Nissan Electronic Parts Catalogue V4.33 ( Fast System )
Dierdre Roussin
Disclaimer: As usual with my knowledge posts, i put this together over the course of years, spent countless hours on this, bought rare factory documents and literature for reference and tried my very best to get all information from trustworthy and official sources. But still i cannot guarantee that all information is 100% correct. Sometimes not even the official factory documentation is really clear. Let me know if you found a fault.
Also please ask before you use any of this! As with all my knowledge posts, i update them every now and then with my latest findings and try to keep them actual.
The steering colum in the 240Z is a Bellowes type collapsable steering colum, that was later (in the 260Z) replaced with a steel ball collapsable steering column. The following details are written in the vol. 125 240Z introduction bulletin:
The Japanese Fairlady Z Introduction bulletin additionally mentions that the colum is in the axle of the driver movement in case of the crash to absorb some of the crash force, while the collapsable system is there to create minimum damage to the driver. The mount is designed specialyl with a focus that the driver cannot accidentally get his hands or other body parts behind in case of a crash.
In the Japanese Fairlady Z introduction book, the steering column is described very detailed on multiple pages, one of the pages shown here describe the function of the bellowes lower column tube and the steering column mounting bracket:
2.6.2 Two dephts for different humans
There are also two different dephts of steering wheel. One for the japanese and one for the rest-of-the-world market. The reason was, that the engineering team used two different test-dummies (Mannequins) for setting the seating position of the driver correctly.
However they realized that a considered japanese and american average guy needed different steering wheel position due to their size, and therefore preferred an adjustadble steering colum (as standard in most cars today). Because of the limited budget, they instead decided to use two different depths of steering wheels instead, as stated by Uemura in the development book:
5.3 Steering knuckles
As you can see in the below Nismo / competition parts catalogue picture, also a set of shorter steering knuckles were offered by nissan as an official competition part.
5.4 steering gear
I thought it would be possible to switch from the regular to the PS30 steering rack for a more direct feeling, but see my notes in 3.1 that this may be just be a technical misunderstanding from my side?
5.5 Power steering
If you want a more modern and lighter steering feeling, there is the possibility to add electrical power steering to the 240Z. I have not really investigated in this topic, but a quick google search revealed various bolt-in kits available from companies like
Zpowersteering.com (shown in photo below)
Silverminemotors.com
Retrorack.co.au
EZpowersteering.nl (thanks for the Input to Florian)
etc. If you search enough,. there might even be a japanese manufacturer / supplier for something similar, if you prefer that
8. More
Interested in more 240Z knowledge posts? click HERE to find more topics like this.
Thanks for reading and i hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to leave your comment below.