I finally finished sewing up the carpets and fitted them in the car together with most of the interior trim and seats. Only the two door panels are missing now as I've still got to work on them. Its rather nice to see the car coming back together, feels like I'm actually getting somewhere - and its also nice to get the parts out of my house where they have been cluttering up the living room. Its taken quite a bit of effort to clean everything up and make them look like new again.

The car is now safely stored in my rebuilt garage, which has taken me several weeks to fully complete, but it was really needed for the next stage of the restoration work, as I will be removing some body panels.

September 10th 2008

I've noticed for some time that the right rear side was moving up and down rather a bit which meant that the gas shock absorber was knackered, so I've been keeping an eye out for a replacement. Unfortunately I have not seen any for sale so I decided to buy a similar pair off ebay that looked ok! They were also for an old Datsun and they had the right sort of end connections and the only problem that I could see was that they were slightly bigger and longer - but that would not be much of a problem, would it?
To begin with everything went fine as I swapped over the end fittings, this was slightly troublesome as I had to force out the bottom bracket and insert it into the new rubber bush, but I managed it in the end. Unfortunately when I jacked up the car to fit the new shocks they would not actually go through the holes in the trailing arms. Doh!
The problem was that the holes narrow on the inside, so theres not as much spare room as I thought. This meant a slight rethink on my part and I had to slim the tube ends down by cutting away some excess metal. The end brackets and bush's also had to be removed again as I now realised that I could only try to install the shocks by inserting them from above the trailing arms, then add the parts once they were in position.
Again I jacked up the car and tried to fit the new shocks and success they went straight into place....only to then find that the securing bolts would not line up with the holes. Drat and Double Drat!
Almost at the point of throwing my expensive new bits in the dustbin I suddenly realised that everything would probably fit if it was in its normal operating position, with the arm not hanging down quite so far. So I used a second carjack on the arm and by constantly adjusting the two jacks was able to very slowly lift and move everything into the correct position and then twist the shock absorber into lining up with the bolt holes. Success!
Yes they were in and they work very well..... Perhaps too well as the backend of the car is now very stiff indeed!

Time to remove the wings and have a look at what sort of nasty horrific rust is hiding behind them. As the right-hand side one has a rust hole at the top near the drivers door I decided to remove it first. And surprise surprise there was ....well nothing really, which I guess was a surprise!

My first car back in the 80s had terrible problems with rust in this area, but it didn't have the plastic inner wheel arch mouldings that this car is fitted with, which together with the undersealing has saved everything. There are some patchs of surface rust but these can be sanded off quite easily. Lets hope the other sides as good.

The weathers getting pretty chilly now so work has slowed on the car and I'm planning to probably stop altogether for the winter months. I travelled down to Norwich the other week to buy a plastic grill for the front of the car and I also got a new radiator while I was at it, as the current one apart from being dented is also now showing signs of leaking. The 30-year-old plastic grill was cracked and broken in a couple of places but has responded well to my liquid glue and its now back in one piece and being painted after multiple washes.

Most of the work this month has been on rubbing down the two front wings, removing the small rust patches with sandpaper and rust-busting chemicals and then repainting them. The right-hand one is now done but it was more work than I anticipated as there were a number of dents in the panel that had to be fixed, in fact both wings have been bashed at some point and even after I've finished working on them they will still not be perfect. The good news was that the rust was only minor small surface stuff and came off quite well, most of it being on the inside at the front and under the side lights. The left wing turned out to be a more recent replacement and had less dents although it didn't have any undeseal on the inside and was therefore being attacked more by the rust monster. To combat future problems, after cleaning, the insides of each panel have received two coats of Hammerite paint and will also get a final coat of thick underseal.

The sidelights were taken apart and cleaned, with the rubber parts being washed and then treated in a solution to get them nice and supple again. The metal holder was rusting up rather badly so it was sanded down and coated in Hammerite as well. One of the lenses was badly scratched so I replaced it with a spare that I had bought off ebay at the start of this project.

In fact my ebay spending has been rather regular and the car's overall costs are mounting up now. When I started this back in March I decided to itemise all my spending in a nice smart little folder, which my friend Nick warned me not too, and I am beginning to see his point as I've now reached the bottom of the fourth A4 sheet and the total is fast approaching the £2000 mark - and that doesn't include rebuilding the garage to store it in, all the petrol I've used driving around to buy or view things - and I haven't bought the stainless steel exhaust, new tyres, or had the wheels refurbed yet!
So much for the cheap little project. Its just been called 'David's Folly'.... I think 'Blue Elephant' is better!

