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

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!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 21:21 and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.