Scored Some Parts!

I found another Z guy! Here in Wisconsin, that is somewhat of a rarity. The guy was mid-project, similar to me and had a sweet looking lowered 280z. He was planning on moving so I helped him out by taking some parts off his hands. I would have bought it all if i could have afforded it but what i got i am pretty proud of: A rear spoiler, black door panels, grill, wiper motor, black visors, fiberglass headlight buckets and a clean a** 71' rear hatch with the vertical defroster lines.

I guess you could say that I am going for a "junk yard" decor for my small dorm room.

Locking the Beast's Cage (Hood Latch)

As many Z car fans know, the 240z produced a seat gripping 150-ish horses, I want to contain that power house of a motor under the hood and look good doing it. For that to happen the ugly oxidized hood latch is going to need to be cleaned up!

The first thing you'll see me do with many of the smaller metal parts that are full of gunk, is I'll put some simple green in a stainless steel cup and set that on some heat, in my case, I have an electric stove in the garage I use for powder coating. So I took apart both of the mechanisms and put all the metal parts in some boiling simple green, this really helps break down the grease and oil. After about 20 minutes most of the grease had fallen off, I got the remaining crud off with a brush.

The picture above is one of the parts about 10 minutes and grease that is on the surface can be easily wiped off though I would since you'll burn the flesh off your skin.  

Once they were cooled down I did a once over with a wire brush to knock off the loose oxidation from the surface, then I powder coated them gloss black. I'll eventually do a write-up about my powder-coating set up and a how-to. As for the final product, they came out alright, depending on how they look in the engine bay. I might just get an OEM zinc plate set, but for now they are great, considering what I started with!

Front Blinkers

Restoring a car to some people might just be putting all the pieces back together and everything works (and this is just fine). I like to go through all the parts; first to see exactly how they tick, and second to make sure they are in the best condition they can be before they go back on to the car. This means cleaning and making it look pretty!

With the front blinker, I got them in the condition i would expect them to be in. Yes, they worked but they looked like they had some miles behind them.

 

Besides having a nice even coat of dust around them, when I opened them up I suddenly found more work than I was expecting.

On one of the covers, a machine screw sheared, there was a preexisting chip (thankfully the chipped piece was inside the lens) and the bolts that are used to mount the blinkers striped out.

So what was originally going to be, open up, wash, reassemble, became slightly more complex. I started by removing the rubber and the light, so that the plastic housing was left. I washed that with some Simple Green (degreaser). Three of the four tabs that were welded to the bolts for mounting stripped off, so i had to remake then with some scrap steel and bolts:

Then I moved on to the lenses, one of them was fine, the other had a chip in the side and a seized screw in the hole, which after trying to remove the screw cracked the plastic some more. Thankfully these to imperfections are relatively easy to fix. Oddly enough the best glue to use for something like this is Super Glue, because what the super glue will do is melt a thin lay of plastic and with the pieces are pressed together they become one piece again and if done correctly, it can look like nothing even happened. Once the glue was dry, I cleaned the lenses with some Simple green, then buffed out the lenses using one of my favorite products Wizards Shine Master. I will be doing a right up on this stuff because it is truly amazing, and brings out a magnificent shine. 

The last thing I did before I reassembled it all was clean up the light and re-wrapped the cord. 

The final product came out great!

I'M BACK!...in school.

I'm back, in school, 3.5 hours away from my Z and let me tell ya, it’s eating me alive. But since I flaked on giving you kind gentlemen updates over the summer, I want to make it up to you. I have plenty of things to write about, and if everything goes to plan, I’ll be making weekly posts (most likely over the weekend) of the various things I did during the summer. Also, I would like to start doing more technical write ups, as to what specifically was done and how, instead of just showing the before and after. I want to do posts on the products that I used and how to use them too. As for Zoey, she is quietly sleeping in my garage.

Update 6/16/2013

I have been making steady progress with the restoration of all the parts, I recently had my two little cousins come and stay for a week. They are just as crazy about cars as I am so they helped out quite a bit which was great to have a few extra hands! Here is what we got done:

Tail Lights

After having the tail light assemblies sit for some time, I finally got the hardware that I needed to complete them. The lenses had some cracks in them and I did not want to replace them so I ground a small trench along the crack on the inside of the lenses and filled it will epoxy just to prevent water from going inside. Then cleaned the housing and peeled all of the old sealant from the grove. Also the chrome on the plastic piece was polished as best as it could be. After putting new sealant and placing the lenses in the housing the lenses were buffed thoroughly.

