Since the weather is preventing me from working on the car I'll go ahead and begin the build log as I promised. Settle in, prop up your feet and get yourself a hot toddy cause this will go on forever.
THE FRONT STORY:
My soon to be daughter in law thought it would be great if I could build them some sort of cool and unusual car to use when they drive away from the wedding. How's that for a cool daughter in law?
Unfortunately she has no clue what that entails. We talked about buying a cool car, because that would be cheaper and it would give me time to fix whatever was wrong with it, but that didn't tickle her fancy.
THE PROBLEM:
The wedding is September 6, 2014
At that time we are going to present him with a build book and a link here. This will be more or less a Readers Digest version of the book
THE BACK STORY IS THAT THE CAR WE ARE BUILDING WILL BE WHAT WAS MY SON'S FIRST CAR. He didn't really get to drive it, but it was technically his first car.
15 years ago when he was 15 I bought him a 1977 280Z for his first car. I'm sure I'LL forget a step or two and a detail or two, but here's the story as I remember it.
We began looking when he was 14 but he was 15 before we bought a car. We started early because no matter what car we bought, we knew some customization was definitely in the cards.
Before looking we did our homework and he decided he wanted a 280Z with the 250 GTO body kit. Fortunately for us one of the manufacturers of such a kit was about 2 miles away so we spent some quality time with him.
He built a kit for a convertible version.
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Then we bought all the right Restoring the Z books to begin boning up on what to look for and began our search. We looked for about 6 months to find a car that wasn't beat all to hell or had huge rust holes in it. The roofs and under the battery/passenger footwells were the worst areas of most cars we looked at.
We eventually got lucky and found a stalled project car that a man and his 2 sons had built. They'd done a good job on the parts of the car that mattered to us. It had NOS (new old stock) seats and NOS Dash plus a newer engine.
We (I) drove it for about 2 months before we began the tear down process. Every day after school and on weekends we worked on it. Tearing down soon got old because we never seemed to have any forward process.
We stripped it down to get it ready for a color change as the first step. At the this time we decided to add a street cage because we knew he would spend some time autocrossing and some track days. We figured that it would be much easier to design and install it at this time rather than having to tear it apart again later.
We still hadn't bought the body kit because we weren't liking the way the convertible kit was coming together and he had a sorry convertible top. As a fall back position we did our work as how would he want to build it IF we didn't buy the kit. He like the no bumper look and the "standard" Z bolt on wheel flares.
He wanted the car to be intimidating looking so we talked about lowering it which worked whether we bought the body kit or not.
I sectioned the struts 1 1/2" and bought Tokico adjustable inserts.
I bought Ground Control sleeves and coil over springs along with Caster/Camber adjusters for all 4 wheels.
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The suspension was totally disassembled, blasted and then repainted in a Hammer finish.
I bought electric door poppers as we'd decided to shave the door handles.
I got a full set of Energy Suspension bushings. EVERYTHING that got a bushing was getting stiffer bushings!
Because we wanted the car to be light & nimble, and we both hated the huge boat anchor of an 6 cylinder that came in the car, we looked for alternative power plants. A little extra power never hurt, right?
The first engine we looked at was the twin turbo 3 rotor Cosmos engine as it was said it to have the closest sound to a Ferrari V12 and what's not to like about that sound?
But after driving to Oklahoma City to pick one up I decided that someplace north of 400 hp was probably not the best engine for his first car.
Instead I bought a 1993 Twin Turbo RX7 for it. Somehow I ended up with 2 of them in my driveway and one slightly dinged one in the garage. If nothing, I am good at excess.
These cars were amazingly put together. A remarkable level of engineering, but I'm glad I didn't have to do any serious work on any of them because if you wanted to remove the engine you had about 3-4 layers to remove to get to it.
It almost seemed like sacrilege to tear one of them down so we changed our minds again & decided upon an SR20DET and I imported one from Japan.
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SR20DET2.jpg
We could put that engine in the Z and my son & I both could stand in the engine compartment in front of the engine. How's that for buying some room and losing weight?
This seemed like it would be great. We lost weight, added power and shifted the weight backwards. We just knew this was THE ONE!