Spending most of the time now on cleaning the front panel of rust, again all surface stuff, nothing actually bad no holes or anything, but there is quite a bit of it. I started with a wirebrush attachment to my electric drill which worked rather well, then heavy duty sandpaper and finally then applied plenty of Hammerite Rust Remover, which is a green jelly type thing that disolves rust - well it does if you keep applying it for about a week! Still I have so far managed to turn my bad rusty bonnet hinges back to bright clean metal. I think this is going to take a while!

It's official I'm now Datsun crazy!
Yes to get the New Year off to a good start I've gone and bought another one. And hell why not, there's supposed to be 22 of these things in the country so I've only got 20 more to get!
The plan was to buy a donor car for spares, which seemed like a good idea as buying all these parts is costing me a fortune. So I popped over to a place near Oxford at the weekend to check out a car that had been for sale for a few months - as nobody had shown any interest in it I expected it to be a mess but surprise, surprise, it looked pretty neat. In fact this could turn out to be the main car with my first one turning into the donor!

So far I've not been able to check it over too much but it's looking good with only a few small rust patch's and poor seats. It belonged to an old man who seemed to have had it serviced quite often over the years. However it's been in a garage for a while so lets hope the engine sounds ok when I've got it running properly.

Well after a bit of investigation I've decided that this 2nd car will just have to be a parts-car for the present moment and probably a project for the future, and so I have just built a carport/shed in the garden to store it safely in. The engine starts fine but coughs rather a lot and going by the new ignition spares found in the boot then it seems to have been a problem with the last owner too. The other big problem is the bad rust in the sills, which is in the outer and inner areas near the rear wheels and crossmember, that will require some extensive welding to replace/rebuild. The brakes also have a problem, probably a burst pipe somewhere, and the interior is in a bit of a state. So for the time being I'll be swapping all the best bits, doors & bumpers etc, with the first car.
So far I've spent most of my recent time rearranging the garden to fit everything in nicely, without it appearing to be a scrapyard! Lets hope we have a good summer.

April 21st 2009

And another ...... but not for long. This ones a total scrap pile, but as it was only a £100 and just a couple of miles away I decided to buy it for parts. The bodywork is just rust and worthless but there are a number of bits on it that I can use - like keeping all the windows which are now pretty impossible to buy new, especially the rear screen. The engine looks a mess but the seller hooked it up to a petrol can and it fired up very nicely, so keeping the engine might be an idea, just got the problem of getting it out. I certainly don't want this hanging about for long, so hopefully I'll be able to get what I want from it and send it on it's way to Silicon Heaven.

Started to dismantle this new car, got quite a few usable bits off it so far but a lot of it is rotten - no surprises there I guess. The Haynes book says removing the main windows is a simple process but it doesn't seem to be quite that easy. I was hoping to get the rear shock absorbers off but they are well rusted, so will now look at removing the front brakes and hope they are salvageable.
I have had a problem with the rear off-side wheel hub of my prime car as one of the threads was damaged by a badly fitted wheel nut. I had thought about swapping the hub but decided to try and fix the problem. I took an old wheel nut and hack-sawed it into two halves, then reassembled it as far down the thread as possible with insulation tape to hold it back together. This was then carefully unscrewed back over the well-oiled damaged section to try and clean up the thread and it worked perfectly, which was a pleasant result.

A nice sunny weekend so I cracked on with the car. I fired it up first and let it run for a bit, normally I just like to do this to keep the engine fresh and make sure everythings working ok, but today I wanted to warm the exhaust up as it was time to try and remove it. Both the down pipe and the back box are rotten and need to be replaced. I am worried about all the brackets being rusted up but my first concern was disconneting the pipe at the engine - I didn't want to end up snapping off a bolt there as I would be in trouble. Luckily with the heat of the engine and plenty of WD-40 both the nuts could by worked free - and of course I could burn my fingers on the pipe!
After that I left the rest of the exhaust for another day. Thats because I had decided to drain the water system and remove the water pump, radiator (again) and thermostat(again). The idea for this was to gain access to the back of the front bulkhead so that I could knock out some dents, but also in preparation to install a new radiator and fix the leak on the thermostat housing. I removed the water pump because .... well I'd never done it before ... and wondered if it was working ok, which it probably was doing before I took it off. Also removed the battery, alternator and side door as I need to do a little bit of welding on the sill.

Spent the rest of the weekend knocking out the dent in the lower front panel and trying to get rid of rust, took the headlights off to make the process a bit easier, and so that I will not be getting paint on them later.

Another nice sunny weekend, with the hottest day of the year so far, so what better than grinding away bits of rust and doing some welding (bet the neighbours love me!). I had my dad's old Arc welder, that hadn't been used in 20+ years, and I decided to try and fix up the small rust holes in the passenger sill. I started by cutting some bits of metal out of the sill of the spare junk car and then cut them to fit over the holes, that was easy. Then I started welding - O'Dear.

