New to Ratsun

[logan66]

Thanks, Bleach those really helped.  I finally figured it out and this time for good I think.  Its been running awesome the last few weeks but haven't had much time to update.  The problem was a combination of things but came down to me having the one of the two wires on the throttle position sensor switched, so it never adjusted the idle mixture even when I hadn't messed with the idle stop screw.  I found it from when I was adjusting the TPS I didn't have continuity anywhere in the rotation of the sensor between the two prongs and accidently touched one prong to the other terminal I didn't have a wire running to and the TPS just happened to be rotated in the right position.  So I fixed the plug and consequently my timing was about 10 degrees off from setting it with the TPS hooked up incorrectly. Through my trials and test I found that cylinder 2 and 3 have about 110 psi of compression each I think I have a leaky head gasket so my winter project will be to replace that which wont be a bad deal because I was looking into buying bigger injectors and jacking up the boost anyway. Regardless I'm really happy with it right now and is so fun to drive.  My thread on this kinda sucks now that photobucket pictures don't show up anymore but I splurged and bought a go pro for fun so I might upload something from that on here. 

[logan66]

Well its been a long time since I've posted on this thread because I lost some interest after photobucket quit working.  However I've made a lot of progress on my car and might try to post more often now.  I ended up pulling the motor back out over my fall and christmas break to change the head gasket and clean up the engine.  As well as repaint the engine bay because master cylinder leaked brake fluid all over the frame rail and destroyed the paint :/ 

Once it was out I just rigged up the harness out of the way to respray the engine bay.  I replaced the head gasket to try and improve the compression on cylinders two and three. I was a little nervous to do this on my own beings it was the first time I have ever tore an engine down that far but it was actually very straight forward and simple.  I decided to splurge a little and bought ARP head studs in case I ever try to get crazy with the boost.  But here's a couple of pictures of the motor after I cleaned it up and painted it.  It was a lot of work but it was definately worth it. It looks 1000x better than it did.

 

 

 

 

 

After I got the motor back in and running again I put the SVO 370cc injectors I ordered a long time ago on the car.  I decided to wait until after I made sure the motor ran again before changing the AFM and injectors.  I ended up having to tighten the flap 13 teeth which was kind of an average of what I had seen other people adjusting it to for the injectors.  Suprisingly it started up first try! It is pretty rich at idle but the idle isn't too much rougher than before but you have to feather the throttle for about the first 30 seconds of start up which doesn't really bother me.  I wish I would've put these in a long time ago because it doesn't even feel like the same car.  I thought it was pretty quick before but now it spins the tires like crazy.  I had no idea how much of an improvement it would make but it is sooo fun to drive now.  Even just at 10 psi with the bigger injectors it moves.  Right now I have it set to about 12 ish psi and don't really want to mess with it anymore because I have a cheap "home depot" boost controller and its difficult to make precise adjustments.  Soon I will invest in a nicer one.  I really want to get it on a dyno to see what it makes.  Along these lines, does anyone know how far I can safely push the motor with these new injectors?  As well as how much psi the stock turbo can be pushed? I might leave it where it is because it makes me grin from ear to ear but I know myself and I'll probably be pushing it more later on.

Thats all I have done to the motor since my last post but in the first picture you can see body filler where the side molding used to be.  Im slowly fixing the rust and dents but I don't have the patience for the sanding.  I'll get back to it soon.  I also put in a new NRG steering wheel and a dash skin I got from MSA.  The dash didn't fit quite right, but thats probably from my dash warping over the years.  Overall though it made it look much better along with the new wheel.

I wish I would've updated this a lot earlier because this is an enormous post but hopefully ill post more as i continue my progress.  I don't have too much left before shes done.  Or at least road worthy.  Soon I plan on finishing the body work and getting it painted this spring and address some suspension because the tire gap is disgusting and my flares have been sitting in my bedroom for about 6 months  :rofl:

[Bleach]

Amazing work! Thanks for the update.

[logan66]

Well I did exactly what I said I didn't want to do and not upload for a super long time.... haha 5 months later.  That being said I have a good final post for this thread and then ill probably move my efforts to the facebook page if I ever want to share anything to the group again.  That being said I really appreciate all the help I got from everyone on this forum.  You guys really helped me out a ton especially in the first few months of jumping into this project not knowing a thing about datsuns lol.

 

But anyways I've been super busy on this car and mostly with the body work.  Fortunately for me my dad used to work with I guy that worked at an old muscle car shop way back and he was my teacher for this little project.  I would work on a section of the car for a week or two and have him check it out and point me in the right direction.  All in all I learned a ton from him and how to correctly do bodywork to a car.  I didn't get as many pictures taken as I would've like but I have a few.

 

This was probably the worst spot of rust on the car and the only spot I had to cut out and weld in some sheet metal onto the fender.  After that I just used bondo to sand it all out smooth again.

 

 

 

After this I worked on the rest of the rust spots and dents and this is where I really wish I would of got all the dents and rust that I fixed because the overview picture just doesn't do justice to the amount of time that I put into it. Oh well :sleep:

 

 

 

After all the spots that needed touched up I wet sanded the rest of the car and got it ready for primer.  We kind of did a spot prime and just hit the areas I did body work on and then wetsanded it all down again.  After that we primed it again and hit the entire car.  Here is a pic of it on my dads lift waiting to get wetsanded one last time before paint.

 

 

 

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of preparing I finally got to paint it :)

 

 

 

We had quite a bit of trouble getting the paint to flow out and had to thin it down quit a bit than what the paint called for but it ended up flowing out pretty well after the first coat.  We ran in to a problem after this though.  It was getting dark right before we put our first coat of clear and and I found out bugs really like fresh paint.  We stopped after one coat of clear and we should of just not started it because we ended up having to wetsand the entire car again to get all the bugs/clear off before we could try to get some clear on it again.  Live and learn I guess haha it would also help to be in a real paint booth and not just wet the floors of my dads garage.  Anyways,  after the 2nd time clearing the car it was finally done.  For not having any previous experience with something like this the car turned out better than I would've ever imagined possible from what I started with.   I'm insanely proud of this car nowet sanded the clear for the second time)  Anyways hert only because of how it turned out but the fact that I can say I did it all myself.  That's the best part.  I don't even want to think of how many hours I have invested into this car in sanding (BTW I counted it out and I wetsanded this thing 5 times, once because of my own mistake :rofl: .  But all the sanding was done old school, by hand with a block how it should be for a car like this!)  So enough talking about it here's my final oics of my first ever Datsun restoration project!!!

 

 

 

 

 

Also, after all that work it really makes you reconsider chopping up your fenders for flares.  I'm not going that route anymore to say the least haha so hopefully the purist will enjoy that.  I did finally get some coilovers but I'm going to wait till this winter to install them and finally enjoy cruisin in this beauty. :thumbup: