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cw240z

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  • Location
    Dallas, TX
  • Cars
    1972 240z, 1972 510, 1976 620

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  1. Thanks! Need to drop the driveshaft off this week to have it shortened. Also which brand of KA header works well with some modification for the 510?
  2. With the wheel wells done, I finally have the entire underside of the 510 stripped, treated, and covered with a tintable bedliner to replicate the factory look. Pretty happy with the results. Should be a very durable finish.
  3. Made some more progress on the 510. I picked up a 280zx fuel pump a few months back for the car and wanted to install it in a location that allowed me to retain the factory hard lines. Only issue I had was the 90 degree inlet on the pump. Fortunately I had removed quite a bit of emission equipment on my 620 and this little hardline laying around. It worked great to route the fuel line in the correct direction B) . I believe in this position directly under the fuel tank I wont have any fuel starvation issues.
  4. Finished up rebuilding the rear suspension of the car. Rockauto sells a great kit to restore the rear brakes on the 510 if you don't plan on upgrading the drums. Pretty happy with the current progress on the car. My next thing to do is finish up running the fuel and battery lines. Does anyone have photos of their trunk mounted battery and how you routed the cable to the engine bay?
  5. Thanks!! If you need any extra info on this just let me know.
  6. More recent progress on the car. Reinstalling fuel lines and the handbrake hardware
  7. Just posted in the general discussion my own take on platting parts with some step by step instructions!
  8. I wanted to share my recent success with zinc platting my own hardware with anyone who's interested in doing this yourself. Here are just a few things I've done recently. Once you give this a couple of tries it becomes a very easy and oddly satisfying job to do! It only cost me around $200 in materials and supplies to do this, which should last long enough to plate everything possible to your car. List of what you'll need and where to get it: 1. Chemicals The basics of this setup include platting your hardware in a solution with pure zinc. The zinc coating is necessary in order to apply the colored chromate finish which is what gives you that yellowish, greenish, purplish color. Chemicals include: 1 Pack Copy Cad®/Zinc Part A & B (Makes 1.5 Gals) Zinc Brightener Yellow Chromate All of this can be purchased from http://www.caswellplating.com/ They sell a complete kit with a ton of extra stuff that also includes this. These are the bare basics needed to get started. The kit is overpriced and as long as you aren't doing this outside in freezing weather the tank heaters are not necessary. 2. Power Source The way this system works is by using an adjustable DC power supply where your parts are suspended in the Copy Cad solution hooked to the negative terminal of the power supply and a piece of pure zinc is submerged and connected to the positive terminal of the supply. You're essentially stripping the zinc off and platting it to the hardware surface. It's all based on surface area. The power supply I use is a cheap lab setup I got on eBay. Once you connect the two terminals and complete the circuit you adjust the current according to the surface area being platted. For each square inch use 140 mA. So a bolt with 2 square inches is set to 280 mA, 3 inches 420 mA, and so on. I purchased a power supply like this one here http://www.ebay.com/itm/30V-5A-Precision-Variable-Adjustable-Digital-DC-Power-Supply-Regulated-Lab-Grade-/380937875451?hash=item58b1aaaffb Don't worry about the voltage, it will fluctuate as you plate parts and will adjust as you tune in the current. Now you're almost ready to plate your own parts! 3. Metals - Pure Zinc - 1/2" Copper Pipe - Welding wire Now that you have a power supply and chemicals to plate parts with, you need the zinc to get the job done. The cheapest way to get a bunch of 99.999% pure zinc is picking up a roll of zinc roof moss prevention strips. This comes in a roll of 50 feet. I thought it would be an easy find at my local Lowes or Home Depot but that wasn't the case. Amazon (or eBay) has it and for a decent price. You can get it here http://www.amazon.com/Legend-Roofing-Products-Strip-Preventer/dp/B00LSJ4SQ4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448767533&sr=8-1&keywords=zinc+moss I also found it useful to grab a 1/2" copper pipe and use that to hook parts to when platting. More on that later. 4. Buckets - 3 plastic buckets We now have our chemicals, power source, and metals needed to plate some cool parts. The chemicals come in 1.5 gallon quantities, so go pick up some plastic tubs/buckets bigger than 1.5 gallons that have lids and can be stored with the solutions inside of them for later use. 4. Distilled Water You need several gallons of distilled water to mix the solutions up in and clean the parts with. I'd get at least 6 gallons to start with. Here's some more info from the company that offers a complete kit http://www.caswellplating.com/kits/images/PlateIt.pdf For me my setup to platting parts first begins with preparing the hardware. I like to let anything I want platted soak in Evaporust for at least a day. This gets rid of any rust and also gives you a clean bare surface to work with. If you want the parts to have a deep shine to them, wire wheel them before platting. Now is a good time to grab a set of rubber gloves to keep grease and hand oils from messing up the platting. While the zinc platting system is very resilient to impurities, it's helps keep your hands from getting stained in the near future when you mess with the chromates. Next we need to prepare the solutions. When you receive the chemicals they should have the correct amounts on the bottle to pour into your tubs. One tub should have the two part Zinc solution and brightener, one with just distilled water, and the other with the chromate. Set them up with the distilled water tub in the middle