Projects / Datsun 240z Restore
My friend and I purchased a broken Datsun 240z. When we brought this car home we found all of the problems that had arisen after it had sit for over 15 years. This is an overview of the many things we did to fix the car, as well as the 3000 mile road trip we did after it was finished.
Background
The car had not been run in over 15 years and we had a plan to drive the car in the Lemons rally 4 months later. The lemons rally is a car rally where the cars have to be purchased for under $1000 and then be driven across country. The lemons rally was a goal of ours for many years and we were extremely excited to be able to find this car in our price budge
Process
This is a picture of the car the day that we brought it home. Luckily it looked very nice cosmetically and most of the problems were under the hood.
This is an image of how the wiring harness looked when we took the car home. This is just one tiny bit of how bad the wiring was. The car was missing many parts as well, we had to add a starter, as well as adding a motor for the windshield wipers. After reviewing all of the problems I decided to undertake the job of rewiring the entire car! I was able to learn more about how the car works, as well as clean everything up and confirm strong connections.
This is a little snippet of my rewiring job. This is the portion for the dash.
This is an image of the engine bay after I rewired the engine harness and did all of the necessary repairs.
Unfortunately due to Covid the Lemons rally was canceled, but me and my friend wanted to do a road trip anyway. We planned out a 3000 mile road trip from the top of the Blueridge parkway to florida key west. We decided to camp along the trip instead of renting hotels, keeping us safer during the pandemic and saving us money. The picture here is a photo along the Blueridge parkway! The road trip was a lot of fun and the car was reliable the whole way! It was a fun project to be able to use my electrical and mechanical skills to have a fun trip and save us money.