Originally Posted by TBatt

It has been a long while since I have updated my build thread so here goes.....

As some of you may already know, my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer about a year ago. Well she pasted away right before Christmas (the 19th of December). She went peacefully and I was with her at the time. May she rest in peace.

The last thing I had posted about the Z was a strange running thing that happened. When I got the car home I checked the code which was 1239. That is the code for a throttle problem. I checked all of the connections and everything looked fine and the car was running great, at least at the moment. Well about two weeks later, while driving into work it happened again. This time all of the dash lights came on and the engine would not respond to any throttle input. It was idling fine but that was it! I pulled over to a parking lot and shut the engine off. Restarted it and all was well except I had a check engine light.....

Got home later that day and the 1239 code had been set, again. This time I undid my beautiful wiring tie downs and relaxed the wiring and then but back on more wire ties. It appeared that the problem was fixed.......or so it seemed. Several weeks later it happened again. And then again and then it started happening almost every time I drove the car. Frustrating!!!

I kept trying different things and it would be fine and then it would start acting up again. Intermittent problems can be very hard to fix! I was trying everything I know to do (I'm an electronics engineer so that means I was even doing weird sh^t). Finally one night while taking my wife out for dinner the problem happened THREE TIMES just going to the restaurant. Ch-ease! At least the fun part was when I pulled up to the valet parking and the look on the valet's faces. They LOVED my Z. Then they look at this old guy getting out and did they look puzzled. Hey, some of guys are only old in years, not attitude! Anyway, the car was in valet mode so I knew they couldn't do hardly anything with it. Valet mode is awesome!

When they bring the car around after dinner the valet said that it was not running right,(he,he). I got in and closed the door so he couldn't see and I took it out of valet mode and did a full on burn out right in from of the place. The valets were cheering and waving there hands in the air. The restaurant owner was probably not happy about it but for what a paid for dinner, he can stick it.

Meanwhile, back to the 1239 gremlin. This time I took the extension cable for the front throttlebody that Stillen supplies and wrung it out with a intermittent cable tester and it did not fail the test. So this time I rerouted the wiring so that the throttle cable extension had plenty of slack and tied it back in place like before. So far I have not had anymore issues, at least for now.

Last weekend my brother-in-law was in town and I took him for a ride in the Z. He had ridden in it when it was stock and was impressed then. The look on his face when I did a 1st through 4th gear pull was priceless.

When June rolls around I will be doing some more mods to the car. Until then I'm just enjoying the heck out of it.