Leaderboard

The original wiring loom for the Z was an utter dogs breakfast: Dirty, extra wires, soldered joints, cut wires, crimped joiners, broken plugs, broken & burnt(!) pins and... SCOTCH LOCKS!!! Not surprising given the condition of the rest of the vehicle, and obviously there was no way I could fit this to the restored Z... Fortunately I have a friend who builds wiring looms as a side-hussle, although he prefers to build Millspec MoTeC race looms, I pleaded with him to remake the factory loom for the Z. He said yes, on the proviso that he able to acquire the correctly coloured wires and that I order two looms (fine by me) and that I NOT hassle him for it. After some searching, all the correct coloured wires were obtained in the correct gauge, along with new plugs. Mint! I waited over 18 months, but he did deliver with a new body loom, engine bay loom, headlight fly leads and a checked and refurbished dash loom. The original Nissan wiring tag was also able to be saved on the dash loom! Refurbished dash loom: Cost was eye-watering as it's build by hand, but I can now guarantee that there won't be any electrical issues with this Z when it's finished!

Have had very recent experience making a claim with Shannons. Mixed bag...... They have agreed to a full payout, I get to keep the wreck (I had salvage rights written into the policy) and they have agreed to having it towed from Albury to Newcastle at their expense and delivered to me. IOnly complaint is that its taken nearly 5 weeks to be assessed, although possibly because its was a little out of the ordinary - I had it towed from the towing yard to a very generous fellow Datsun owner's shed for storage out of the weather, and it was assessed from photos rather than in person. All correspondence after logging the claim seemed to be with the parent company rather than Shannons specific people, who tried to follow the script and tick the boxes for assessing a modern car (No, it doesn't have a proper VIN, just a 9 digit chassis number, etc) Ohh, and after many phone calls chasing up what was happening, they always seem to be "experiencing a higher than normal call volume" because despite ringing early in the day, lunchtime, afternoon, after hours, I think the quickest a call has been answered is 50 minutes, most times well over an hour and the record was 80 minutes..... I asked about when the money may be in my account and was told "we're currently experiencing a higher than noormal claim volume and it may take up to a month".... All up, not too bad, just very slow (and looks like I won't be fully paid out till at least 2 months after the accident) The tow car (insured with a different insurance company) was assessed, written off and money in my account a cople of weeks ago. But they were generally unhelpful and made me jump thru hoops over every little thing. Dunno which was worse.

Onto the suspension. Aug '22: The front engine cross-member had clearly been damaged in the accident - the kink in it was a give-away. However I also noticed that it had inner LCA eccentric eye bolts fitted, presumably to get the camber back to somewhere normal - check out how far it's been slotted! I thought about fixing it, but it wasn't going to be economically viable, so I went through my collection of crap and found one. This was media blasted and painted. (The old one went into the scrap bin). We then moved onto media blasting an de-oxidizing the suspension components. Then they were given a coat of Stain Black as per factory. When we were reassembling the brake components, they all looks very new. I queried Tony (the owner) and he confirmed that the brakes and wheel bearings at all four corners had been recently reco'd. This was good - one less job for us to do. I did think it was strange considering the state of the rest of the vehicle though... The heater box, fresh air duct and fan housing was also given the same treatment: