waltzinblack

I used to drive my sister's 225 TT loads before I got the Z.. I, like most people above, found that the TT 'felt' faster at lower speeds, as soon as you get to 3000ish rpm there's that definite 'kick' that you never get in the Z. In gear acceleration feels faster in the TT because of that, because I think you sort of only remember the kick, and forget that for a few seconds the turbos were lagging and not actually doing anything. The Z is so much more linear you don't get that, but getting more and more used to the Z every day I can see that it is a lot faster than the old TT. The TT also feels faster because of the short gear ratios imo. Mk1 TT boot space is phenomenal with the back seats folded down for such a little car as you will know, unfortunately you won't get as much in the Z. Fuel economy is much worse in the Z too. And the interior in the TT, especially the seats, are hundreds of times better than the Z. Although I love my Z's gauge pods! Now, here's why none of that matters: The Z is better looking by a country mile. It is such a beautiful car, that you hardly ever see. The shape, the lights, the wheels, the brakes, everything looks muscular and cool but at the same time sleek and pretty. TTs are pretty, and a revolution in design when they came out, but they have nothing on the Z. Also, people NEVER used to come up to me and say 'nice car mate' in the TT. And with the TT I used to see about 10 others just on a trip to the shops. The Z is special, some people dont even know what it is! 'Is it a Porsche?' 'Is that the new GTR?' Fools maybe, but it's nice for people to appreciate the car, no one bats an eyelid at a TT. Then there's the noise. The noise in the Z is just beautiful. It sounds like a much faster car than it is, and again, draws glances and comments from passers by The TT also isn't a proper sportscar. End of. And like most other competitors to the 350z, it will NEVER feel as special.

Great write up man! So happy you enjoyed the Boxster - I absolutely love them. It's a shame you didn't get to try the Spyder, might have been even more fun! (albeit a little less comfortable!) There's a lady with a white Spyder who lives near me, they look awesome I too bought the Z over a Boxster, but in my price range the Z was more powerful, newer, has less miles and looked a bit better. The 2009+ Boxsters are absolutely beautiful, it's my dream to have one. Hell I'd even have one over a 911. They are just so pretty!

Hardly a hot hatch, but how about an E46 M3? if running costs arent an issue of course Out of your list though I'd say definitely the Golf Gti. Has a lot more class than the others, especially the Type R and VXR which are a bit..well... chavvy imo

Ah awesome if they come out of the old lights that makes things easier! Thanks for all the help, I feel stupid asking if they were plugs now! But the car has been away in the garage so I didn't have the old headlights to compare

Isn't the ballast sort of like, the power/igniter for the bulbs? Do they usually come attached to the headlights? (I could take a pic of the back of my lights to show what they look like..) Also, I'm assuming that means that if the 2004 Zed has the ballasts, they aren't good enough for the facelift lights?

Sorry dude I know the first pics were a bit ambiguous, but to properly photo the holes I couldn't fit the whole thing in!

Cool, will most probably then and see, haha. Thanks for clarifying that there should be bulbs! Are these just plug and play? They appear to have an identical connection that the LED sets have for the back, so can I literally just plug them in to where my old ones were and they will work without modification? (well, after I get enough bulbs of course!) @ Husky: So does the indicator only fill one of the holes? (giggidy!) What goes in the other one?

well this is the same headlight..

I suppose headlights are considered bodywork? Anyway, recently got some second hand facelift headlights to fit to my 2004 model, how hard is it? If all the front bodywork has to come off (looking at that thread with the guy who posted his new headlights...), then the car is being resprayed atm is it worth just taking them down to the bodyshop and asking them to fit them? The MAIN question, though, I'm not sure if my headlights are missing bulbs. As you can see in the pics below, there seems to be two holes at the top corner of each unit, and in these holes I can sort of see what looks like copper prongs or plugs. Stupid question probably, but are these suppose to have bulbs in, these holes? Cheers

Black/Blue (I think?) with some swanky looking LED things instead of the reflectors on the front bumper , roared in the opposite direction. Anyone here?

