'72 4 door, Tweety Bird

[speeder]

Still waiting on the airbox from my buddy. He's slow.

I swapped out the AR LIbres for some VTO Libres in 14x6. Thanks Dave! They're great and are holding up well.

Exhaust got rebuilt last spring so it's now tucked nicely up in there, not hanging down waiting for a rock. I never did get around to raising the car, I just raised the lowest point by an inch, which was the exhaust. Clearance hasn't been an issue since.

I've been putting in miles since my last update with no problems and nothing but good times!! A two day run in April, The Snowball Rally- Santa Cruz to San Fran to Sac to Tahoe to Sac and back to Santa Cruz. Flawless. Speedo read 120 briefly on an open downhill section with good visibility. Tach read over 6K. It felt close to top speed for Tweety. Real speed was probably closer to 115 as I think my speedo reads a bit fast. The car was flawless, needing nothing but gas.

I spent the summer rebuilding the front end on my Roadster. A big, expensive job that still needs final sorting. This made me gain immense appreciation for the incredible simplicity and functionality of the 510 front suspension.

August saw a traffic free 400 mile one day run (on a Monday) from Santa Cruz to Carmel to King City, east to Peach Tree Road, south to Paso Robles, east to Coalinga and then back to Santa Cruz. Amazing back road ripping with some Alfa driving pals. Nothing but gas added. Tweety kicking ass the whole time, pedal to the floor.

Then this past weekend it was 1K plus miles on the CA Melee. Unreal. A few thousand corners on everything from washboard gravel to poorly repaired pot hole ridden 1.5 lane to perfectly smooth fresh tarmac. Endless corners. Nary a hiccup. Gas and go with occasional bug removal! Fast. Several knowledgable people reported Tweety looking perfectly poised while ripping through super bumpy corners at high speed. 510 handling is as good as it gets!!

More than anything I think my experience in the last year shows what a 510 can do with a simple, very inexpensive suspension setup, sorted stock brakes with good pads (remove the dust shields on the inside- big improvement in cooling), and a reliable power plant.

The next step will be...
a new set of Dunlop Direzza's, 185/60 14, and a few thousand more miles wide open!!

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[speeder]

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[speeder]

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[BlackWidow]

thanks for posting the pics, looks like it was fun and a beautiful day.

[speeder]

One last thing.

If you drive a 4 door and you like driving with the window down, on the next hot day, put down all 4 windows. All the way down. No ear blasting wind, just a nice breeze flowing all around, even at speed.

[butters68]

gotta love rollin all 4 windows down and crusin in a five one oh eh.

[speeder]

Long time since I wrote anything on the project build thread. I had some sparking problems last fall and this spring that I wrote about over on the powertrain forum and I'll update that also. I don't drive the car that much since moving to CO mainly because I'm not running the road rallies I was in Cali. CO just doesn't have the roads that CA does. Stuff here is much more wide open unless its dirt or gravel and those roads are often rough. I'd gotten complacent about how Tweety was running, basically tooling around town with my kids on board, not driving like there was an Alfa on my tail and another 100 miles of twisties!

A close pal of mine who is an expert tuner recently and knows Datsun's really really well was kind enough to pay me a visit. He took a ride in Tweety and immediately said no way man, this thing is running like crap. Everything else feels great, suspension, brakes, trans, but an LZ motor like this should have way more power and it should pull harder into the revs even with the small port W53 head. Lets sort it out.

Long story short, we headed to the parts store and I bought a new Bosch timing light to replace my ancient one, then we put in a rebuilt matchbox diz that I had waiting with all needed parts- pedestal, plate, cap, rotor, etc. It had been sitting in a box for the last few years. Jason Gray's diz page was really helpful for this. That page is a great info source for us all trying to run L series motors. Reset the timing to about 31 degrees max advance with 12.5-13 degrees of mechanical advance. We took off the filthy, thrashed ITG foam air cleaners. Swapped the main jet down to a 120 for the altitude, adjusted the valves (which were not far off), changed the plugs, and set the max fuel pressure at 2.5 at the carbs.

As noted by Three B's, who had the same or a very similar motor to mine, he was able to run 33 degrees advance with no knocking and BP6ES plugs, while I was running what I thought was 28 degrees max and BP9ES and having to add octane booster. Prior to the diz change, my car was not happy and knocking. The timing on the diz I had in there was way to advanced and probably had been for a long time, and had gotten worse about a month ago when I changed the pertronix unit because the original pertronix unit I had was grounding out. It was my own fault for not going through things in a controlled, organized, step by step fashion, and I learned a ton working with my friend for a day. The new timing light was a key part of the equation. When I originally set the car up with another tuner many years ago, I think the timing was set wrong then by him using his timing light. I should have bought the new light then and done it myself to confirm everything, but oh well, you live and you learn.

Good news is the car is kicking ass now!!! It is way smoother through the entire rev range. AF meter running high 12's low 13's and Tweety pulls strong up to 6K or so. Man what I could have done with all this extra HP when I was smashing out 2-3000 miles a year of back road in Cali! It would be a rocket at sea level.

New coil for the electronic diz will go in this weekend so the diz gets the full 12 volts without a resistor. Gonna try some 115 jets also. Also gonna try some BP7ES and maybe even some BP6ES plugs and see how that goes. New air cleaners coming as well.

Long live The Realm!

[bertvorgon]

Ideally, you want to run as HOT a plug as you can. This keeps the plug "clean" for good idle, etc..

Be realistic of course as to your type of driving, or, what type of trip you might do. I do put in the effort to tailor my plug choice for what type of driving I will be doing.

Like your area, we have lots of mountain passes here where I will run either a BP8ES or if I think I will really be caning on it, I run a BP9ES ( cold plug)

If I am really just farting across town, even with 30 to 60 miles of 70MPH cruise on the highway, with MAYBE the odd blast of full BOOSTED throttle, I just run BP7ES plugs, ALL NGK of course.

Knowing that I am just say going to a car show with LOTS of idling at traffic light, slow traffic, I just put my BP6ES Hot plug)plugs in.

Just look at the colour of the plug, down into the base of the center electrode, and if it is a nice grey colour, your good.

For top end stuff and to see how the mixture really is, do the classic open pull if you can and then CUT the engine off clean and pull the plugs, see how that ceramic is looking in the center. If it is starting to glaze or super white, you might either richen it, or, run a next ranger colder plug and see how it does.

In Reality, most of our driving is at part throttle, even at highway speeds.

here are a couple of pictures of my plugs, the yellow is from the little bit of lead in the Avgas I run, and you can see just the start of glazing, I should have run my next colder plug, but you get the idea. The colour is good, just maybe a hair lean as they were from a long, high speed cruise.

[speeder]

Cool pics, thanks. We did pull the plugs a few times and I'll be doing that again to monitor things. It was cool to see them go from black to more grey and without all the mess on them.

[bertvorgon]

You have got a good handle on it then.

here is a pic of my exhaust after a good highway cruise and my A/F ratio at 4,200 RPM.

Avgas burns quite abit cleaner than pump gas but it gives you an idea of a good mixture