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

It been quite a while since I posted anything on the site about how the car is going. This is partly due to the fact that not much has been happening. I’ve been doing a few little things, but nothing major. I spent a bit of time under the car with the degreaser and high-pressure water cleaner. Under the car (front half at least) is looking pretty clean.

I’ve also sanded down the engine bay, ready for a bit of paint. Today Dad and I sanded down the fiber glass repairs that we did under the battery stand. We’ve given it a lick of body filler to smooth it out a bit too. We are hoping to get the engine bay painted in 2-pak (silver) down to the chassis rails. We are planning on painting the rails with black POR-15. Once the engine bay is painted, I’ll start working on the suspension and steering, giving things a bit of a recondition and clean up.

I’ve taken this week off work, so hopefully I can make some progress on the car. Fingers crossed.

Did a little work on the car today, mainly focusing on getting the bits and pieces out of the engine bay. I started by trying to get all of the petrol and brake lines that go to the back of the car out, but the hand light gave up the ghost. I got most of the brackets off, just the last couple near the diff.

I then took apart some of the brake lines in the engine bay, but most of the bolts would not come loose. Luckily, enough of them came loose so that the master cylinder and the proportioning valve could be taken out of the car. The clutch master and slave cylinders came out easily, as did the brake booster. The worrying thing was the state of the brake/clutch fluid. It was very sludgy and dirty. One of the seals on the brake master cylinder had deteriorated quite a bit. This may explain why the brakes didn’t feel so great when I drove her last (nearly two years ago :(). I also took the steering shaft out (We’ll have to steer her by the wheels now).

The only thing left in the engine bay now is the brake lines to the front brakes, the engine mounts and the steering/suspension. I’ll leave these things for next time. She’s also in need of a good de-greasing, from front to back. I think that we’ll have to repair quite a few seals on the engine and gear box.

Today we continue on with fabrication and repair of the passenger side floor pan. With the floor pan piece fabricated, we started out by fabricated a new channel piece. Once all the metal was folded and ready to go, we worked out how we were going to weld it all together.

I have to say that the final job has come up really good. The floor is not a lot stronger than what it was before we started. The floor was prone to a large amount of “oil canning” but now is solid enough for Dad to jump on and not move. We are very happy with the results.

Only one more major item to be repaired now, one of the driver side seat mounts is cracked and will need to be replaced. Then it will be onto cleaning and freshening up the under carriage

Today we started work on fixing the passenger side floor pan. To make things a bit easier, we used the gantry to hoist the tail of the car. This gave us a lot of room under the car and did make it easier to work, but a bit scarier as well 😉

First up, we had to continue stripping off the sound deadener from under the car around the rusted areas. This took a little bit of elbow grease and much nerve as with must strikes, the tail of the car would swing a little. With that done, we found some steel and started to fabricate the replacements for the floor pan. The rusted area has a hump in it and we had to do a little bit of folding to get the same hump. We got the first piece of steel fabricated before I had to leave for the day.

The last two weekends have seen two big milestones being reached. Last weekend we sprayed her with a coat of undercoat. This weekend, we got the engine out. Read the rest of this entry »