It has been a slow year in terms of progress. Fortunately the engine was sent away early in the year which made for an excellent Christmas present, beating Santa’s arrival by mere days.
Front Brake Calipers
In February 2014 I removed the calipers from the car. In January 2020 I bolted them up to the car… just as well I’m not getting paid to do this for a living! Before starting this project I would have looked at well used parts and considered them scrap metal. I did in fact scrap a perfectly good exhaust manifold becase it had a bit of surface rust on it… I threw it out! What possessed me at the time I do not know. That exhaust manifold, along with many parts like the brake calipers here, have been eye-opening lessons …
Summer 2020
There are some parts that you just know are abundant but you struggle to find anyway. The transmission crossmember for an early gearbox had eluded me for months and months as I persisted in limiting my search to Australia only. I relented and after posting on Instagram one was on its way from the US in less than a day. In early December I decided to free up some floor space and take the engine in to Stewart Wilkins Motorsport. He has already reconditioned my differential and transmission and I trust his many years of working on these cars will …
End of 2019 Video Update
Shot a quick video last night showing the status of the car. I should do more of these but I’d rather spend my time working on it or with the family instead of editing videos. I guess I could do more one shot videos since they don’t require any editing.
Brake Warning Switch
The brake warning switch from the Datsun 240Z is a simple design. It detects a difference in hydraulic pressure between the front and rear brake system and alerts the driver via a warning light on the speedometer gauge. The unit receives the front and rear brake lines from the brake master cylinder. It splits the front between left and right while the rear is sent via one line and is split between left and right at the rear proportioning valve. When a loss of hydraulic pressure is detected at any point beyond the unit’s exit ports of around 13 to …
Spring 2019
Delving into a variety of systems designed in the 1960’s gives you an appreciation for the elegance of engineering and its restorability. Where on modern cars components are designed to essentially be replaced as a unit, almost everything I’ve come across on the Datsun is rebuildable and you get the feeling that it’ll last another 50 years thereafter. This spring I continued underneath the car with the half shafts and prop shaft. Simple elegant engineering built to last. I can’t stress how satisfying it is to take something full of decades-old grease and rust, clean it, strip it, and rebuild …
Dash, Wiring, Gauges, and Ducting
Like many jobs, the dash restoration started many moons ago. It was in fact March 2014 when I sent it to The Dashboard Doctor. They did a fantastic job recovering it and it sat in its box wating for all the other pieces to be ready. Later in 2014 the wiring was sent to Vintage Wiring Harness who took a touch under two years to complete the restoration due to a number of circumstances. In any case, the results are fantastic as I found out this year when I went to install the 3 harnesses. The dash harness fell in …
Half Shafts and Prop Shaft
I disassembled the half shafts in April so of course when I went to assemble them six months later I made a couple of mistakes. I’m finding myself in this situation quite a bit and it’s unavoidable; it’s just the way I work. I’ve got components in pieces from 4 years ago! The mistakes are usually silly little ones and exarcebarted by a gung-ho attitude and a reluctance to check the manual; but mostly it’s rushing to complete jobs when the finish line is so close. I keep relearning the lesson of patience and double checking everything. It will sink …
Fuel Tank Dents
I had booked in some painting time for this past Saturday and nothing was going to stop me, not even the rain that started early Saturday morning and continued for the better part of my scheduled 5 hours. My poor wife must have thought I finally cracked it with all my pacing up and down the stairs, inside and outside the house, checking weather apps, and commenting on drizzle vs rain all while contemplating throwing plastic drop sheets over the clothes line so that I can paint under cover. Oh the hillarity of it all. I can picture pockets of …
Winter 2019
I sat down to write this post and I tried to recollect what I had accomplished this past winter. I feared another season had slipped by without much progress and I would need to squirm my way around this update. Fortunately my photos tell a slightly different story. It starts with some work on the half shafts. I have two sets and for some reason one of the four half shafts is shorter. I suspect it’s a later model shaft that was on the parts car. In any case, I battled with all of the uni-joints and only had to …