Today, while I was hard at work, a buddy of mine sent me a link to a car on Ebay, it was a 1984 Rabbit GTI with 517 original miles. I was looking at the car in amazement, seeing it was in St. Louis, and more so in Creve Couer, near where we used to live.

From there I clicked on another link, I'm not even sure which one, and I came across a list of cars, one that peaked my interest, a 356 speedster replica. I decided to check it out, and then I started reading more realizing it was also local to St. Louis, but get this. It is electric! I thought, oh that's cool, but then I scrolled down and started watching the video embedded into the ebay page. I'm 68 minutes into it, it's a 91 minute video.

So I have been delaying wiring up the car a bit, partially because I don’t understand it all, and partially because I am afraid! I’m a computer geek, but not always the best when it comes to working on the car, I question everything I do, maybe because I blew up the last motor?

Part of the wiring problem I’ve had is that I needed to get a fuse block to start hooking things up to, the original block had melted long ago, and only half worked. Last night I went to PepBoys and CarToys looking to see if I could find anything, with no luck. Today I decided to try Napa, SCORE! I actually got two different blocks. One 6 pole and one 10 pole, that way I can break things up if necessary. I hope to get the wiring started this weekend, I would like to attempt to have the car running again, which I think really just means I need to get a switch wired for the starter.

I’m not going to deal with a key for the car, this car long run isn’t going to be something someone will be able to walk up and start anyways.

So we’ll see how far I get, I may also have to go look at this on Saturday…. http://www.toolking.com/hobartwelders_500500a.aspx

So the Labor Day holiday weekend is coming up, and my brother is coming to town. I’m planning on putting him to work on the car. I’m not sure what the goal for the weekend is, but I do want to at least get something done on the car!

I was looking to try another body, one popped up last week on Craigslist but the dude sold it. I emailed, called, etc but the guy wouldn’t call me back, when I finally got in touch with him someone else had already purchased it, just my luck.

So as of right now I’m going to keep the current body, unless something better pops up in the mean time.

So tonight after work I got the 240Z off the trailer, both of which had been parked in the Garage since we moved to Colorado a few weeks ago. I had lined up a storage lot for the trailer and wanted to get it out of the garage. Well the 240Z wasn’t easy to start, took a good 5+ minutes of attempts before it finally started up. Later in the day I realized the MAP hose wasn’t hooked up to the Megasquirt, that would explain the difficulty in starting! whoops.

So I dropped the trailer off and came home to organize the garage a bit, moved the newly assembled shelves in place and started going through some of my boxes. After I got bored with the unpacking I decided it was a good time to put all the bulbs and fuses that I had purchased yesterday into the car. That was pretty quick and painless, but didn’t produce any fruit! I didn’t see any lights in the rear of the car at all. So what next?

I simply decided to pull the dashboard out! The whole thing, gone, removed, not going back in (likely not) along with the blower and heater core. Why might you ask? Why not. The car will hopefully be somewhat streetable, but I won’t be using most of the gauges on the car anyways. For a speedo I’ll have the G2X (GPS data logging), for RPM I’ll likely have the G2X, or even a Netbook running the Megasquirt software to show me all the appropriate date from the ECU. So why do I need the stock dash? I don’t! Though I did realize after I pulled the dash that I left the fiberlass dashboard in St. Louis, and didn’t bring it to CO. Luckily I’m going back to STL next week for work and will hopefully get it packed up and shipped back.

I’ll need to do some creative wiring, hooking up a switch for the headlights, a horn, turn signals, and even the ignition, but I think it will be cool to have all those as switchable items on a nice clean looking dashboard, not the big old clunky stock one.

Here’s a photo sans dash.

Two years ago today was the day that the Datsun toasted Motor #1 on it's first autocross run! Here’s a shot of that first competition run.

And then a short time later (same run) here’s my getting out to push it

Here’s what we found when we just happened to pull plug #2

And then this is what it looked like when I went to drain the oil from the motor

A few things have happened in the two years since that fateful day. A few months later I purchased a 2004 Corvette Z06 and autocrossed that for a year.

I sold the Corvette.

I got the Datsun running again with another motor, same turbo setup.

We moved to Colorado. www.going2colorado.com

In the next few weeks I hope to get more of the 240 back together, starting to work on the electrical system and such. Then during the first week of September the car goes to www.hanksvillehotrods.com for a new exhaust, maybe I can talk them into a cage too ;)