body following all the good work that’s been done on the rust. First point of call tho has got to be the newly rolled rear guards to clear the new wheels with the extra track that I plan on giving the car: Body straightened back up after will gave it the ‘ultimate’ fender roll. Allegedly he’s given it around an inch of clearance under the guard and that any more without splitting the quarter panel will bend the body panels too much and ruin the body of the car. You’d never know anything had been done here if I hadn’t told you, would you?! That Buick in the background is a car that Will has been building for a customer for the better part of 5 years now. It’s been a full custom build because the entire original chassis in it was falling to pieces when the owner brought it in to Will for his expert care. Rear Panel: The straightest roof I’ve seen in a long time: Will tells me that despite things looking pretty bog covered at the moment that by the time he has finished shaping the panels with a hammer, touching them up with bog and then sanding it all back to a final product that the car will have less than half a tin of bog ON it in its entirety. That’s less than 1kg of bog over the entire car… Sounds like a deal to me! Well folks, that’s been one hell of a long update and it’s time for this plane to land (quite literally) so hopefully that’s been enough to tie you all over for the next 5 weeks before I get back to town and can go see the car again. With any luck the body will be in primer, the chassis rails on the car, the fiberglass parts fitted and the entire car ready for paining. Time itself alone will tell, but here’s to hoping!

Engine type: L Series Engine Size: 2.8 litres Tank Size: 60 Kilometers to tank: 350 L/100km: 17 Carburettor type: Triple 45mm Weber's

And there in lies the fundamental challenge with the Z car market today, you only need to spend 20-25k to buy a fully restored car! These cars are returning such a small portion of invested body work costs that it becomes almost prohibitive to do a restoration with the intention to sell unless you have all the tools and know-how to do it yourself. It also means that a body that is not complete is almost worthless due to the cost involved if you had to pay someone. I'm not trying to get you down, just there are plenty of people saying "I would pay xxx IF I had cash" but I don't see anyone saying "I'll pay xxx I HAVE the cash" and that's where is gets difficult As was mentioned a few posts ago, probably the best way to go would be to get all the parts together over time as you come across them and put together a complete car in pieces and then sell it, you might find it easier to move and get a fair bit more for it. The other option would be to find someone that has all the bits but needs a body. Perhaps you can find someone working on a 2+2 and convince them to do a body-swap I fully agree with your comment of one being enough too, when my car is finished I will NEVER restore a car again. Don't get me wrong, it's been great and I am grateful I've been able to do it, but given the choice I won't rush back into it!

I think this is a pretty interesting thread, especially because I'm midway through a resto and I've often thought about what it's worth 'as-is'. In my opinion, being in pieces drops the price dramatically, not having all the pieces to put it back together almost makes it worthless. To Mossy, who started this thread, going through what I am and seeing your car the way it is, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole, let alone pay money for it. The cost that would be required just to fix up what's been done and to get it 'going' would put it in the realm of most immaculately repaired, ready to go cars. Don't take it the wrong way, I think that zeds are worth a lot of money, but the market thinks otherwise and for what you would pay for a fully done resto'd car, you would come out way ahead compared to buying a shell, let alone with one that needs a lot of repair and rust work. That's purely because these cars are under valued in lots of peoples opinions, just not those paying the cash to buy them, which is what counts at the end of the day. One of the hardest parts with your car, as I've found with other for sale locally, is missing steel panels. In my opinion, steel panels ruin this car: They are heavy, they rust ridiculously badly and they are hard to find (try $600 plus for a guard, in bad nick, in the wrong colour!!). However, if you don't have steel panels then most people will tell you you don't have a car. This is also one of the reasons I think that reduces the value of your car and was certainly a driver for me to go fiberglass: I can keep the steel panels, oil them up so they don't rust and put fiberglass on for a track car, that way I don't care if they get damaged. However, for the people paying the dollars, fiberglass is a big negative. In your case, if I were you (I'm not) and I didn't need the cash and had the space then stick it in the shed, wrap a tarp over it and leave it for a few years. These cars will get up in value eventually, just they aren't there now.

