LTJ

Wow! I have been slacking on posting here! To be fair I lost my login details to post pics and a lot of other stuff has happened! I made a new Flickr account to post these pics... I went ahead and started building steel flares started with 38x25mm steel box section: Welded all the little cuts and metal finished it to this point with no filler at all: After getting all the flares to this point I actually sold the car, we made a massive move to another state, sold or gave away most of our stuff and are now starting from scratch in the middle of the outback, where we have bought a 100+ year old stone cottage with a a massive shed. After we get the house and shed up to scratch, I may go looking for another project Datto... The new owner has kept in contact though, and the good news is that it is actually being built for rallying! Here are some update pics after the cage went in:

Good to see this thread still going!

That would be awesome! Check out www.ratrodbikes.com/forum if you like, I'm a moderator over there, currently running a muscle bike build-off!

Amazing what you stumble on in the middle of the night watching YouTube: Some great A10 Datsun footage in there!

Nice work!

Glad to see this is still going! ?

You are going to like what I am working on at the moment then! All steel rally flares! Update coming soon...

Nice work as always! ?

You may notice in that last photo a big chunk of filler fell off the back door, so I went searching to see what it was covering: Turned out to be a decent crease that someone had tried to pull and repair years ago, I knew there was something there and a matching one on the front door when I bought it, but figured it was unlikely to be rust that high up, so I didn't worry about it. The time had come to do something about it now though, I figured just replacing the door would be the easiest and probably best result, but any doors within two hours or so of me were rusty in the bottom, so it seemed like I would be only making things worse, so while I wait to get a decent door I decided to make these ones a bit better. Donor 910 trunklid from the same wreck I stripped for the gearbox and other parts: Bent some returns down the long sides to help prevent warping: Fitted up: Tacked up: More welding with lots of cooling using a wet rag and then sanded and refitted: Result was not too bad, definitely not perfect but good enough until I find a better door, still have to do the front door too...

Now I had the wheels on, I decided to adjust the ride height, the rear was easy, I just swapped the lowered Kings springs I currently had for 910 rear springs: Longer but slightly softer, end result was great. Front required a bit more work: Here is the end result: Running roughly 1 1/4" higher than standard and about 2 1/2" higher than what I had. The balance of the car is better now too, the old rear springs were a bit too hard with no weight in the back, the new ones match better with the fronts.

I thought I was already a cool kid just by driving a Datsun? Vintage Cibie Super Oscars turned up on FB Marketplace for the right price, so I snapped them up quick! The guy originally bought them new to run on his rally car in 1973, so there is some pedigree with them too... I just have to build the front bar to mount them on!

Still updating this thread from where I left off: The Datsun A10/Stanza/160J/Violet is of course a hugely successful rally car and pictures like these popping up in my Facebook feed were starting rub off on me: It seemed the obvious place to start if you want that look is the wheels, but people want $1,000+ for those cool original 6 spoke 14x6" Enkies and that is just not in my budget! Of course the non factory teams back in the day used various other wheels, but I wasn't liking any I found within my desired budget. That is until the day I was browsing the Datsun Facebook groups and someone had posted a set of 5 vintage Globe rally wheels in 14x6", they were of course rather rough as they has seen many rallies over the years: After they arrived at my place, a reasonable amount of paint stripper, some work with a scraper and wire brush got them a bit better: Some more work with a light file and a nylon brush on a drill got them prepped for a repaint: Cleaned them with Prepsol and hit them with epoxy etch primer, while doing this I struggled to get an even coverage between the spokes without spraying too much on the face of the spokes, so when it came time for the white I went in with a 1" brush first: Two coats of 2 pack white later: Followed by 2 coats of clear: Got tires fitted up and put them on the car, I was slightly worried they may not balance up well or be bent, but they were all very good and straight, very pleased! Looking much better than the original 13x5" steelies!

Yeah, they kept using them as a result of the "Australian vehicle content" laws, they got a import tax break if they used a certain percentage of Australian made parts. So my '81 A10 got the BW40 trans, a BorgWarner 68 diff and Girlock brakes, opinions differ on which parts were better, I think most agree the Japanese auto was the better of the two transmissions, the BW68 diff had a slightly bigger gearset than the Hitachi (6.8" vs 6.5") but seem roughly equal strength, and the Girlock brakes are actually easier to get parts for over here than the imported ones as the exact same brakes were used on probably 50% of the cars sold around that time, whatever the brand, including Mitsubishi, Toyota etc... I have been told the Girlock brakes have a bigger pad/shoe friction area, but I have not compared them myself. Interestingly the BorgWarner trans kept getting used in it's various incarnations over here until around 1990, when the local 6 cylinder Ford Falcons switched to a BTR 4 speed, before that they were running a BW51. 3.5L V8 Rovers back in the '70's ran a BW65... Did your 910's over there still run an L series? I thought you guys were usually a step up capacity wise compared to us usually, so would have expected a Z22 or something. For instance we got the A10 only with the L16, our 720 trucks were L18 before roughly '84, then switched to Z22, whereas I think you guys got the bigger motors right from the start of the 720's?

Yep, decided going through the legal red tape for engine swaps and diff swaps was too much effort. That transmission IS the BW40 floor shift I pulled from my A10 Stanza, the box is from an '84 910 Bluebird (Maxima) that had a L20b in front of it.

Wow, I kinda left this thread in the middle of nowhere didn't I! Sorry about that! I decided to change things up a bit, keep the L16, and sell the worked L20b and Toyota diff. Still went ahead with the longtail 5 speed swap though! Pedalbox was a direct swap: Fair bit of length difference between the auto and 5 speed: Mount was easy enough to fab up: Driveshaft needed shortening of course: Used a CV boot as a shift boot, just made a plate with a piece of tube for it to clamp to: Everything went together as expected with no issues. The car always seemed a bit sluggish, I had put it down to the auto, but even after the swap it did not have the go it should have. Ended up tracing the problem to a gummed up secondary butterfly on the carb, was probably gummed up when I bought it. I pulled out my spare carbs and they were gummed up too, talked to some other Datsun owners and they had the same issue. Decided to fix it once and for all by modifying it to progressive secondary instead of vacuum: That made it so much better to drive! Next I decided it needed a better exhaust, the one it had on it was tiny, all press bent, rusty and cracking at the mufflers... My solution involved a few pieces of 2" tube, a couple of 180 degree mandrel bends and a chambered sports muffler: That made it sound so much better, but boy did it drone around town! Next weekend I added a straight through hotdog to the center section: That fixed the drone, I lost some volume at full throttle, but this doesn't give me headaches now!