This is absolutely the reason. I have to say I'm glad I've found someone others who agree with me on this! It was only last night a friends and I were watching something on Dave and we were both saying it. It's the same for comedians with different ethnic backgrounds, ALL they make jokes about are their race/country. Russell Peters is funny the first time you watch him, but eventually his jokes about his Asian father get boring. It's the same with Stephen K Amos and that woman who's always on Mock the Week making jokes about Nigerians. Frankie Boyle is pretty bad too. I mean the first time you watch him it's really funny, but then it ends up getting old. When he's not being obscenely vulgar he just makes EVERYTHING into a joke about Scotland.

+1 on the sports holdalls. They make it much easier than suitcases. I reckon if you ration yourself to an outfit for every two days, you wouldn't feel dirty and I'm sure that 6 pairs of clothes and double the underwear for two people would just about squeeze into a couple of sports bags and easily into the boot. The Tardis comment is also pretty accurate, there's a lot of space in there you just need to know how to use it! (filling in all the annoying corners and shoving things under the strut brace etc) I play airsoft, which is similar to paintball, which requires hauling around great big bags full of replica rifles and machine guns and the boots, ammo, clothes and assault vests that go with them! I can fit a fair amount in that boot - so I wouldn't worry! Failing everything, sell it and buy a MK1 TT. Driven my sister's before to an airsoft weekend, where I took my WHOLE armoury, which was around 13 guns of various shapes and sizes, a sports holdall full of clothes and food, various little supply and ammo bags, a massive tent, two sleeping bags and roll mats. With the back seats folded down you could probably fit another whole car in the back of a MK1 TT, they are massive compared to how small a car they are!

Looking at that picture, I'd say it's deffo a fake, it doesn't look wide enough at all, and it doesn't seem to be high enough at the back, and the windscreen, seats and roll bars are different! To be honest I hate those fake kits... so I don't feel too sad for the 'Ferrari' at all. Glad everyone involved was OK though

I've also always stuck to that, most cars I've driven seem happy changing gear every 10mph. In the Zed, I find that doing that makes for the smoothest gear change, change up any earlier or later and there's always a tiny little judder! As for the fuel economy thing, I'm not so sure that 6th in 30 would be best for that. A friend who is a driving instructor told me that high gear/low revs doesn't always work for fuel economy, if you were in 6th at 30 and needed to accelerate, you'd either have to put in a lot more throttle compared to say 4th gear, which wastes more fuel, or you'd have to change down to accelerate and then change back up to 6th, the gearchanges using a little more fuel than if you had just stayed in one gear. And again, if you had to slow down to like 20, you'd probably have to change down as well, whereas if you were just in 4th you wouldn't have to change gear at all. And I was always led to believe that changing gear wastes a lot of fuel if you do it a lot

Haha, yeah basically. If you like paintball, give it a try! But realistic guns and they perform a lot better too! If you look it up and enjoy the sound of it, give me a PM, it's always nice to get new players into the sport! ( )

Dont worry dude I wasn't I realise I dug myself a bit of a hole with the fiesta post, (hindsight eh?), and was expecting a ribbing once the comparison had been drawn to my s/c thread.. an airsoft forum I'm on you always get these kids posting up how they have just started airsoft and then they post a thread asking how to make their gun be the most powerful/awesome when they dont even really know the sport yet! I have done that on here now, so if anyone was preparing to go nuts at me I was just saying I'd rather they do it via PM! Also, I know it doesn't exactly help my position, but one of the reasons I was asking about supercharger builds on the cheap is because the money I've budgeted to spend on the car is cut short by the money I've budgeted to spend on driver training days! Don't worry, give it a few months and my noob-ness will wear off! (by the way, I'm pretty young to own a Zed, and I'm sure that a lot of what I say and do is similar to the Chav owners you all despise, but I'm not a Chav, just an idiot!)