Just be careful with this one! Use the urethane on the front of the rod, but NOT on the back! The radius rod is a solid piece of steel and if there is no give it WILL fatigue and potentially snap... Trust me. Use the urethane on the front to keep the car from squirming under brakes and use a rubber one on the back to keep it supple enough to not fatigue the rod. Best of both worlds

4 June 2011 9 days until the next update, that sounds more like a project getting back on track! I like where this is going My new goal is to have the car ready by Christmas. Aside from certain religious and social implications of that time of year it also happens to be the latest that I can enter into motorvation, Perth’s biggest import and aussie car show. I entered several years ago after I had the motor rebuilt however this time will be slightly more significant and so I would really like to make the end of the year! So, since the last update the car has indeed been delivered to panel beater! Success! Hooray! Happy Dance! And so on and so forth You read that right ladies and gentlemen, after 6 months in an idle state in a driveway collecting dust, the car is now sitting in a panel shop, idle collecting dust… Not to worry, despite the panel beater being busy this last week, I haven’t had that luxury and work is progressing. Not to get ahead of myself tho, we will return to the scene of the crime 7 days ago: I got some pictures off of dad that he took of the car on its final day in silver and so I figured it would be a good idea to post them up for sentimental reasons. Silver was never my favourite colour; however it worked well, was individual in regards to colour choice’s in Perth and was remarkably cheap to buy in a spray can for touch-up jobs…. Here is the ‘ole zed on its final journey to the panel beater. Goodbye old girl, bring on the rebirth! On arrival at the delivery location, dad and I… well… dad, worked hard to get the car mounted on the rotisserie. Whilst one of us was working hard, I broke out the camera and managed to grab a couple of pics: Go you good thing! … That was all well and good, however on close inspection of the under body by a foul mouthed, disrespectful panel beater Silver Bullet was left heartbroken at the diagnosis: “It’s a pig. You need more than you want to spend, it is FAR too rough to get finished on that budget” … :,( None the less, we continued on the inspection, with Will giving me a real no-holds-barred inspection of the body. Here he is in full swing: Despite many negative words, it didn’t go unnoticed by the onlookers that Will was excited at the prospect of having a rotisserie to work on again after so long working with jack stands. I will apologise in advance to boyblunda tho, the rotisserie may come back with patches of odd-coloured paint itself. This body needs a good blasting and avoiding the rotisserie is hard. None the less, the rotisserie is simply a tool and what a fantastic one at that. With the car positioned as it is I was more than able to rotate the car myself with no assistance and no bias towards top or bottom heavy, talk about infinite adjustability working to an advantage! So, today I got up at 630 to get an early start on the car. About 3 and a half hours after convincing myself that it was actually a good idea to get out of bed (it really wasn’t!) and cycle 23k’s to the shop, I finally arrived! Hoorah! … It might not seem like much, but that was probably the hardest part of the day those few hours getting ready, making lunch and cycling in what felt like sub zero temperatures. Don’t worry, I checked the Bureau Of Meteorology website and it was actually more like 10 degrees. But that’s beside the point; it was just damn freaking cold alright! 12 hours after getting up I finally arrived home again, but I have to say, I had a pretty big win today. Will had some super-dooper paint stripper made of all sorts of extra-ordinarily environmentally harmful chemicals that worked an absolute treat on the car. Will himself exclaimed that it shouldn’t have worked so well and he was stumped at what crap quality the paint was… Again with the bad words to the poor girl! None-the-less, 7 hours later and I had the entire engine bay stripped of paint, back to bare metal. Will passed his experienced eye over the metal and the job I’d done… The words used are not possible to spell, so I’ll just summarise as “needs plenty of attention” Now is the point where I would happily show off the hard work I’d done all day, however, I couldn’t fit my camera in my bag. Honest. nothing to do with forgetting it despite charging it the night before or anything like that! So, no photo’s, however, rest assured that the car is coming along well and that the engine bay is ready for some new metal, welding, grinding and painting to make it look ship-shape again Wow, all this makeover work makes me I feel like I’m in the middle of a nip-tuck episode Almost as expensive too… I’ll be spending next Saturday at the shop too and this time I’ll get photos to update on how things are going. I suspect Will will have done little-to-naught on the car by then, however, I’ll keep going with paint stripping and with any luck I’ll get most of the rest of the car back to bare-metal in another day’s work. As a present to all those following this thread, as I promised in the last update, here are some pics of the rotisserie mounts. A massive thanks again to dad for manufacturing the mounts and even going to the effort of getting them plated so that they won’t rust. Without his help, this project simply would never have left the phase of ‘pipe-dream’! The front mount: Here you can clearly see how the horn mounting points are utilised and also the vertical bolt that has been installed in the front of the frame rail to hold the weight. The bolt holds the mount to the car and the horn mounting bit basically keeps the square tube from deflecting from vertical. It works an absolute treat and although some temporary modification of the chassis rails is required, I would highly recommend this mounting procedure. The rear mount: The rear mounts are very basic, using the rear bumper mounting points. These points are bolted to the chassis rails from factory so they are super strong and amazingly simple to produce brackets for mounting. Hopefully these pics are helpful to others who are looking to build rotisserie mounts. With the car connected at these points and with the center of rotation about 4 inches’ or so above the mounts the car is perfectly balanced. This is with a cage tho, so a standard zed might be a little bottom heavy. None-the-less this is a VERY simple way to mount the car out of all of the methods I came across when trying to build blue-prints for this car.

