HDAtom

I agree with the patch panel part, it would make it more difficult and probably isn't worth it. For the roof panel, I was thinking that if I targeted just that small rusty spot, I should be able to do it with a square patch and it isnt very big. I don't think a new roof would be worth the time, nor do I have the time or the space to store a new car or things like that. I also don't love the idea of cutting the roof off of another car just to save this one with this small rust damage. I actually intentionally did all of these things. The glass is on there to keep a lot of the dust out of the interior of the vehicle, this is working for the most part. The fenders are still on the car while I am sanding them as I dont want to misshape them by sanding off the car. The wiring harness is inside the car, which I am ok with because I am not painting the interior. I will do patch painting where I weld new panels, but I don't personally find much value in sanding and painting the interior. It will be almost impossible to see and as the exterior paint fades, this paint won't, so it wont be a problem to revisit in a few years. I don't plan on selling this vehicle, though I am trying to keep is financially good to sell it part way through and still not lose money. The fuel lines only had to be bent a few degrees to be completely out of the way. Same with rear brake lines. I plan on redoing all of these lines with new lines that I will build myself. The lines are also extremely simple in this car so I am not too worried about needing a shape to stick to, but that is the other reason I am just leaving them. All brakes will be replaced so new lines there too. Thanks a lot!

I will do a little Financial Friday thing so people can watch my wallet deflate and the inevitable selling of my soul to the devil. This is where I am at right now! I am doing quite well with my budget up to this point, although the only thing I have done is sanded the car and put tires on, so not much to say there...... We will have to see how this progresses into a dumpster fire fueled by $100 bills.... Here is the file if you are interested in where all this money went or what things you may have to buy and haven't thought about... Datsun280zcosts.xlsx The base price is what I purchased the car for and the "legal" is registration and title transfers and such. 9/18 Update: I discovered some body filler stuff on the driver side fender, no big repairs, maybe just for repainting (no pictures as its gone). I think the black stuff I have been finding is rust, I don't know much about rust, but under all the rusty areas is this black stuff. Maybe this is because of the stuff they sprayed on it, maybe this is just how rust looks after the top layer is sanded... I may be cutting a chunk of the roof out and replacing it with 18 or 20 gauge metal, maybe something stronger as that is probably rust It is quite hard to take picture with the plastic everywhere. Waiting till tomorrow to deal with the engine bay... I am probably 60% of the way done with paint removal, I still have to take out windshield and hatch glass, but I was leaving in to minimize dust in the car. These rusty areas are not as bad as I originally thought, I could probably just fill in the holes welding, but I think I will cut out a decent chunk here and just replace it, probably with 18 gauge, maybe 16, to add some strength as it is very very flimsy here and I don't like that it bows so much. Although that would increase weight at the furthest part of the lever arm for lifting the hatch, so maybe not... I will have to do some testing.

Yup, I have been paying a lot of attention to this! I make sure not to sand in the same area too long and move around, though I doubt that the temperatures that sanding causes is higher than parked California summer sun temps.

This is hilarious. Good thing I covered my entire engine bay with it hahaha. I will have to take some extra time and water or something else to make sure I remove all of it. I probably should have used paint stripper for the car. I think there is a layer in between the paint and the metal as @240zadmire suggested. I have also seen people go to bare metal with these cars and other not ?. I hope bare metal will give me better adhesion for the paint and all that. It may rust easier, but with proper primer it should be ok. I am going with some quite high quality stuff and will be careful on prep. I know my car has been repainted at some point, so maybe? The sanding gets the metal quite hot and it is still very very adhered to the surface, maybe more heat, but I would be scared of warping it. I am about half way done sanding so far, so I will probably bring the whole thing down to bare metal for consistency. All or nothin haha.

