On a roll

Looking back through my blog, the last time I made any suspension related changes to the Z was all the way back in 2010. So I started thinking about how I can make the car go faster around corners. After reading a post by my friend Tom at Honed Developments, I started thinking that I should fix the roll center on the Z and attempt to return it to factory specifications. As Honed doesn't make roll center adjustment kits for Nissans, I jumped on to the interwebs and found a company called Moon Face in Japan. After a few emails to Jesse Streeter, these arrived a few weeks later.

The roll center adjustment kit for the Z33 consists of three parts.

1) The ball joint kit (SAB14). Seems like I bought the last one as they announced that it is no longer in production.

2) The low angle adapter for the front upper arm (SLD11).

The ball joints and tapered collars fit at the points indicated below.

These images from Moon Face show the difference in angle of the upper arm (when using lowered suspension) with the factory tapered collar (left) and Moon Face tapered collar (right).

The difference between the Moon Face ball joint (left) and factory ball joint (right) can also be seen. It will reduce the distance between upper and lower arms to match the shorter strut.

3) The low angle adapter for the rear upper arm (SLD12).

The tapered collars fit at the point indicated below.

Below is the difference in angle of the upper arm (when using lowered suspension) with the factory tapered collar (left) and Moon Face tapered collar (right).

  

For someone like me who's not so mechanically skilled, I reached out to my friends Jim and Tom (from Honed) for help. Firstly, Jim helped me dismantle my suspension to remove the front knuckles.

The front suspension in pieces.

Then Tom pressed the factory ball joints out of the knuckles and pressed in the Moon Face items.

Pressings completed.

I had to use a ball joint puller, WD-40 and Loctite Freeze & Release to get the factory tapered collars unstuck. This is the ball joint for the front upper arms.

With the Moon Face ball joints fitted into the knuckles, Jim came over to help assemble everything again in the front. As a track day was looming, we ran out of time and didn't fit the rear new tapered collars as that would probably require an entire afternoon in itself. Now all that was left to do before track day was to get a wheel alignment.

A massive thanks to Jim and Tom for their help.