 Door Panel Pieces

Since I was working this past week while my cousins were here I wanted to give them something to do while I was at work and despite my instincts, I let them work on some parts from the car. I forgot to mention that they are 15 and 12 years old, but I knew they wanted to see this car done as bad as I did so I gave them the task of cleaning up all of the parts on the door panel. Besides not taking a before picture they did great, washed all the parts, polished all the chrome, and used black restore on all the black parts.

 Steering Column

While I had the help around I wanted to tackle something a little bit bigger, so I decide to restore the steering column. This was great fun for me and my cousins, like always I pulled it pretty much completely apart making sure to take TONS of pictures so I could remember how to put it back together. After everything was in pieces the column got sanded, primed, and painted satin black. The section of the column that sticks out the firewall and gets connected to the gear housing got paint white to match the other steering components. I was originally planning on refinishing the wood on the steering wheel but after pulling off the cover I found that there was no need to, the wood was in amazing condition. The previous owner must have put the cover on as soon as he got the car. So the only thing to do was paint the supports and put everything back together. I must say I am extremely happy with how it came out!

Engine Update

I got a call a couple of days ago from my uncle, relaying the progress of my engine. He said that himself and the gentleman rebuilding my engine have pulled it completely apart and that some water got into two cylinders and corroded the piss out of them, so they will need to be re-sleeved and I am going to need new pistons. I guess this isn't terrible news considering that all I need to do is pay for parts and he is willing to do the work free of charge.

Update 6/02/2013 - Part 2

So I have started going through the parts that I have and cleaning them up, here is what I have done this past week:

Center Console

I completely disassembled the center console. The previous owner replaced some switches and there is a couple unfamiliar hole drilled that I think he wanted to add some additional switches. For now I am not going to try and cover the holes but I will mostly putting more switches in the cutout spaces just to fill them.

Front Blinkers

The front blinkers were fairly easy to clean up with exception of these two mounting brackets that had rusted  and could not be used. I replicated them as best as I could by welding a bolt to piece of sheet metal and they turned out pretty good, I painted them white so you wouldn't be able to noticed them through the amber lenses. I washed the housings and I think some of the black undercoating got splattered on the housings because I scrubbed and scrubbed but was not able to get it all off. Maybe I shouldn't have cared but i'm just stubborn. The old and cracking heat shrink was cut off and I wrapped the wires in electrical tape, winding the tape in one direction and again in the opposite direction to make sure no water gets in. I sprayed the rubber seal in WD-40  and let it sit for some time to rejuvenate it and lastly polished the lenses.

Rear Bumper

I discovered that the middle section of the bumper was cut out for some reason! I decided I would take it apart and salvage what I could. After seeing how rusty the inside of the bumper was I soaked it in penetrating oil and started to try and loosen the nuts holding the rubber strip on...*SNAP* the bolt sheared right off! No effort at all. I figured that one wasn't so bad, and tried a second nut, nice and easy now...*SNAP* there goes a second bolt. Now I just want to get the darn thing off and what do you know they ALL sheared off. Next I worked on separating the corner section from the cut middle piece. I won’t go into detail but it ends with me throwing a wrench and trashing the bumper sections!    

Side Marker Lights

The four side marker lights didn't look too bad at first glance but it was a different story when I took the rubber covers off, at least for the front pair. One of the front marker lights was extremely rusty and even had a hole in it. I ended up only working on the two rear marker lights since I am going to need to find another front marker light. Like the other assemblies, I took it completely apart, buffed the chrome, polished the lenses, and rejuvenated the rubber. I wanted to make sure that the housing would stand the test of time so I       POR-15'ed it (doing the 3 step processes).

Dome Light

The dome light really didn't have anything wrong with it, was only a little dusty, But that was enough for me to take it all apart (partly because I wanted to see how everything works). I just washed everything with soap and water, then dried thoroughly. 

Update 6/02/2013 - Part 1

Sorry for the delay on posting, I have been rather busy with other family matters, but now that I have a second to spare I would like to update you all on my progress. First off, I made really good progress on organizing the wealth of parts that I have. There are still a couple of boxes of parts that I have really no idea what they are, but I'll leave those for another day. For the parts that I did know, they were placed in boxes and labeled. The transformation of the space that I was given is pretty significant, Just take a look!

The next step is to go through one box at a time and restore the part inside so that when I do the final assembly of the car all the parts are ready to go in without having to clean them up.

I'll be doing more update posts like this one showing what I have done, as well as technical information of various processes that I used and the products I used. If any of you have questions on how I did something or suggestions please don't hesitated to leave a comment.