Thanks for the tips Mark I will definitely try and implement those. The guy from SW said he would print off instructions for me for every part and I intend to follow them down to a T. 9/17 Update: I am not sure if I will keep doing daily updates, I feel like I am just going to put too much junk on here, we will have to see. Maybe someone would like to see the daily struggles of this and how slow progress really is... Anyways I was only able to sand for about an hour as I could not make any noise for a while (event near my house), but here is what I got done. The dewalt sander shown in this first image has been absolutely insane, this thing just throws the paint right off and has a vacuum attachment, though it doesn't honestly work that well and there is a lot of dust created. I would say it catches maybe 40%... I was able to get the stripper on the other half of the bay and covered it this time, I feel this will work much much better I was able to strip a bunch off the other side, but didn't spend too much time on this, there were other parts I was excited to work on... Some areas were bubbly, but most is not, hopefully covering will fix this for the other half. I used a brass scrubber thing on my drill to get that stuff off. I will need to sand out the scratches later so this may not be the best method... I got a bunch of sanding done on the roof and WOW, the roof is soooo thin, is this normal? Can this thing even kind of support its weight upside down? A pillar bar over windshield? I will figure it out later. I found this weird stuff on the roof, it is quite hard to getup and it looks like it is raised, not sure what it is. ?‍♀️ hopefully I am not using too low of a grit for this... It looks like the car was repainted at some point... I was really confused on why some of it was orange and some of it was red. The colors have been so weird. The passenger fender was orange on top and red on the side. I feel like it could also been from exposure... These rusty spots down here also dont look too bad, which is very exciting.

Sadly the previous owner did most of the interior stripping. So that is just a mess, I assume everything there is broken or missing. Only thing I took out is the dash and heat exchanger (I think, ac thing??), everything else was in boxes when I bought it. I am not looking forward to interior and the cars interior probably won't be ready for a year, although this will be easy to wait for parts and just keep going on it. I used a chest mounted GoPro for the entire teardown. I am hoping for about 75% useable footage for putting it back together. I figured 100,000,000 random photos better than 100 good ones that always seem to miss something. Although I do have some photos. Luckily no smog checks will be required for this car in WA (as far as I know lol) so I will be lucky on that. Any tips for the paint job?? I am quite nervous about spending $1600 at Sherwin Williams on paint to do a crappy paint job haha. I have a high quality paint gun and paint, so nothing to blame but myself....

Thanks @240zadmire, I assumed it was riveted in and didn't even look close.

Thanks for the tip, the stripper definitely evaporated. I am just trying to run my sander on the compressor. My sander says I need about 3 cfm @90 to run it. I think I am able to pickup the dewalt 4.5 gallon 235 psi tank, 5 cfm@90 for a reasonable price from someone online. Do you think this will be able to run it? I have also been looking at buying additional 10 gallon 150 psi tank from HD for $30 (on sale if anyone else is interested) and making that into additional tank space. Although I think with the low PSI, it won't help that much and will need to be post regulator anyways. I am also ok with buying a 15-30 gallon one and selling it after the process, although with this smaller one, it would work with our tight garage setup. This would not be used for painting.

Thanks everyone for their replies, really awesome to see all this. But ignorance is bliss ?. I really like to approach things with a very optimistic view and will usually fall slightly short of the stars. Believing you can do something is half the battle, the other half is not getting in over your head... This car will NEVER be finished and I don't expect it to be, when I said I wanted it "complete" I was more talking drivable as a daily. This does not mean 100% reliability, but generally commuting in it. This car will eat away at my wallet for decades and decades. This is definitely the plan, pretty much anything that doesn't need to engine to be out to be worked on won't be improved until after it is driving. I am actually planning on replacing all of this. I want to make new lines for all of this and when I put new brakes on I will do new master cylinder, booster, ect. Pretty excited to make the lines tbh, will go stainless for these. My electrical actually seems to be in really good condition. I was expecting to create a new harness, which I was quite excited about, although after I took it apart everything seems to look decent. I will need to do some better butt connectors in places but it isn't too bad. This is with the exception of the fuel sensor plugs things which are all broken, (honestly idk what they are just yet) which I know I can buy a kit to replace those. This is pretty much my philosophy, except I am going engine first so when there are lead times there I can switch to other things like brakes Maybe I am too optimistic about this, but I think if I can stay focused I will be able to switch to different parts of the car when there is a problem with 1 part. In terms of stamped paneling, I think the only real area that I have rusted is the tail plate, but when I looked at those online, they weren't even stamped in the area that I am working on. I may cut out both sides and make them match... I have also not looked under the wiper area, which could be a HUGE mess, who knows. For the floor pan I plan to just patch the small section and move on. I am also not too concerned with resale value, I hope to drive it until I am inevitably unable to dodge someone who will then hit me. Updates for today... Today sucked..... Pretty much broke my battery powered orbital sander and then got a pneumatic one with the hopes and dreams that my dad's pancake compressor could keep up. It could not... So I spent the day looking for a bigger compressor and a good solution for our workspace in the used marketplace. Didn't get too much sanding done and I am leaving my engine bay paint stripper on overnight.