to keep from cross contaminating. Grab the 1/2" diameter copper pipe and cut it into manageable lengths that can span the length of your tubs. We'll hang parts over this later. With your gloves on, grab your favorite degreaser like Simply Green and hose the parts down. After that take some welding wire and wrap what you want to have platted leaving enough wire to hook over the copper pipe and suspend the parts in your tub. With that ready, dip the parts in the distilled water a few times to remove any degreaser and hang them in the solution. Now cut yourself a strip of the zinc plate and submerge that in the solution surrounding the parts being platted. Make sure a portion of it is out of the solution so you can hook your power supply to. Parts and solutions are all setup and ready to go! Now here's the part that includes a little math. We need to guesstimate the surface area being platted. Give it your best shot, it's gonna take a few times to get it right. Adjust the power supply accordingly, 140 mA per square inch. When you get it right you should see the parts start to bubble all over. Negative terminal on the parts, positive on the zinc. It's okay to pull the parts out and check on them. I usually leave them in there for 7-12 minutes, it's not going to hurt it if you leave it in there longer. Once a good zinc finish has been applied, removed the parts and dip them a few times in the distilled water to prepare them for the chromate. Once dipped suspend them in the yellow chromate for 20-30 seconds. Longer you wait the darker they get. Immediately remove them and dip them in the distilled water to stop the reaction. I like to hit the parts with a heat gun to dry off any extra chromate and speed up the process. You'll need to set them aside and not touch the parts for a few hours. After that you should have some awesome looking hardware ready to be installed back on the car!
  9. I'll get on that then! A great winter project! B)
  10. What I did was pick up a five foot copper pipe from Home Depot and cut it down into lengths long enough to sit on top of my bucket of solution. Welding wire works great to suspend whatever you want in the bucket for platting. Just wrap the wire around what you want to plate, and make a hook on the other end so you can easily pick up and move the parts from bucket to bucket. If you wrap them loosely the zinc will get in behind the wire and plate everything just fine. Here I tried using 16 gauge bare copper wire. Makes stringing parts easier than the welding wire but it's difficult to keep them suspended on the copper pipe. As far as bare metal for platting I'm not a huge fan of sand blasting either. Too messy for smaller parts and difficult to hold. The Evaporust will get parts down to a dull bare finish. If you want them shiny when platted just wire wheel them and it will give them a nice glossy color.
  11. I'd be happy to post where I purchased everything and how I have set this system up. It makes a huge difference to the appearance of any part of your car.
  12. One of the details of this project I've been working on lately is platting the original hardware on this car myself. Normally you have to disassemble everything you want to have platted, clean it as best you can, send it off to some shop to do it, and pray that you get everything back you paid to have platted. That didn't go as planned for me, the shop I used lost several unique parts to my SU linkage. I figured there had to be a better way to go about getting that yellow zinc finish at home. I had also tried the three rattle cans of different hues to get the effect, but that just looked like cheap plastic. Searching the internet I found a company who sold a DIY platting kit that could be used to plate parts in a blue, yellow, or green zinc chromate finish depending on your setup. The whole patting process is very basic and easy to do. I try to soak whatever parts that need platting in a cup of Evaporust over night to strip them down to a clean and bare surface. Then its a matter of stringing the parts up and hooking them to a power source. You set them in a solution with pure zinc in order to give the yellow coating a surface to adhere to. Everything is based off of surface area. Once a good zinc coating has formed you wash the parts off and dunk them into the yellow solution for 25-30 seconds. Then BAM! Freshly platted parts done in no time! The gas cap looked like complete crap before I platted it. It's a pretty user friendly system to work with in order to get the right shades of yellow on your parts. Also work in a well ventilated area! In total I'm in at around $200 for all the supplies and equipment to do this. If you keep things clean than it should last a very long time. I've platted just about everything possible under the car that came from the factory that way. Definitely worth the money!
  13. Nice!! I was pretty happy with the deal. I haven't heard this one run yet but from what I can tell there shouldn't be any surprises.
  14. I really like the factory look of having the underside of the car textured in the body color, similar to how this 240z was done After searching what was out there I came across this tintable bedliner kit from U-POL. It comes with everything you need to spray, just add 10% of your choice of color to the bottle. After several long nights of media blasting the underside of the car and applying a POR-15 rust inhibitor primer, the four bottles of Raptor liner covered just enough to do from the firewall to the trunk. It lays down very easy on the car and you can always go back over it to get an even texture or to spot in a scratch in the future. It's also a very messy job, I wouldn't recommend doing it in a garage, or even a paint booth.
  15. After getting the top of the floor cleaned up I turned my attention to the underside. The car had several layers of undercoating applied to it throughout the years. It had also been sitting in that field for over 15 years so it was in pretty sorry shape when I got to it. What was left of the rear suspension is sitting beside it ready to be blasted and painted.
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