- Huge_Midget
- Jun 6, 2002
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I don't like the look of it...
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I'm nursing a monster set of blueballs thanks to this thread. You're the best/worst sort of cocktease.
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Nov 8, 2013 22:46
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May 16, 2024 00:10
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- Huge_Midget
- Jun 6, 2002
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I don't like the look of it...
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There's nothing wrong with seriousposting in style 
Apparently my office is closed New Year's Day, so it's time for updates. This one is going to be bittersweet, so hold on to your butts.
Not what I'd call "quality"
So as I mentioned before, I bought a Cannon 2x DCOE intake manifold that fits the R16 head. It's not the best quality ever, but there really aren't many other options.
 
The casting quality is exceptionally poor, and I may dremel it down and sand it back, but right now, I just want something workable.
A further annoyance is that based on the geometry of the manifold studs, there's an obnoxious lump on the inside of the runner. There's really not much to be done about this, unless I want to start grinding the inside back to try and get a little more clearance.
 
Either way, I test fit the manifold on the engine just to get a feel for how it was going to turn out. And I really, really like it.
 
Oh, except that the fuckin' exhaust manifold flange is too thin. This is a known problem with this header, and I was assured that the one I was buying was the "new version", but I guess not.
The lesson I'm learning about restomods is that the "mod" part is hard. If I had bought reman Sumitomo calipers, I wouldn't have had wheel clearance issues, or any of the other strangeness - it's the same with the carbs and a hundred other things. But, if the car were just going to be stock, riding around on 165/70 R14s and trying to get up to freeway speeds with 96bhp... No, I'm doing the right thing, it's just a pain in the rear end sometimes. 
Reunion tour
When I did my last real update, the body was nearly done, and the frame was on the trailer. Let's see how that turned out.
You know, they say it's the kids that can't get off their phones, but Dad's worse than I am
Remember I said there was a touch of red in the paint? I think you can see it now. This was the car's first trip out into the sunshine in a long time. And no, this is not the final ride height. There's no engine in it, and I still had the goddamn spring shackles upside down. 
The drive home was a whiteknuckle horror show for me, since I was terrified that something was going to touch my baby. Matters were made worse by horrible traffic, which ended up being the result of someone's  reliable Jeep 4.0L engine catching on fire.
But the car survived, and made it home. If anyone wants that Isuzu Trooper in the background, it's free
Racecars!
I'm going to derail a little and share some cool pictures. I went to the WTCC at Sears Point last year, and got to see some cool racing.
I also spent a while climbing around the pits/garages and yelling at random people to let me touch their stuff. One guy finally acquiesced, and let me touch his stuff.
He... he had some cool stuff. 
And as I continued my journey down the garages, I spied more cool stuff.
B-but... it's p-probably just an automatic...
NOPE
Why can't I own every car? There are so goddamn many. 
The final score, and the only thing that has any relevance to this, is that I nabbed some "barely used" 14" Toyo Proxes RA1s from the junk tire pile. These can go on the 5-slots, and make for some extra autocross fun.
How do you eat an elephant?
This was a major turning point for me. I bought a brand new pretty thing, and installed it on the car's body. That was the first time I'd done that since I brought it home.
 
It felt so good, in fact, that I did it again.
God drat manifolds
This poor head was seriously beat to poo poo. All the studs were bent, most had stripped threads, and things were generally just lovely. I drove all the old studs out with a combination of vice-grips and hammers, and then installed nice new ones with hex keys in the top, and locktite on the head side.
 
Naturally, the black oxide that looks so good now is gonna get rusted off in seconds, but it's a small price to pay for those hex key holes.
I discovered that some careful washer stacking could get the manifolds on reasonably well, and would serve as an interim solution. Eventually, I'm going to have to actually fix this, but I wanted to prepare the wee Datsun for her trip to the exhaust shop.
Loss of luster
So uh, to sell a car in the 60s, you pretty much had to have some chrome on it. I'll let you guess how that went for the uppity Japanese newcomer selling a stripped down sports car for $3000.
 
 
Knowing that this was going to be long lead, I shipped it all off to a guy I've been working with, and...
So long, Uncle Sam
...then I moved out of America. In January of 2013, I left California to come live and work in the Cayman Islands. Sometimes, there are things you just can't say "no" to.
 
 
 
Working on the car is now incredibly difficult. I have to end up in California with no social or familial obligations, wake up at the rear end-crack of dawn, slam down coffee, and put in a fully productive day. Based on the way income tax laws work, to get the Foreign Earned Income exclusion, I had to remain outside of the US for 330 days between Jan 15 2013, and Jan 14th 2014.
This next year will be easier for me, because as of Jan 1st, I'll already have been an official resident of the Cayman Islands, which gets me the FEI exclusion without doing anything else, AND means I have many more US days to burn. So 2014 will be the year this car gets finished, one way or another.
The other good news is that with the time I had to sit and think about the car, and the massive piles of non-taxable dosh I was rolling in, I could do some really trick poo poo with the car, which I'll get to next time. But for now, there's one thing I forgot...
My Datsun is an airplane
Well, not really, but there's a guy (whose name I can't disclose) who both owns a fleet of Datsun Roadsters and runs a professional avionics remanufacturing company. So for those of you who were wondering which variant of the inevitable gaudy loving AutoMeter tachometer I was going to grace my dashboard with...
Nope!
The gauge rings have been rechromed, the faces have been silkscreened to original spec, the paint is the same mildly luminescent compound used on aircraft instruments, the glass is new, everything has been zeroed out, new needles, new quartz movement for the clock, everything calibrated accurately, new gears, new new new new.
This was another of those moments where I knew that whatever came next, I couldn't gently caress up, I couldn't phone it in, and I had to meet the standard these glorious motherfuckers have set.
Why can't cars come with real gauges like that anymore? Gah! I just want to know every minute detail of the goings on under the hood, why can't modern engineers make us a car that has ALL OF THE GAUGES! Check engine lights are the idiot's crutch.
So I guess what I'm saying is I'm super jealous of your analog instruments.
(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 2, 2014 06:09
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May 16, 2024 00:10
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- Huge_Midget
- Jun 6, 2002
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I don't like the look of it...
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So were you Hitler in a previous life? Has karma doomed you to a Sisyphean existence of making trying to make an old Japanese roadster run, only to take two steps back for every one forward? Did an old gypsy woman curse you in your cradle by drawing runewords with a NOS Nismo stroker crank?
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Jun 1, 2016 16:56
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Nov 8, 2013 22:46