I really hope it doesn't take too much of my budget to do metal work ??, I only budgeted about $500 for metal. I also know how to weld so I will be doing all that work myself. Almost everything seems to be surface at this point, with the exception of the rocker panels, battery tray (lol I didn't even show a picture of this and its a huge hole), little bit in driver floorboard, and the 2 tail sections. I am probably missing a few obvious sections, but I don't believe it is terrible. We will see....... I also plan on making my own battery tray and doing everything out of sheet metal (bending myself ect...) as well as not expecting a perfect job. This car sat for 5 years with the previous restorer and I am not interested in leaving the car in the driveway. She wants to hit the road, even if not in perfect condition (she told me ?). My frame rails are dented but not destroyed, I am also not redoing the bottom as it seems to have held up well and I don't have a rotisserie, nor do I have time / space. Hopefully another time though! This is why I was hoping to just go with techno toy for the entire build. It will be expensive, but I will also get to geek out with all the customization and get to learn a ton about how to tune a cars suspension, with a system that was setup to hopefully work with each other. I am also hoping for reliability and workability with those nice strong powder coated parts...

Hello! I am starting this build thread because of how much information I was able to get from posting a simple picture of my engine and asking what I should do with there. There was tons of support and I am excited about sharing my build process here and adding more information into the mix for future builders. I am hoping this will also keep me more accountable and will allow me to actually finish the car. I only have a short time until I begin my next job and I want the car to be working by then. I will be working hard to get it there. This is my first restoration and I don't have an insane amount of experience with cars. I have swapped an engine (oem) before, rebuilt a t5 transmission, and have completed numerous smaller projects on my families cars. Anyways, this is going to be a fun process and I hope to get something that runs, drives, and can say I saved it from the scrapyard. I plan to update this every day I work on the car, which should be 7 days a week about 6-10 hours a day. So hopefully expect a post every day to see progress! These will most likely just be me rambling like this one is. Goals (hopes and dreams): Everything will be DIY (except machining...) I hope to have this car painted by October 7th and out of my parents garage. I hope to have the car running and driving by the 31st. I dream of having the car relatively complete (it never will be complete) by the end November 30th. Budget (LOL) I bought the car for $1000 and I hope to complete the car in the range of 15-20k (including tools), but I will have to see what happens... By the time I am done painting I should have about 4k into the car and tools Other stuff: I have a lot of planned "upgrades" that I want to do such as a full TTT lower half of the car (I hate money), new brake / fuel lines, a nice engine bore and new pistons (KISS), and new pretty much everything that's in the engine bay (alternator, AC, starter...), but I will have to see how it goes... There are some big questions still out there lingering in my head such as if a full TTT build is worth it (probably around 8-10k) and how will the ride be. I am quite young and am not too worried about the ride, but more with noise as it annoys me a lot. Also paint color... I have about 5 days to figure out which color I want, I think I want it to be red... I wanted to get the paint in original 110 red, but I think it is a little too orange for my taste and probably won't go with it (this is what the original car's color is). I took some photos today, I have just completed stripping the engine bay (I will be bending current brake / gas lines out of the way as all the hex ends have been marred and don't work anymore, I figure bending is better than cutting) I will be able to give more up close photos of the damaged areas when I actually get to welding new stuff on! I will also be keeping all of the images and files found here in this shared OneDrive folder as I have noticed many people's photos and things seem to go missing. Here is my first picture dump! Safely #1, you will probably see a lot of PPE around in my photos... Interior was mostly stripped when I got it... I have a box of interior parts I hope will fit back together... There should be some much better picture tomorrow when I am able to get this cleaned up and start stripping the paint off and seeing how far the rust really goes, I have a lot of work to do... It was at the end of the day and there was low light so pictures arent the clearest.

