1970 Datsun 240z Project

[monsween]

Been a lurker on here for a while in the for sale section so thought i'd throw up my current Datsun 240z Project

This ones going to be a keeper and may take a while to put together as I slowly acquire the right parts

1970 Datsun S30 240z
2.4l straight 6
4 speed manual box
California US Import

The plans for this is to "stance" the car. A lot will not like the idea of this however it's not been done on the cheap and just trust me it'll look the dogs danglies when done!

Buying the car down in Guildford i trekked 600miles up to Aberdeenshire. Not particularly the best idea in a 44 year old car but never the less it got me home stinking of fuel with only a few roadside bodges

Day of Purchase


Rear Bumper Removed


Lovely Sunrise



First on the list was a detail!, the paintwork was terrible and i knew that going in so was always going to be a re-spray job but fortunately I have a detailing friend who wanted to try out wet sanding. The paint couldn't get much worse so was more than happy to let him test it on the Datsun. The results were astonishing to say the least so the respray is back to the bottom of the list of jobs to do

Post Detail



We have frequent car gatherings at my house with a small selection of cars that turned up that day


I then purchased a HEAP of carbon bits from the US to bolt onto the car, the day they turned up everything was fitted. Bar the carbon bolt on arches. Those will go on when the cars been sufficiently lowered
BRE Carbon Spoiler,
Carbon Rear Bumper
Carbon Front Bumper
Rubber Front Air Dam
Carbon Bolt On Arches

Carbon Bits



So that's where I'm at right now with future plans including:

Future Plans
Re-Jet and Tune carb to get it running right
Bride Fixed Bucket Seats
Takata Harnesses
MultiPoint Cage
Coilovers and Camber Plates
Carbon bolt on arches
New wheels (Undecided as of yet)

Longer Term Plans
LS1/2JZ/1JZ/1UZ Swap

I do have a few other projects / cars at the moment which means this takes a while to fix up.

97' Toyota Supra TT 6 Speed


05' Saab 9-3 Aero 2.8T 6 Speed

'97 BMW 318 5 Speed
'95 Volvo 940 2.4 4 Speed Auto


Thanks for reading and i'll keep this updated

[charliecroker]

Yes, yes, yes!

[raymondmarble]

Stunning!

[baggabones]

Love it...looking forward to the updates

[oldschoolcool]

Nice car, but i liked the bumper on more, and carbon on a 44 yr old car ?
It looks too nice to modify,and surely will lose value if not kept period.

[hiswitsend]

Great motor, much better without the rear louvres and your plans for it will be watched closely.

[varelse]

Can't say I'm much of a fan of the carbon either, but it's your car, and I can't fault you for choosing one!

[atomman]

Nice to see another 240z on here,

If you need coilovers and camber plates have a look at my thread if you want to have a go and save your self a few quid , I have designed some top mounts that let you change the camber with out cutting out the top mount,

Small world I was watching your bumpers the other say on eBay to

[s20]

Oct 25, 2014 8:34:32 GMT monsween said:

This ones going to be a keeper and may take a while to put together as I slowly acquire the right parts

1970 Datsun S30 240z
2.4l straight 6
4 speed manual box
California US Import

Are you (fully?) aware of the history of this particular car? Repaired crash damage, etc?

Being 1970 production, it would have had solid (unvented) rear quarter pillars with '240Z' emblems on them, and all the cabin venting would have been done by the double-vented tailgate (a complex system with louvres in the tailgate internal trim, internal vent ducts, flaps and drains). This changed in early 1971, when Nissan introduced bodies with vented quarter pillars (wearing round 'Z' logo emblems that also acted as vents) and the tailgates lost their venting system and became simpler.

Your car has both the vented tailgate AND vented quarter pillars. No cars were built that way. The vented tailgate is correct for a 1970 production year body, but the vented quarter pillars are not. It's very likely to have had a big enough accident some time in the past where a whole new rear quarter panel needed replacing. Maybe both. The S30-series Z body is very vulnerable to major damage in rear-enders, and an accident that was big enough to require the replacement of a whole quarter will have been very likely to have damaged the rear floor and some suspension mountings too. Quite often such cars need a pull on a body jig.

I'd check it out very carefully if I were you.

[atomman]

Thought I recognised the car from some where

[s20]

Oct 26, 2014 9:28:43 GMT atomman said:

Thought I recognised the car from some where

Me too:

zclub.net/forum/showthread.php?t=23741

I'll be interested to hear if the seller told the buyer everything he knew about the car....

[monsween]

Just replied over there.

[monsween]

Oct 26, 2014 9:10:41 GMT s20 said:

Oct 25, 2014 8:34:32 GMT monsween said:

This ones going to be a keeper and may take a while to put together as I slowly acquire the right parts

1970 Datsun S30 240z
2.4l straight 6
4 speed manual box
California US Import

Are you (fully?) aware of the history of this particular car? Repaired crash damage, etc?

Being 1970 production, it would have had solid (unvented) rear quarter pillars with '240Z' emblems on them, and all the cabin venting would have been done by the double-vented tailgate (a complex system with louvres in the tailgate internal trim, internal vent ducts, flaps and drains). This changed in early 1971, when Nissan introduced bodies with vented quarter pillars (wearing round 'Z' logo emblems that also acted as vents) and the tailgates lost their venting system and became simpler.

