240z.drago.com.au - Adventures of rebuilding a 1973 Datsun 240Z

I woke up earlier than I had expected to this morning. Probably due to how excited I was feeling about taking the Z out for a spin and attending my first official rally with her.

On Saturday, I was able to get the vinyl card attached to the hatch door. I had thought that I might be able to attach it using the push clips, but I had to change to scrivets instead. I found some from Supercheap Auto that were black and had a vinyl texture to them. The did the job and look great as well. I then washed her and spent a little time giving her a polish. Nice and shiny. Read the rest of this entry »

Dad mentioned to me that he had entered his 2-Door Datsun 1600 into the RACV Great Australian Rally and that My Uncle had entered his Monaro as well. It occurred to me then that if I set a goal, then maybe I’ll get some more work done on my car. So I sent off my entry form and now to get some things done.

It’s been a long time since my last update, and I need to go back over the blog to see where I left things off. This weekend has seen a flutter of work done on the car. Dad helped me get the tail light surround in place and I installed 4 of the 6 pieces of carpet. I took the original carpets up to All Car Carpets in Lilydale and they fabricated new ones for me. They also sold me a couple of roles of sound-proofed underlay.

The plan is to spend Saturday next weekend finishing off a few things and giving her a good wash and polish. Once she’s polished, I’ll install the badges that I am happy with. Then on Sunday, time to take her out and enjoy a cruise. Fingers crossed for good weather.

Today, I wanted to focus on getting the car safe for driving. Given the work that we did on the tailgate last week resulted in the paint cracking, I don’t want to complete the interior until the paint is repaired. There is not much left on the car to do to make it safe, only the wiper washers, lining up the headlights and a front wheel alignment.

Before we got onto that though, I wanted to fix up the door locks. I could lock the passenger side, but not unlock it and I could unlock the driver side, but not lock it. A bit of a pain to lock up when out on the streets. Luckily, all that was needed was a slight adjustment on the linkages and a slight bend and the drivers side door was operating as expected. The passenger side was a little more tricky. The tumbler mechanism that moves the linkage had rounded out over time (suspect that it was a driver door tumbler as I cannot believe that the passenger tumbler would see that much action). A previous owner had fixed the problem by adding on an extra link to the tumbler. When I put the door together, I did not put it back together correctly and hence the malfunctioning tumbler. When I slipped the extra linkage onto the tumbler, and again a slight bend of the linkage, it started to work again.

We then moved onto getting the wiper washers installed and connected to the washer bottle. This was a pretty straight forward job and with a quick clean of the nozzles and connecting new pipes (the old ones were quite brittle) all was done. We connected a battery to the car to give it a quick test and all was well.

But then, the set back. As Dad was closing the inspection panel from filling up the washer tank, I noticed that the rear reservoir on the brake master cylinder was at MIN. When we parked the car a few months ago, it was at MAX. We hadn’t seen any leaks, but took a closer inspection of each wheel. The rear driver side wheel had brake fluid on it. We jacked up the car, took off the wheel and got the drum off. The shoes were covered in brake fluid as was the slave cylinder. We took it off the car and Dad will take it back to BGT to get them to fix it up. Not what I wanted to see, but at least we found the problem in the garage and not on a corner of some mountain!

Yesterday, Dad found a place that had very small rivets that we could use to secure the metal strip onto the trim that sealed the door windows. First thing up today was to get these seals together and into place. The small rivets worked a treat and the trims fit into place nicely. The windows are quite stiff though, may need to look into why one day.

The next item on the agenda was trying to get the tailgate to shut properly. As hard as we tried, we could only get it most of the way down. And once I put in all of the dovetails and guides, up it popped again. I think I’ll just have to give it the paper test and hope that it is sealing well enough to stop the fumes from getting back into the cabin.

Well, after a long stint of being busy with things other than the car, today we finally got to do some work on her. First thing that we did was to get out all the boxes that we had packed for the move and to evaluate where we were up to.

The main things that I want to do is to get her to a point that I can drive her more frequently. There are two standout things that stop me from doing that: The door windows are not sealed properly as the rubber seal on the chrome trim has not been put in place and the seat belts are the old school fixed length ones.

First up, we had already glued the new rubber seals on the chrome trim, but we need to work out a way to re-secure the metal strip to help keep things together. As you would expect, the metal strip was very rusty, so the first thing to do was to clean it up a bit and put some paint onto it. Once the strip was painted, this task was put on hold (16hrs for the paint to dry).

Before we jumped onto getting the new retractable seat belts in, we cleaned up the chrome trim that fits onto the rain channel. Once we had given it a quick going over with the dry steel wool, we snapped it back into place.

We moved onto the seat belts and gave them a quick try using the anchor points that are standard in the car. They didn’t work as the reel would have to go in on an angle. The type of reel requires that it be positioned straight otherwise the locking mechanism would permanently engage. Based on that, we moved to positioning the reel in the same locations as others before me have, on the wheel arch. We made a couple of reinforcing plates and welded the nuts on them. The belts went in quite easily and a quick test run and they fit perfectly. When on, the belts go over the shoulder and across the lap as the installation guide stipulated. Thanks Hemco!