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

With most of the front end apart, we decided to taking the tail end apart and finding out what work was required there. As with the front end, the rust effected nuts’n’bolts gave us a hard time, but at least the grinder was only required on one occasion.

During the tear down, we confirmed a few things that we had suspected and already knew about. The hatch panel was rusted and had already been repaired (for the RWCert). We ground off the patch job to find the original problem. The patch was very roughly done as you can see in the pictures. I found that RareSpares press the Hatch panel and one is on order.

We popped the glass out of the tailgate and found one rust hole that is in need of some serious repair. Dad is pretty certain that we will be able to shape a piece of steel into the required shape and repair the hole ourselves.

During the tear down, we removed the tow bar. That was fun to get out! The main issue with getting it out was access to the bolts. An eighth of a turn results in a long, drawn out removal process for each bolt. At least we won’t be going through the pain of putting it back on. We’ll just have to patch the hole that was made for the trailer light plug and loom.

Whilst we were taking the tail apart, we needed to get the interior panels out of the way. We have pulled out most of the panels and will have to get some more of those plastic rivets. I have seen these available on several sites, so this shouldn’t be a huge issue.

We also took the internal panels off the doors and found that the doors are in pretty good shape. The driver side interior panel is in a bad way, hopefully we can repair it or find a replacement. We found that the driver door is not the original door. It is painted green on the inside. It was also full of shattered glass. Got me how the person that repaired the broken window couldn’t spend a few minutes vacuuming the glass out! The only holes on the doors was on the passenger side, a small hole that will be pretty straight forward to repair.

Next step in the plan will be to start stripping the paint on the rear quarters and the roof.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 29th, 2005 at 20:13 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.