Our build

Welcome to Lemons and another hopeless Z car build.  I am helping yet another delusional friend build a Lemons Z.  I am not sure which addiction is worse, Lemons, Zs or Zs in Lemons.  A few more years of this and they will have to make a special hospital for all us nut jobZ.

My car has less the 4" of ground clearance as it is.  We have bottomed out the frame rails and been pretty hard on the exhaust. 

Our short tires lower the car about an additional inch.  If you drop the floor 3" I don't think you will clear much of anything.  That will also affect the frame rails and overall strength and integrity of the car.  In my opinion, this is a bad idea.

I replaced my floor pans and installed seat rails out of 1.5" angle iron.  We run a Kirkey seat on modified OE sliders and I am thinking our butts are about 2.5" off the floor.  I've had plenty of 6'2"ish drivers.

My friends car with a Corbeau seat puts the driver higher up which is not as easy on the tall guys.

Get a seat and see how it works in the car before you start dropping the floor.

I replaced the floor first.  Then we stuck the initial seat in the car and played with pieces of wood to get the seat height and angle.

We upgraded to the Kirkey seats for the second race.  At that point I tried to put rails as close to the floor as possible while keeping everything inside the car.  While there is some height and tilt adjustability in the arrangement, we have it as low as it will go.  We made a booster for short drivers.

Something else to consider is a Hans recommends a 20 degree layback.  Without a Hans, it's typically a comfortable angle too.

I am in the same boat being 6'-1" and very tall from the waist up.  Our drivers ranged from 5'-8" to 6'-3" and so we mounted our Sparco seat on the stock Z sliders.  We sit higher than I'd like, but there is lots of room to drop the seat if we cut the cross rail out.  We did not need to run a seat back brace as we were within about 4-1/2" of the cage cross bar even with the shortest driver.

You will want to gut the driver's door and run NASCAR bars.  We had plenty of elbow and shoulder room this way.  We planned on using a quick disconnect steering wheel, but we didn't want to add another $150 - $200 to the budget to get the splined quick release and a new wheel.  We added a slip-on steering wheel cover and then sewed a Nissan OEM leather wrap over the cheap-o cover.  It made for a nice, thick wheel with the right dish.  We had no problem getting in and out with the fixed wheel, but it would have been easier with a quick release.

I will send pics of our cage tonight.

I'm not sure what your Z experience is, so feel free to email me with questions.  Chances are very good that you need to do a lot of work to the fuel tank, vapor tank, and hoses to make them clean and safe.

Yeah, the Chinese pipe benders are a mess. They can be made to work by modifying the follower rollers (adding half-pipe "shoes")  and fettling the dies. Then you have to pack the tube with wet sand and tape off the ends. Seems hardly worth it...

We bought the JD2 Model 3.
Suppose to be a good bender??