This page describes what has taken up a lot of my free time for more than 19 years, my Datsun 240 Z. The relationship with the car is really of the love/hate type! Well, for better or worse, here's some documentation of what you can do if you really are a freak, like me!
I've owned the car since 1988. I ran it in stock condition in the summer of -89. After a few years, I put it on the street again with a Chevy 350 and a Muncie M21. The engine has been dynoed to 410 hp. I am currently putting an LS7 crate motor in it. I have chopped the roof and put in a roll cage. The picture to the left has been slightly doctored to show what it will look like fully finished. (Which will take a few more years yet.)
If you're interested in all the details of the car, please keep on reading! I am going to update my page continuously, so please check back. THE MOST CURRENT PICTURES WILL BE ON THE LAST PAGE. Questions and comments are welcome in the guest book or at my e-mail address: chevyz240@hotmail.com!
This is how the photo looked before doctoring it. As you can see, the Torque Thrusts are placed in front of the car, and I've put boards under the car to simulate the ride height I'm hopefully going to be able to attain, with quite a few mods to the suspension and floor pan.
Here you can see the current status of the car as of November 2008.
Follow along to see the development of the car since I bought it on 12/20/88!
This is what I brought home a few days before Christmas! The car was imported from California the summer before, by the guy that I bought it from. It had a 260 Z motor in it. It had almost no rust, except for the floor pan, that had been repaired terribly. I guess that the dried-out weather-stripping made the car leak in a lot of water that collected on the floor.
After some work during the winter, this is what the car looked like in the summer of -89. Back then it was my everyday car. It ran OK, and I and a friend went on a road trip to Paris, France. I also made a lap on the Nürburgring Nordschleife!
Since I had took on too big a project in building a tube framed, chopped top, Chevy SB motivated, Volvo 122 Amazon, which never seemed to be finished, I made the decision to drop the Chevy SB in the Datsun to have a fun car to drive the next summer, while work commenced on the Amazon. Yeah right... Some people never learn, eh, Mister Positive Thinking?
This is what the Volvo should have looked like, when finished. That unfortunately never happened, as I parted the project out in pieces. The guy who bought the body was going to build a caravan of it, towing it behind the chopped Volvo 122 Amazon he already had!!!!
What ended up in the Z's spacious engine compartment was this Chevy 350 with AFR 220 heads, Victor Jr, Holley 750 DP, Crower roller rockers, among other parts. The headers I built have 35" long 1 3/4" primaries dumping into 3" collectors, which in turn are connected to a custom built dual 3" exhaust system with custom mufflers. If you look carefully, you can see part of the block lightening that I did. This was inspired by Smokey Yunick's (RIP, you old cheater!) book Power Secrets. The block was relieved of 10 pounds of cast iron.
The engine installed in the car, after initial start up, with everything temporarily hooked up. After a lot more work than I had anticipated, the car was back on the road again in -96. I ran it with the V8 for two years, before deciding on chopping the roof (a disease caught when doing the Volvo), and putting a roll cage in. Again, this was supposed to be done during one winter. Hrrrmmppff...
After having made hundreds of renderings of the car in chopped mode (a few of them can be seen here), both cutting, pasting and drawing on real photos, and doing simple CAD sketches, I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted the car to look. I wanted it to look like it was meant to be that way from the factory, not to look like it had actually been chopped.
In order to get the sleek lines I was looking for, the windshield had to be laid back. Using my "ideal" rendering, see pic, I cut the entire roof off, lowered it about 3" and shortened it at the top of the windshield to get the windshield slope I was looking for. (In this sketch, the car has also been sectioned, in a way; the sills have been made lower by raising the floor, and the suspension has been radically lowered. While this is the way I really like the car to look, it involves way to much work. All the suspension pickups have to be moved, the motor needs a super shallow dry sump oil pan, there is no space for the exhaust system (or me, the height of the car being around 41") and so on. In reality the car will have to be slightly higher. Oohh, the agony I have gone through contemplating all this!)