Your car has both the vented tailgate AND vented quarter pillars. No cars were built that way. The vented tailgate is correct for a 1970 production year body, but the vented quarter pillars are not. It's very likely to have had a big enough accident some time in the past where a whole new rear quarter panel needed replacing. Maybe both. The S30-series Z body is very vulnerable to major damage in rear-enders, and an accident that was big enough to require the replacement of a whole quarter will have been very likely to have damaged the rear floor and some suspension mountings too. Quite often such cars need a pull on a body jig.

I'd check it out very carefully if I were you.

Thanks for the post, very informative and a great help.

I knew there was some accident damage repair when I purchased it on the near side panel due to there being some filler in there but not the offside. The car appears to be straight and i've had no problems driving it around 2500-3000miles since purchasing.

I'm planning on stripping the rear suspension apart this winter to powdercoat/re-bush so will get my glasses out for that.

For anyone reading the thread through on zclub, Simon (the seller) couldn't have been a better bloke that pointed everything out to me that he knew. Come to think about it he may have said it's had a new rear quarter in the past and I just don't remember as it's not particularly important to me other than the car still being straight.

[Dez]

fookin wars, the rivet counters over there are a bit keen aint they.

[s20]

Oct 26, 2014 17:46:06 GMT Dez said:

fookin wars, the rivet counters over there are a bit keen aint they.

Or they know what they are looking at, and they "...don't write slogans, write truths..."

[s20]

Oct 26, 2014 13:52:48 GMT monsween said:

Thanks for the post, very informative and a great help.

Glad to be of any help.

If it was my car, I'd check that R/H rear quarter of the car out very carefully. If it took a hit hard enough to require that the whole rear quarter was replaced (quite a complex and involved job), then it will have done damage to what the quarter is connected to in the bodyshell. That includes the top mount of the rear strut. It's all quite fragile in the S30-series bodyshell.

As far as I remember, the original 1970 type (nylon) fuel vapour recovery tank inside the rear quarter had been replaced with a (later type) metal version. As you have perhaps noted from the thread, the fuel filler flap is also a (much) later flip-up style with no external fastening. With those two details in mind, I would guess that the R/H corner took a HARD hit in the past, and anything that hit the rear quarter that hard would have hit the wheel and (domino-like) that would have transferred through to the suspension on that side. It's all worth checking out very closely.

All well and good if it was repaired properly (and - as has been noted - it all looks OK in the photos), but forewarned is forearmed...

Good luck!

[106e30]

Usually I wouldn't be a fan of carbon on such a car, but that rear spoiler looks great on it.

Hats off to you mate, its a cracker

[camerashy]

Monsween,

Check out the early pages of my build thread, you can see the incredible lengths that older US bodyshops went to to cover up crash jobs and it might point you in the right direction of where to look. As Alan says, you want to look *really* carefully and make sure it's structurally sound especially around the suspension turret. Being an early type of unibody car...this is an important and structural area! Not very much of it is double sheet steel, so it matters! There are *a lot* of good resources out there - hybridz.org, classiczcars.com etc where people like S20(Alan) have contributed many MANY photos, oodles of knowledge and otherwise. Knowing *how* these cars go together makes repairing them a hell of a lot easier! Definitely something worth investigating and reading up on if you haven't already.

When Malcolm Vardy was repairing the original 240Z shell I had before I emigrated (that looked clean when bought but was a vertiable house of horrors once the paint was off) he did a very good write up which is still available to read - www.vord.net/cars/240z/ some very helpful advice in there and general thinking of how to look if the car is straight or not. Mine was an extreme case (rolled car that should have been scrapped...put back on the road by a yahoo)

I would get the back end of that car up on jack stands, get the passenger side rear wheel off and have a real good look, scraping off the undercoat, looking for anything that isn't a spot weld. If there is mig fishscale/birdshit welding there, it's had a boo-boo. As Alan says, it is a very tricky/time consuming repair to do *right* but an easy one to bodge and make look pretty. Likely the easiest way to see if it *has* had a repair is to see if there is bondo/filler at the point where the roof meets the rear quarter panel. There shouldn't be, it should be leaded. Determining the quality of that repair however...is a much more in depth procedure.

Most blaringly obvious, emblemds and tail gate aside is that the tail panel (with the exhaust cutout) has been blended into the rest of the quarter panel on the RH/side screams 'bad repair job' to me. Check it out, these cars hide money demons if you don't know what you're looking for, trust me, I learnt first hand, the hard way. See if there is a Z-club member local to you who can visit/you can drive to to offer advice/give it a real once over at the very least, it's easier to stomach knowing the the beginning if you're polishing a turd if the curse word shines through rather than finding out half way into a project that your dream car is held together with little more than braze and epoxy glue.


James

[sciclone]

I love the shape of 240z's but not as anally as those guys ^. However, I'm not a huge fan of overloading/overpowering any lightweight chassis, and if your plans to put a V8 or high-strung turbo 6 go ahead, then you may want to get the chassis fully engineer/laser checked, if this thing has had a big knock like most seem to imply.

If the frame is twisted, then the suspension is affected, and the last thing you want with going faster/more power, is no handling.

Not trying to be a nay-sayer (wouldn't have known about the vented/non-vented tail gates, fuel fillers etc), but I do know about driving in cars with bad frames/suspension, and it's not much fun when they try their hardest to throw you into ditches etc.

[moggy240]

Where did you get your carbon panels from and how light was the rear spoiler as the genuine ones are quite heavy