My first few touch's did nothing then part of the small plate I was welding burned away completely in a bright flash, then bits of weld splattered the sill, then I dazzled myself, then I burned a small hole through the sill and then the rod stuck fast to the car and I had to switch the power off! This was then repeated many times.
A frustrating hour and a bit later I had managed to fix one very small mangled plate in position and gave up on the next bit. The thought of bodging the remaining bigger hole with filler did seem a very attractive idea at this time, but that's not what I want to do with any part of the car, so after a good nights sleep I decided to have one more go.
I had noticed that I tended to have more success when the rods were short, probably as they didn't wobble as much, so I made myself some small ones by simply hack-sawing some rods in half. Then I turned down the voltage and tried again and suddenly by magic I seemed to have the knack. The second plate went on fine and is nice and secure - it did take me 2 hours of messing about and the result does look rather a mess but it worked. Now I've just got to grind off some of the excess and make it look presentable. I was quite pleased with myself after all that but I don't think that I want to be doing anymore.

Spent the rest of my time continuing work on the front panels. I've been using a power drill, sandpaper, wet & dry paper and rust dissolving gel to clean up the metalwork and then applied several coats of Hammerite silver paint, which looked really smart, but then had to over-paint it black so that it wouldn't show through the black plastic grill.

All looking good so far, I'm getting to the stage where I may actually be putting it all back together again, if I can remember where it all goes that is, luckily I have a spare car to double check such things - which is also a handy thing to have around.  

*Just discovered something interesting with the junk Datsun, apparently when you remove the driveshafts there's nothing to hold the front wheels on - as the car just collapsed on the driveway!

Began to reassemble the front of the car, but before I did I decided to do a bit more painting in the engine bay. I would have liked to fully clean out and paint this area but it's pretty much impossible without removing the engine and all the brake pipes and a like. Also it wasn't really neccessary but I did feel that the sides nearest the front needed some work, as obviously they have been more affected by the elements. So I just masked off the first foot or so of the metalwork, gave it a rub down, then applied some silver Hammerite. To make it easier I removed the horns under the battery compartment and gave them a clean too. When painting its always better to dismantle and paint everything separately - I hate seeing overspray, looks very amateurish. The supports were sanded down and spray painted green, while I used fine wet & dry paper to clean the horns and then sprayed them with WD-40. I actually found that the electrical wiring wasn't even connected, which is why they weren't working, so I cleaned up the connectors and gave them a squeeze with my pliers to make them grip a little better.

I have swapped the front bonnet - again. Now I'm having the Blue one off the second car while the previous replacement Black bonnet will go onto the Blue car.

Also swapped the doors over today, so now the second car is Blue with a Black bonnet and Gold doors, very pretty!

Started work cleaning and checking the two blue doors. Drivers side first and there wasn't much wrong with it, which is why I'm using it, just a small bit of rust along the bottom. First job was to remove the attachments such as the mirror, window and door handles, and then get to the inside by prising off the black vinyl trim. This is always a bit tricky as the trim is rather thin hardboard that will easily crease up and fall apart under any stress and the plastic clips that hold it in place are made from the Worlds most brittle plastic!

To remove the clips safely you need to carefully slide either flat-bladed screwdrivers, or metal rules, under the trim and both sides of the clips, then use a gentle twisting action to lift them up till they just pop off. Of course you normally find that previous owners have already tried this and there are always plenty of broken clips to prove it. Luckily the panel was in good condition with only a few snapped connectors - and I've got plenty of spares to replace those.

The first job was to use my power drill, with wire brush attachment, to remove the flaking rust along the lower edge, there was a fairly small amount of this under the drain holes, where over the years the waters caught in the folded metal door skin. Again I'm using a mixture of rough sandpaper and green rust-buster gel to remove it, this will probably take a week. The interior of the door was also cleaned out in preparation for the painting, I'll be Hammeriting and undersealing it later.

Clean up on the doors went well and as the weather was good I was able to start painting them. The main part of the inner door is Black, to blend with the vinyl trim, and I quickly masked this area off and painted them using a Matt base paint with a Satin top coat. The door lock was masked off and will remain Blue, the rest of the inner door edging was painted Silver. I started with several coats of 'Smooth Silver' Hammerite along the bottom edge to protect against any future water penetration then changed to standard Silver car paint for the sides as it gives a better finish. More Hammerite was then applied to the inside of the doors. The rubber side seals were removed and I'll be cleaning them this weekend.