Are you not the same guy who just posted this??http://www.350z-uk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=49725 Yes I am. Ridicule me via PM/some other way, already seen the post about this thread degenerating, and I know that my post was one of the reasons for it so I won't post again here attempting to explain my contradictory and ridiculous life!

And are we all forgetting that the car is nothing without the driver? I just got embarassed by an old (98 plate ish) fiesta on a very bumpy and twisty B road. It wasn't even a Zetec-S. Simply because I don't know how to drive fast, and I was too worried about the bumps and the RWD-ness sending me into a bush!

Enfield... I think you waved back at me

Meh.. well at least you guys have made the decision for me! It's better to no that you really can't do it on a budget rather than wondering all the time!! Thanks for the input, even though I'd hoped there was some miracle way of doing it cheap! So it's N/A mods for me I guess! I'm thinking one of Abbey's packages, (circa £2000), but then what else can I do? Is it possible to push a DE up to sort of 310/320bhp naturally aspirated? I'd like as little modification to the looks and sound of the car as possible, haha

I really REALLY would love to get my Zed Supercharged. The problem is, I only have 4 or 5k to do it. MIGHT be able to stretch a little bit. I have been searching and annoying Mark at Abbey with my PMs (sorry! ) for a while now, but I still need to know a few things. I would just get the usual N/A mods done, but I cant help thinking that it's such bad value for money, you pay a lot for relatively little gains, when paying a couple of grand more with a Supercharger would get me good, noticeable gains! So my question is, is it possible to have a reliable supercharged car with nice power gains for less than £5k? I've read that one place up North somewhere used to install the Stillen supercharger for around that amount? But as with a lot of threads on this forum, that was a pretty old post, and I wondered if this was still the case, and if the Stillen is any good, and reliable? (I can live with the bonnet bulge if it really is the only way!) Other things that sprung to mind were: buy the HKS or Vortech kit myself for ~£5k, and either try and fit it myself (with the help of a friend who is an amateur mechanic and fixed up his own MGBGT - is it easy enough?) or maybe ask my local Indy to fit it for me, THEN after its fitted take it down to Abbey for a remap to adjust it all so it runs nice and safely. The quoted figures of £9k+ for a UK installed supercharger are just too much, but getting my Indy to do it I cant see they would charge an extra £4k on top just to fit it. Final question, what are the HIDDEN OTHER costs of the supercharger? Are there any other parts that NEED to be fitted to make it run reliably? I don't need massive power, 350/360 would make me happy! But are there any other things apart from the cost of the kit, cost of fitting it and the cost of a remap to tune it afterwards that it would NEED to stop it blowing up? I was under the idea that the kits were pretty bolt on and complete.. Thank you so much!

Well if you look at the stats, 40 PS difference and 0.5 seconds slower to 60, it shouldn't be a surprise! The difference in power and acceleration could be made up for by SO many variables! In an ideal world, where you could race the two cars perfectly against one another, then don't worry, your Zed would be quicker (but not massively!) Also, 'still had a bit left on the throttle' is the oldest excuse in the book! I bet he could see that after 60 you would start inching ahead but didn't want to admit it. haha

About 11:45 this morning, waved at you as you passed the speed camera, I THINK you waved back, haha. I was the Azure coming in the opposite direction!

Although, what Clarkson says about the bassy speaker is pretty true, haha (even though you can just turn Bass down!). And when he says in his typical manner 'it doesn't really FEEEEEL that fast', I do get that sometimes , and we'd all be lying if we didn't admit to the downright shabby interior plastics, and oh how those compartment covers wobble! He is unfair on the Z though, but I think really he knows its a good car, just doesn't like it so shoots it down in trademark fashion! As for that article, I was a bit annoyed that they called it '40 years of the Z' I was expecting a big album with lots of pictures and a nice couple of hundred words on each car, but all we got was 6 snaps, about two lines on each and they didnt even show a 370!

Reckon you could take/put up a few more shots focusing on the front and rear mudguards mate? I'm keen to see what they look like from all angles as thinking of buying myself!