Ben's Dirty RBS30

[Dirtydatto]

Well here I am

Honestly thought I had my head around what this car would take to get on the road when I bought it but lo and behold it just keeps throwing gremlins rust and more than enough fibreglass at me. 

So I thought I'd document the leaps and bounds over all these hurdles (and the hole that's burning away in my pocket) for everyone and bring you all along on the journey.  

So without further ado I present to you the way I broke to my partner that I wanted a second baby 

Not the human kind and not the first 260z kind either. 

Elegant and tastefully done I know, but I knew I'd gotten away with it when she asked if this one actually drives and I said yes.... although I whispered the part about it having a massive hole in the floor.

A late model 76 260z with a previously cream interior and sporting an RB30E conversion (all of these things give me problems later) my eventual aim is to take advantage of the EFI Rb30 and tune this into my daily driver, before maybe getting a bit more adventurous and throwing in either an RB30ET or a 25/30DET down the line!

So! To kick the thread off I'm going to show off the car in the condition I bought it and try to highlight the many problems I didn't yet know I had, before detailing what and how I overcame them in each subsequent post as I wildly rush this build along in time to be ready for the Retrospeed Wilby park sprints in April. 

Enjoy!



 

 

 

Edited February 13, 2020 by Dirtydatto

[Dirtydatto]

---Passenger side floorpan---

So, obviously this was one I knew about  before I bought the car.... or at least I thought I did.

The reason this was cut out was because the previous owner had found a few rust holes in the passenger floorpan that had been coated over with fiberglass by the owner before him. So he removed what he could find and cut it out to a square ish shape, with the intention of applying a floorpan insert similar to this 

The only problem being, this is a late model (end of 76) 260z, which means that the floorpan has a slight bulge to accommodate a cat aaaaand the chassis rails are deeper. Funnily enough this also means that the both of us at different times could find a nobody in Australia that had these patches readily available so options were fairly limited. I have zero welding knowledge and while I do really want to learn, I didn't think that starting on a chassis rail was a great idea, so I got in touch with Rob from the Z factory in seaford who offered to come over and have a look at the car.

What we found wasn't fun
One bit  


--- Floorpan 2: fiberglass boogaloo ---

This image is just for illustrative purposes and not actually my car, but the gist of it is that because it was covered by the seats on both sides when I bought the car, both I and the inspector missed this section of the floorpan, on both sides ….. fun 



And this is actually what my drivers side one looked like after I took off the seat for a peak




So with the shitest possible outcome confirmed we decided to pull the trigger on completely replacing both the driver and passenger side floor pans and rails, from the top of the footwell back to just before the luggage raiser. In hindsight it was absolutely the correct call.


--- Floorpan 3: damage and repair ---

Lets kick things off with the damage 

 

I had no idea the rails were that bad until they came off,but Rob had a decent enough hunch that with rusted floorpans comes rusted rails... he turned out to be pretty bang on. 
It looked like at one point they had already rusted away, and rather than cutting it all out a previous owner had simply coated the rail with an new section. You can kind of see in the first image of the rail on the left, all in all not a lot of fun

And this is how the S30 looked with all of that cut out, properly flintstoned.



I'm going to continue with the conclusion in the next post, I've just run out of time at the moment

Stay tuned!

Edited February 13, 2020 by Dirtydatto