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 ;)

So today was spent packing the garage (read about that over here). While getting things packed up made it a productive day, the real joy was with the car. I drove it today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It has been over 23 months since the car last moved under it’s own power, so getting it out of the driveway (harder than it sounds) and driving it around the circle made for a great day.

The car is still hard to start, but once it starts up the first time it generally starts up easier (as you will see in the video). I then had trouble trying to get into gear, keep the car running, and letting off the brake as the ebrake isn’t strong enough to keep it at the top of our driveway. I finally just let the car roll down the driveway and started it at the bottom before driving it around. If you want to see it running and driving skip ahead in the video to around 6 minutes. Commentary provided by my beautiful wife Natalie.

The video is in HD, so watch it that way ;)

After driving it around I even got more of the front end put together, with a grill and air dam installed, I’ll get a picture of that configuration tomorrow.

Tonight I came home and started putting the suspension back together. Fortunately I hadn’t gotten too far with taking it apart, so I didn’t have too much to put back together. I decided since we only have a couple of weeks left I won’t try getting the other suspension under the car, I’ll just worry about getting it together and secured for the trailer ride to Colorado (http://www.going2colorado.com) later this month.

I got the front suspension bits together, though I didn’t bother to put the sway bar on for now. I then decided to pull the steering column to get the new one put into the car. That was easy, at least the pulling it out process, I stopped for dinner, but it sure looks like the replacement column isn’t going to work :(

I’ll have to try to get that in later this week.