Vuelta de Tuercas

My new hood has arrived! I ordered from ExtremeDimensions, and the hood itself is from Carbon Creations. They had a nice free shipping offer on Ebay that I think was more convenient than getting a used one (I saw a couple for $200-ish, with some dents), paying for shipping and then repairing it... would probably be the same price or higher. Let alone a new OEM one which will set you back some $750 plus shipping... ouch! As you might guess from the brand, mine is a carbon fiber hood. Wow. A few years ago it seemed like such an exotic material, only seen in F1 cars. It's my first close-up experience with this material. Although manufacturers claim their products to be "100% carbon fiber", it really isn't all carbon nanotubes; it has to be combined with some kind of polymer or other materials to give it rigidity, in addition to its natural tensile strength and low weight. What you see in the first picture above is the back side, which is lined with some kind o...

More updates on the work that's being done on the Z! I had mentioned that the front bumper was cracked. It turns out that the lower section has very wide vents and the actual piece of bumper between the center vent and the side vents is kind of slim, and it supports the whole lower portion of the bumper. In the following frontal view maybe you can get what I mean. The bumper goes from the lower front portion of the wheel arches, then horizontally towards the front and then up to meet the headlights, so it's a big piece of fiberglass-reinforced plastic. Below the black portion holding the turn signals and foglights there is a black stripe. That is actually just a groove with a black stripe sticker on it; the bumper is a single piece. Those slotted vents on the sides lead to the intercoolers, one on each side and each feeding one turbo and then the air from each of them reaches half of the cylinders. This is a completely split intake, split exhaust car. Although the afterm...

So I think at this point I should give some updates on what is keeping me busy these days on the whole Z thing. If you look at the list , you may have an idea of what is in progress and also updates as I get quotes and find out what is repairable, which parts I need to get, etc. Moldings I found a site that has instructions on how to do a ton of things to the 300ZX, and among those things were the instructions on how to remove/replace the various moldings (on the sides of the windshield, along the roofline, on the window sills, ...). After being satisfied with plastidipping the windshield cowl, I decided to give it a go. First let's recall the status of the moldings: That white strip is where the molding's black coat has worn off. This is uglier still: the metal below the coating has some serious rust. These moldings have chrome underneath the black coating. So I decided to plastidip the hell out of those suckers. I would scratch the black coating as m...