Lights are all in

January 11th, 2008

Once the heat abated a bit, Dad did some more work on the car. He mounted the front indicators and the headlights. The driver side nose cone needed a little adjusting so that he could get a screw driver to reach the adjuster screws, but apart from that, everything fell into place nicely.

He also painted the area behind the grill. I decided that I wanted to paint it black so as to hide everything behind the grill.

Dad said that she’s starting to really look like a car again. It’s getting closer and closer.

Tomorrow, we will try to get the radiator in and the springs for the bonnet hinges. Might try to also get the front bumper on, but need to work out what I am going to do with the rubbers for it first.

Continued Working On the Lights

January 6th, 2008

Dad did some more work on the lights today. He went and bought bulbs t replace all of the old ones along with the orange bulbs for the front indicators. He also bought the bulb holders to replace the ones for the front indicators.

Once home, he wired the new holders and plugs and replaced all of the bulbs. He hit a bit of a snag with the orange bulbs as the pins we not 180° offset. He was able to get the bulb in, but had a hell of a time getting it back out. Once he got the globe out, we decided to file off one of the pins, and rebuild it with solder. It worked a treat. He mentioned to me that the orange bulb is set quite deep in the lens and you cannot see the orange until it is lit up. Cannot wait to see it in action.

Let there be Light!

January 5th, 2008

Today Dad and I focused on getting the lights ready to install back onto the car. Dad had already started on the headlight carrier and had painted it in kill rust before I got there. All of the lights needed a good clean and polish.

The plastic lenses on the taillights didn’t look the greatest. They had a lot of scratches and looked fairly dull. We used a little wet rubbing compound on them and the shine came back quite easily. A little glass cleaner and they look great. The chrome trim polished up really well and only the middle of the trim needs to be touched up with a little black/dark gray paint. We put the new rubber seals onto the taillights and applied some windshield sealant to make sure that the taillights do not allow any fumes to leak into the car. The lights installed easily and look great on the car. She’s really coming together well.

The front headlights cleaned up really nice and the stainless steel surround came up fantastic. I painted the lens adjuster with the Silver POR-15 paint and it looks fantastic. Much better than the rusty colour that it was ;)

One thing that I had wanted to improve on the car was the front parker/turn signal combo light. I was never happy that it was a shared bulb and that the turn signal was not orange. My Z does not have turn signals on the side of the car, so I wanted to try to improve the safety by making the turn signal orange. but to do this, I would have to move to using the 260Z parkers/turn signals. I did not want to sacrifice the aesthetics of the original 240Z with having the orange lens for the turn signal. So, I removed the orange lens and I intend to get orange bulbs. This would improve the safety, but also maintain the aesthetics.

The only thing left to do was to install the headlights and make up bulb holders and looms for the front parker/turn signal lights and then install them. Not to mention replacing all of the bulbs!

Cleaning a couple of parts

December 31st, 2007

Penny (my wife), Sebastian (my son) and I are spending New Years Eve with my parents this year, and as such, I get to do a little work on the car again (it’s been a good week). It was quite a hot day, so I only cleaned up a couple of things.

I started out by cleaning the heater controls. They had quite a bit of dust and grim on them. I cleaned it all off and then applied a bit of WD-40 to the controls and in the cable pulls. This freed up the mechanisms a lot and they move very smoothly.

I then started some work on the rear bumper. I decided not to get it re-chromed at this point in time. It does have a few imperfections, but it will do for now. I think I might need to build a new page of things to do after she is back on the road! I had been applying Penetrene to the nuts all morning and I was able to get a few of them off. I was mainly trying to get the overriders off. But, as always, the last nut seized and I ended up snapping the bolt. Luckily, I had a spare set of overriders that I was going to use anyway. The bumper didn’t come up too bad, but I still need to paint the brackets and the inside of the bumper as they are quite rusty.

The Dash is in.

December 29th, 2007

The plan for today was to get the dash into the car. Before we could do this though, we had to get the tunnel trim in along with the ducts in the dash. We were worried that installing the tunnel trim would be tricky as it is quite long and the contact glue on the vinyl might have stuck to itself. Luckily though, it went in quite easily and looks great.

After cleaning up the ducts, we installed them into the dash. It took a bit of fiddling around to get them installed. We also installed the glove box insert. Even though books day that it can be installed after the dash is installed, I thought that I would save the trouble and get it done before putting the dash in. The last thing to do was to replace all of the globes in the instruments.

The dash went into the car fairly easily. It wasn’t quite lining up but then I adjusted the bottom of the dash and it all fell into place. With the dash installed, we can start working towards getting the car running again, woot!