Jul 4th 2009

One long-standing problem has been the windscreen that has a bad wiper scratch doing a full arc across the drivers field of view. This is bound to be an MOT failure - but even more importantly is a bloody awful annoying sight. So I have been planning to change the windscreen since I had the car and have now got a replacement screen from red Datsun 3. However getting the thing off the scrap car was a real pain, and to now repeat that job and then have to refit the new glass was a task I no longer wanted to do. So after a quick visit to ebay a 'Miracle glass repair kit' fell through my letterbox this morning and I set about sorting the screen. The kit contains a bottle of 'Special Fluid', some pads and a drill attachment tool, sounds easy.
First job attach pads to pad holder, attach this to my power drill, add fluid and switch on - and spray droplets of fluid everywhere, the windscreen, the walls, my arms, my tee-shirt, etc. After an hour I finally realised that I was simply polishing the scratchs and they were going nowhere. Useless, but it did smooth off some scuff marks which gave me a clue.
Putting aside the miracle repair kit I got hold of some 400 grade wet & dry paper and a bottle of Brasso polish then spent 3 hours sanding down the scratch and the glass around it, followed by another hour using 1200 grade paper to smooth down the mess I had made. Together this arm-numbing exercise turned a thin scratch into a 1 to 1& 1/2 inch band of frosted glass which looked a bit of a disaster. Then the glass repair kit earned it's description, unable to shift one heavy scratch it could polish frosted glass to near perfection and after another couple of hours the windscreen was completely fixed. It's a miracle!!

I finished painting the door sills and then bolted on the replacement doors. Everything seems to be in line and working properly but I can't be sure yet as the door rubbers are not attached. This is because I will be putting more paint on the window surrounds and also because the rubbers are in a bit of a state and need a good clean and soaking in that ArmorAll rubber restorer.

Jul 11th 2009

I decided to tackle the wheels next as they are one of the last major problems to sort out. One idea was to get new(er) wheels and possibly go up a size as the 12" originals are a little on the small size, however the point of this restoration is to recreate my first car and it had these type of Pardat alloys. Unfortunately they are in quite a state and need refurbishing. So I emailed a company and got a basic estimate of £230 which I guess is not too bad for five wheels, but it would certainly have cost more if I had gone ahead with it, as they would have charged for the added extra work required to fix the poor condition of the wheels. As well as that there is also the cost of five new tires to take into consideration. All in all I was looking at a bill of around £500 and this project is already well over budget (well it would be if I had actually ever set one) so it was time for some cost-cutting - and that means doing it myself as usual.

Firstly I jacked up the spare car, balanced it on supports and took off it's wheels, then swapped them with the ones on my prime car, then a quick trip to a garage to get the tires removed. Then I began the stinky process of applying Nitro Mors paint stripper - boy does that stuff work fast, the paint almost leaps off the metal! After a good rub over with wire wool to remove the last of the paint/varnish and a wash down the wheels were taken indoors for the lengthy job off final cleaning and polishing - not as big a job as it could be as only the front facings have to be polished, the rest of the wheel will be painted Black, still it will take me a couple of weeks.

While discussing my Datsun problems with a woman at work I mentioned the need to remove an engine and she offered me her old engine hoist at a rather cheap price - I must remember to ask women for car parts and tools more often!
What initially looked like a pile of old scrap pipes assembled into a rather sturdy frame - and a feeble looking pair of pulleys and thin rope lifted the engine out without a problem - although I had to wrap the rope round a block of wood to stop it cutting into my hand. A pretty simple one-man job in the end, now I can get rid of this pile of red rusting scrap.

O'dear the budget for this project just took another hefty knock as I spent big on body panels. I travelled down to Chelmsford to see a man who apparently had a new-old-stock rear hatch in his garage. While I had already done some work last year on my existing hatch (quite a bit actually) I had noticed that there were some rust patch's showing again and had drilled them out, making a mess of it's new paint job. Rear hatch's seem to constantly rust on these cars so when I heard of a possible mint'ish replacement then I was roaring down the motorway in the early hours of the next day in the quest for this hidden treasure.

First out of the garage was indeed the hatch for a 120a coupe, covered in light surface rust but solid and lovely. Then as I carefully placed it in the back of my car a pair of front wings appeared, 'Nice', into the back of the car with those too. Then a mint condition, pristine, never touched, still wrapped in it's Nissan packaging, chrome front bumper, 'Very Nice', into the back of the car with that. Then a mint condition, pristine, still wrapped, rear bumper, 'Very Nice' again. Then as I tried to close the boot he pulled out a huge Nissan box with a pristine bonnet inside! Well I just had to have it, didn't I. Luckily payday is coming up soon and I can always go without food.