Thanks Yeah, the rotisserie certainly makes things a LOT easier when trying to work on the car. Hopefully the panel-beater feels the same.

26 May 2011 Another 3 months between updates… This is getting to be a habit these long breaks… Well, for my sanity’s sake I really hope it doesn’t continue! On a positive, my car goes to the panel beater this Saturday 28 May!! I have booked the tow truck, mounted the rotisserie, adjusted it to find the center of gravity of the car and am all ready to go! Let me just stop you for a minute tho and say that things have actually still been moving slowly in the background and so I apologise in advance for the flood of pictures I have taken in the past 3 months. You have been warned Rotisserie? Yep, that’s what I said. I put up a post a few months ago looking for a rotisserie to buy/borrow and a VERY generous boyblunda offered to purchase a rotisserie and let me use it! The catch? I had to fit it to the car and I’ll have to demonstrate to him how to use it… What could I say but yes! Another big thanks to boyblunda, this generosity has really made my project for me. I’ll be happy to catch up any time now the car is on the rotisserie and demonstrate how to use it. The rotisserie is an Ebay unit, which from my understanding is built in Australia. You can pick them up for about $1000 delivered to your local courier depot and they are amazing value! You get a fully functional, constructed, hydraulically jacked rotisserie with almost infinite adjustment. Rated to 1000kg they are more than capable of holding on to a zed shell without a worry. The small amount of work I had to finalise on the car was made MUCH easier with the aid of the rotisserie and for such good value I couldn’t recommend them enough to anybody thinking of doing even mildly serious under-body work. Here are a few pics of the rotisserie when I got it: And what is inside this wonderous black box: Several hours of trying to work out what goes where, why I was short on a few nuts (I wasn’t, I just lost them on the ground for a while ) and I present: The ultimate blue twister! A couple of days later and the ever faithful hand, I mean Dad , had managed to construct a set of mounts and had them plated. The front mounts bolt to the front of the chassis rail, where the horns mount and the rear mounts bolt to the rear bumper mounting points, which are attached to the chassis rails. Unfortunately, I only managed to find 1 picture of the mounts, but I will get more I promise! Unfortunately this turned out to be less than ideal on the first trial lift. Check out the deflection of the rotisserie on the front of the car in this pic! Indeed, that is not a normal angle! So, it turns out that even tho that is frame rail there at the front, the captured nuts are actually only welded to some 1mm plate steel and this plate just bent something chronic when any load was put on it. Needless to say, some more work was required. So, it was back to the drawing board and the man that is came up with another idea: The same mount, but this time with an horizontal plate that bolts vertically to the chassis rail itself and some more bracing on the mount to minimise sheer forces on the welding holding the vertical plate. Just imagine the same mount in the pic above with a horizontal plate butting up to the radiator mount and a bolt through the chassis rail holding it against the top of the chassis rail. Unfortunately it requires drilling the chassis rail, but that’s an easy fix with a welder later compared to some of the rust on this car… I didn’t grab a pic of the new mount, but I will on the weekend after the mounts have been re-plated. Regardless, the new modified mounts work a treat and it wasn’t long before Dad and I had the rotisserie sorted and were spinning the car like a game wheel. But enough ramble, time for some more pictures! (I did warn you…) The underneath: The rear: Super human strength! Also about the best reason for having a sunroof So, the car was up in the air and everything was going great, well, until I realised that now I had much better access to the underneath of the car and all the tar that still remained on it Back to my favourite game of all time; Heat Gun & Spatula vs tar (no, not anywhere near as exciting as it sounds!): Bald spot!!! … I’m just gonna go and huddle in the corner now, don’t mind me…. I’m back! Not to worry tho, Ashley & Martin didn’t get any of my zed fund And the greatest achievement of last weekend: NO MORE SUNROOF!!! The hole is also not too bad. The roof is a little warped, which will probably require some of our best friend ‘bog’ to get perfect, but the new roof is in fantastic condition so it is certainly salvageable. I’m honestly surprised how little rust there is given how dodgy the install was considering the sunroof installer couldn’t cut more than 5cm at a time in a straight line! On a side note, I have a perfectly functional, reasonable condition LE VAN Sport T Top twin window sunroof for sale if anybody is interested, just drop me a PM and I can send through some more pics. So, that brings me (and you too of course) up to date with what honestly seemed like a neglected rebuild thread. I’ll be dropping in on the panel-beater weekly to keep the pressure on so expect PLENTY of photos over the coming months as the car is transformed from a rust-bucket to what I envision to be a real show stopper. After the panel beater and paid labour, the fun starts all over again with the reconstruction of the car. I managed to bag and label every screw into small sections such as “fuel filler cap” or “pedal box” and take over 500 photos of the car as I stripped it, but somehow I still think that won’t be enough when it comes time to find where all those screws go after so long since taking them out! However, that’s a story for another day. For now, Tom out. PS, to anyone who has followed this whole thread to date, Congratulations! You have just cracked 10,000 words (10,412) , or 35 pages, lovingly typed by yours truly Hopefully you enjoyed all of them! (10,429).

