Alright the time has come to part with the parts. I took some time this evening to take photographs of what I have and what I am trying to sell. Right now I am trying to sell everything locally so prices don’t include any shipping. If I don’t have any interest locally I’m willing to ship the coilovers/springs/shocks but only as a package.

Sway bars and the exhaust are way too much of a hassle to try to ship, so those are local only. (Local in the San Francisco Bay Area, if you’re somewhere else in California and want to drive here, feel free).

Cash Only, no checks. Paypal acceptable for a hold, but cash must be delivered in full before handover of the parts. All parts located in Half Moon Bay, contact me at z – at – christoc.com for more info.

All parts are sold as is, with no warranty, and unknown mileage. I can tell you I put about 10k on each of them (except the control arms and the Cobb bar), but am not sure what they had prior to me.

This morning I began the process of converting the 350z back to stock, or close to stock. Mike Lane over on the east coast requested the control arms/custom bushings that I have on the car, so he sent me his original OEM set. A couple of months ago I actually tried to remove the arms on my car so I could lube them up and try to get rid of some of the excess noise in the car, but I wasn’t able to. One of the nuts on the upper strut mount was stuck and no matter what I tried I wasn’t able to get the nut removed.

I picked up some tools from the local Ace Hardware in Half Moon Bay to get that pesky nut off, and this morning when I got started, things didn’t go well. I managed to  break an extension I was trying to use, then I managed to break the bolt extractor as well! I was not a happy camper, though I decided to try one more thing, a better quality extension and turning it by hand. After that nut was removed replacing the control arms was nice and easy.

So the first parts of the car are back to stock, I’m shipping out Mike’s new control arms early next week, and hopefully they will see some autocross action soon!

Today was a practice day at the San Diego National Tour. This morning I took part in the Evolution School advantage program, basically you get a ton of seat time in the morning before the practice course opens up for the rest of the entrants for the National Tour. My r-comps were on a truck otw to the tour, so I ran my street tires for the morning session. I also had the car set at full soft (bump/rebound), most definitely not the configuration needed, and my evo instructor Brian let me know.

He knew me (not to be cocky, a lot of autocrossers do because of my involvement with SCCAForums.com and announcing at events throughout the years), but he made the mistake of assuming I knew what I was doing . He assumed I knew about suspension setup, I corrected him, and asked for help! He was very helpful and provided me some guidance to try things out.

In the morning sessions on street tires (Azenis 615s, decent tires) I got down to 30.0*, not bad, but nothing near the 27.* that a SS Z06 was running.

I also had a horrendous knocking coming front the front end of the car, though that wasn’t new, it was happening all week. When I put the new bushings in I failed to apply any grease to them (other than when they went into the control arms).  My father is here in town to watch me run at the tour, so we headed over to autozone to get some white lithium spray grease to try to help with the knocking. I thought, there was no way that it would help, but geez, it’s amazing how much quieter the car is now.

When the tires showed up I got them put on and adjusted the Konis a bit, then went back out and ran a few more practice runs to see how the car felt.

I got faster on each run, finishing with a 28.555. Still not up to snuff against that Z06, but definitely better than I had been doing in the morning.

I ended up going with the following settings on the Konis

Front Double Adjustable Truechoice Coilovers
Rebound: 1 full turn from soft (2.5 turns is full stiff)
Bump: 6 clicks (12 or 13 clicks is full stiff)

Rear Koni Sports (single adjustable)
Rebound: 2.5 clicks (10 clicks available)

I’m still trying to get the time lapse video from drive down to San Diego yesterday together. I can’t get Windows Live Movie Maker working very well on my laptop. I’m hoping it finishes up here soon.

So today I went back at the suspension of the car.

The problem with the video is that I did the time lapse in reverse! I mistakenly sorted the photos in descending order instead of ascending. You really can’t tell on the time lapse though, it just looks like another time lapse!