I am absolutely blown away by the responses! Haven't posted on too many forums but I usually get blasted on the first post no matter where it is. I looked a lot more into things last night and wow do parts get expensive! Not to mention machining and other things. I think I am going to cool it on my thinking about hp, I know these cars are light and do well with "lower" hp numbers. I am NEVER lucky.... I usually approach car stuff with a take it apart now and then price as I go, but I see with the engine I REALLY need to make a spreadsheet and plan for everything I am going to do and then execute later. As well as adding 50% to that and then probably spending double lol. I agree! Alright, next step will be getting it ready for a compression test and hopefully leakdown as well. That is an awesome stand, loved the videos, I may be interested to do it! So much more to think about...... In terms of my plans for the car, this list also goes in order of operations. I hope to finish the car with about 15-20k. This leaves about 3 or 4k for the engine, power is not my main concern atm and can be revisited later as I know these cars are fun stock and its simple enough to pull the engine and really get it done if I choose to in the future. I prefer suspension and tires over power as there are a lot of fun curvy roads out here and I don't like speeding tickets... Everything in this list is fully DIY except for the engine. Got the car for $1,000 Currently fixing body (its not too bad, almost all the usually non-structural rust spots) for hopefully ~$500-1,000 Painting at home for ~$2,000 (already priced out liquids and know where I am buying it) lets hope I can do it well ? Fix engine... ???$ New wiring harness - ~$400 (I'm actually excited for building this, thinking about templating and trying to sell some to earn little bit of cash for the build as well as helping other with a high quality harness) Rebuild transmission - ~$500 (hopefully) Rebuild differential, maybe OBX LSD - $500-1,000 Hoping for a full Techno Toy build as almost everything under the car looks shot and I hate money. $8,000-10,000 Interior - ~$1000 This is quite an ambitious project, but I have about 3 months till my next job starts and look forward to putting 40-60 hour weeks into this. Please let me know if my plan is dumb lol. I look forward to asking for lots of help and learning a lot...?

Thanks a lot for the replies, I really appreciate it!! I will try and get some more closeup pictures tomorrow and share those. I know this car has been sitting for at least 5 years and that was when the previous owner took it on as a project car (He didn't do anything to it though), so its probably been sitting for a long time. There was only about 1 qt of oil inside of it as well and it was crazy black. I was worried about putting any strain on it with the starter and cranking it, is thing something I shouldn't be worried about? I am hoping to get the block inspected, hot dipped, bored, ect. I would like to add some displacement if possible and prep for higher HP in the future (maybe turbo? Still in the beginning stages of thinking). I know these engines have good forged guts. I have a lot of time to think and listen to books as I am sanding and painting the body first ?. I have been taking tons of picture and have had a chest mounted gopro to make sure I can get it all back together... I have taken off fuel rail, spark plugs, and other hoses since then, is it worth putting it back together to get that compression test? If I am planning and really messing this much with the block is it worth it to do a compression test?

Hello everyone, first post! I am starting a restoration of a 1977 280z. I am interested in doing as much as the project I can at home to learn as much as I can, even if quality does not come out perfect. I am interested in rebuilding the L28 that came in my car, but I don't know the condition of it and what to really look for. The previous owner took a lot of necessary parts out like battery, fuel tank, and some other things, so I decided to just take it apart and try and figure out if anything is wrong inside the engine. I figured engines are simple (lol), fuel, air, and spark right?? It is already out and I can't do a compression test. I am trying to gauge the condition of my engine to see if this one is worth rebuilding. This is quite a black box build as the only thing I know about it is that it turns over by hand and the odometer is at 43k (I am assuming 143k). I think the carbon buildup is quite substantial and there seems to be some scoring marks, is this balancing or some other problem? How does my engine look? What else should I post images of to see if the engine is alright? I know I have a lot to learn and will continue stripping the engine to look for problems, let me know if there is something I should look out for!