It was personally imported from the UK many years back. Could mean I can get away with a fair bit. could also mean nothing. I'm optimistic!

I've put the RB20 (skyline) and the Silvia SR20 box, and the SR20 box is the one you want, the gear lever is 5cm further back. With the skyline box I had trouble selecting 1/3/5 as my hand would hit the console. I wrote a big paper with pictures and instructions here: http://forums.hybridz.org/index.php/topic/75401-l28-transmission-swap-options/page__st__20__p__881963#entry881963 VERY easy mod, if you want to do on the cheap then just swap the bellhousing, machine out the gear selector holes and use the countershaft bearing from the 260z box, off you go.

Hey Guys, I just got my rego notice today and found this written on the conditions of the form: CONDITIONS: 301 Imported Vehicle - exempted from the Australian Design Rules and from the fitment of a compliance plate Now, my reading of that is that this car does NOT EVER have to comply with ANY ADR.... Is my reading correct? If it is, I'm about to go and do the biggest happy dance you've never seen!!

I'm with Scottz, I bought some off ebay for about $120 delivered. I've yet to try them in the standard reflector housings tho... I suspect they'll be terrible and I'll need decent projector housings to mount them in, which is likely to be more than $200, so at $380 if i hadn't already bought my lights I would probably just get these to save the stuffing around... They would need to be REALLY good housings tho!

I have mentioned before and would support a "Minimum Post Count" before access to write in the classifieds. IE: Free to browse and PM, but not to post wanted or for sale posts. This works well on other forums, I can't see why it wouldn't here

The strut top, the bit that's busted, is a bit of rubber mounted to a metal plate, much like a gearbox mount etc. I picked up 2 second hand one's out of a wreck over here for $30 I think a couple months ago. I thought that was about fair value. It's hard to jusge value of second hand parts like this tho, I can't imagine they are all that popular yet I suspect they would be very expensive new...

yup. Looks like the whole strut top has failed and is just floating around up there.

I have 205/50/15 and 225/45/16 race rims/tyres and a set of stock 195/70/14 road wheels as well. The only reason I run the 14's is extra ground clearance on the road and a MUCH softer ride. The sidewall on a 195/70 is so big it actually provides almost more cushioning than the suspension!! However, I am about to relegate the 14's to the shed for good as I just love the extra response of the lower side-wall tyres. They are a bit bumpier, you need to watch for pot-holes and mostly drive in the right lane to avoid man-holes etc, but it feels and looks so much better I wouldn't have it any other way. Have a think about how often you drive your zed and then think about how little you would care about a 'bumpy' ride in it. That will ultimately be your answer because if you wanted a smooth ride you would either have a fully restored original car, or not a zed!

First post, no introduction, from a guy allegedly in Houston posting on an Austalian based forum. There is a welcome forum. Grammar and punctuation also go a long way... I'm noticing more and more people from the states lately requesting help to source parts. All the parts come from the states, which is what baffles me....

Thanks for looking everyone, I've been in touch with boyblunda and we have come to an agreement.