BenZed

Before I go on with the painting prep of the car, I should talk about the engine. As I wanted an angry L-series engine and I had some budget to play with, I entrusted the engine build to Stewart Wilkins of SWR. Starting with an F54 L28 block, we added an LD28 crank, L24 conrods and KA24 pistons for a capacity of just over 3.1 litres and compression of around 10.5:1. The head is a P90A (big ports, small chambers) which I sourced from Japan. The head had already been ported, but SWR ported it more and added new valves, Tomei springs and a 298-degree cam with 14mm lift (big). The sump is extended and the engine features an SWR balancer designed to control the harmonics of the long-stroke engine. Final balancing was done with the new OS Giken TS2BD twin-plate clutch already attached to the crank. Having been frustrated by a triple-Weber set up in the past, I decided to go with an OER injection set-up. This uses a Weber-style manifold with six 45mm throttles. The manifold was match-ported to the head, along with the long-primary Trust exhaust manifold. I found all of these parts second-hand in Japan too.

I painted the engine bay and interior myself to save a bit of money and speed things up (the project was already dragging on a bit by this stage). The next big issue to tackle was the sunroof, which had to go. The metal around the edge of the sunroof was rusted and buckled, to the extent that we couldn't easily repair it. Instead one of my friends suggested making a carbon-fibre skin for the roof. We made a mould of another car's roof and produced a one-off skin with one layer of carbon and one or two layers of fibreglass. The roof was cut out a bit further, with supports welded in to add strength to the roof skin, which is quite flexible compared to the original metal. The skin was then glued onto the remaining parts of the roof panel with sikaflex and blended into the pillars. The end result is smooth and a bit lighter than the original roof too.

While we were in welding mode, it made sense to do some more chassis improvements. We welded in two braces on each of the rear suspension towers up to the roof, as Zeds are a bit weak in the C-pillar and often crack at the panel join. A cross-bar was welded in too, which doubles as a harness mount. In the front another bar was welded in to each of the inner guards to increase rigidity (this is a fairly common modification in Japan). The lower part of the radiator support had been bent by some sort of impact, so it was cut out and replaced with 50mm square section steel which is also much stronger. With this done, I moved on to stripping the engine bay and interior. A few other rust areas were cut out and welded up in the process and any unnecessary brackets etc were removed.

The new quarter panel repair sections and sills were TIG-welded into place in an effort to reduce buckling of the original metal. Unfortunately it was still a very big job to get the quarters looking factory again. Some extra sections needed to be welded into the tops of the sills and the vertical panel for the tail-lights needed some fresh metal welded in before we could fit the replacement panel above it. The rear quarters had both been repaired in the past, but not very well, so there was about a centimeter of bog in some places. I got it down to just a light skim coat instead. The new floor panels were MIG-welded in, as it is thicker metal and easier to work with.

Here's my latest Zed project. Some readers may be familiar with my last project, the burgundy 1JZ-powered 240Z project car in Zoom magazine around 2001-2003. That car was sold to a buyer in the UK about three years ago and about six months later I got started on this project. If you read through my posts you'll see it is just about finished now. The plan was to build a car that was as light as possible while still being road-registered. I also wanted to use a highly-tuned non-turbo L-series engine, like most modified Zeds in Japan use. I started off with a fairly typical 1973 240Z, mostly original apart from a sunroof and various minor body repairs. It had about the average amount of rust, but none under the battery tray, which was a key consideration for me. Stripping the car revealed a lot of rust in the rear quarters, sills and floor, plus the panel above the tail lights. I purchased a number of repair panels from All Zed in Hornsby and set about cutting out the rot. As you can see, it looked quite a mess by the time everything was cut out. I bought door skins and repair sections for the front guards too, but later decided to use fibreglass replacements for these parts.