Hey everyone,
Just wanted to take time to share what I have been working on lately and tell the story behind the project.
Long story short, I bought this Z around the same time I met my soon to be wife. I'm a huge Nissan/Datsun fan to begin with and I have always loved the early S30s. When I hired on at my current job, one of the guys figured out I was a Z fan. He told me that a guy he knew was selling a 1970 240Z and asked if I would be interested. I was blessed enough to have hired on with a sign on bonus that happened to be sitting in my bank account. At the time that money was going to be used for a dry sump system for my other project (S13 240SX w/ VK56DE and 370Z 6 speed). I could not pass this up. I went to go look at the car. It looked great, but wasn't perfect, but pretty darn good for a 1970 Japanese vehicle. It ran well and drove well, but would get hot. Work picked up and life happened and it sat patiently waiting for me to take care of it.
My fiance and I both love the car and after I proposed I got to thinking. The wedding is really more for the bride than the groom. You do things like go to bridal shows and they try to convince you that $30 per plate of finger food is a good deal and that 8 hours in a barn with no air conditioning is worth $10,000. You taste cake, you talk to food venders, dj's, videographers, photographers, "do we need a photo booth?", is 300 people too much?, and worry about burlap and lace. You want her to be happy but stay reasonable for the day. In the end you sort through all the wedding propaganda and find the real deals that you both want for a realistic price... but in the end, this is all a means to the end of pleasing the woman you love on your special day. I'm fine with the lace and pretty things, but I'm a car guy at heart. I have a few cool cars, but the coolest by far is this Z. I have to leave my own mark on this wedding some how. And that's when it hit me. I'm going to make the Z our getaway car!
So, here is the car:
Went to a local car show. The gas cap was broken off, I have since fixed that:
Had a shop for a while:
And a local road near by:
The group:
My garage at the time:
Then we moved to our current house:
And that got us to where we started working on the car to get it ready.
Because the car would over heat, I decided to go ahead and replace/update the entire cooling system. So out came the dash, the old heater core, the old radiator, t-stat, t-stat housing and hoses and in with the new.
Also I wanted to upgrade to a newer electronic distributor so I tracked down a local guy that had a 280ZX sitting around and got his tach and distributor and distributor base off him.
Through the help of this lovely forum, I was able to find out that the distributor was bad and wound up ordering a reman that will be here this coming week.
I also went with an MSD blaster 2 coil.
The wheels and tires are coming off of my drift car. They have had a rough life and needed some tlc. I searched high and low for a local wheel refurbisher to no avail. The plan was to make the blue wheels match the gold ones and fix some lip damage. No one local could do it. So since I don't have a lathe I can't fix the lip damage but I can strip the paint and polish the lip. The wheels were profiles from sand blasting, but after a few hours of stripping, sanding and polishing, the paint is gone and the lips are almost a mirror. I have ordered the paint to match the others.
Some paint stripper and 2 stages of sanding:
Fully sanded and polished:
Then I took a minute to get a brake from the polishing compound fumes to see how well the car will clean up, so I did some polishing on the nose of the car:
Things are coming along!
TLDNR: This is going to be our getaway car at our wedding! Neat, huh?