Fixing the 280Z That's Been Dead for 21 Years

Hello, I have a question: how difficult can it be to get a car back on the road after sitting for more than two decades? Or better yet, how difficult can it be to do it correctly? In the summer of 2019 I managed to get my hands on this 1978 Datsun. The Z car ran and was driven for the first time after sitting for 17

years

, however the engine had no power, pressing the brake pedal was simply a suggestion, one of the wheels started smoking and everything was still falling apart, long story short the car was in trouble and as of today four

years

later it is in even worse shape and more specifically it has gone back to not running at all but even if If it still ran, the car would not be able to pass the state safety inspection required to actually register. but this time that changes today we are going to get this car drivable reliably and hopefully on the road legally for the first time since 2002.

How bad can it be now? It may seem contradictory, but this effort does not begin. with getting the car running again because it doesn't matter if it can run and drive, so I'm going to rebuild all four brakes. Many older cars use drum brakes that work by expanding two shoes outward by pressing them against the inner wall of the rotating drum to which the wheel is attached, while many cars today have disc brakes that work by squeezing two pads against a thin rotor. to which the wheels are attached. Dotson, knowing that variety is the spice of life, I decided to have both, which to me simply means that they can be a pain in the ass in multiple ways, here we go, oh my god, this is heavy, yes, this is basically a glorified paperweight, the reason it was so difficult to remove is because both pistons are completely seized in place, so it wasn't. it even worked in the first place, luckily the one on the driver's side came out fine, however it wasn't in much better condition, the brake pads were also very stuck in place as well as one of the pistons in this caliper as well, that's three out of four, so If my calculations prove that the front brakes were operating at only 25 capacity when I was driving the car, originally penetrating fluids are usually the answer to stuck pistons, but after hours without success, I finally resorted to clamping at this guy and finally broke. free, there we go, there we go, but then it got stuck again once the caliper broke in half.

I was able to remove the hydraulic seals, thus finishing this disassembly and yes, I used jaws with serrated jaws on what is supposed to be a sealing surface, but these pistons are so pitted from all the rust that they would always have to be replaced and replacing them is practically the history of each component here, this may seem like a lot to restore, but if you remove everything it is useless. They can't be reused, it's really just the caliper bodies that need work. For cast iron, they clean surprisingly well, although I suppose that could be due to the fact that one of the ultrasonic cleaners is amazing and two of these tongs are galvanized at the factory, which means minimal rust.

However, since brake fluid is hygroscopic, a lot of rust still forms where it seeps past the seals, but all of that can be removed with a brass wire wheel. It is aggressive enough to remove loose rust, but not enough to mark the cast iron surface and create problems with the roof or at least God I hope so, but as far as preparing for rebuilding, this It's literally everything, with a five-dollar seal kit, 20 new pistons, and the sobering realization that you could have bought new brake calipers for less. money we were ready to go, just insert the hydraulic seal, piston and dust seal, do that one more time, we bought them together and voila, brake caliper completely rebuilt, the only thing left now is to install the new ones brake pads along with their associated hardware.

I just realized that because they were fused, they use the old pickups. Whoever did the brake giveaway above must have thought that when the service manual says to apply a small amount of grease, it actually meant covering them with industrial glue, but hey, us. We've all

been

there, the passenger side caliper of course was rebuilt as well. It took a lot more heat and a lot more force to release the pistons, but after that the process was completely the same, leaving us with two fully functional front brakes. Well, hypothetically, these are Fully Rebuilt and should work like new, but they will only be as effective as their counterparts, so they're not bad.

All this work, of course, would be worthless if you didn't do anything with the brake lines. The hard sections were simply cleaned, but the rubber. The segments were completely replaced with new ones and once they were installed and everything was adjusted to spec, that's it, we were done with the front brakes, so now the rears are the last time I use a storm transition. I have actually never rebuilt drum brakes. I've used disc brakes a million times before, but never drums, and to be honest, they scared me a little, instead of just one thing that just slides out of the car, it's a bunch of things held together by very tight springs, but once I understood everything. separating and cleaning, it actually didn't seem that daunting.

I just had to reset the automatic adjuster, add grease where there will be metal to metal contact, and install the new parts exactly where the old ones were. Actually, it's only difficult if I don't do it. I don't know, forget to install the new wheel cylinder first. Oh, this guy is what pushes the shoes out when you press the brake pedal, so it's important that it's there and you might think that taking that into account made the second side go much faster, but no, it actually goes faster because I sped up the footage. Ok, the drum brakes are rebuilt, so now it's time to do something with the drums.

These still sound great, but the inside is completely trashed and there are replacements available online, but the only ones available at the time of filming were for seventy dollars each, which is a little out of my budget right now, so What if there is a way to save the ones I already have? Houston, possibly one of the cities of all time, the traffic is horrible, the urban planning is horrendous. is home to one of the widest highways in the entire world, all of this to say that my hell of a city's car dependency problem is also combined with an overabundance of auto repair shops that have the specialized equipment capable of repave my original. brake drums at a great price, no less, so why did I try to do it myself?

I do not know i do not know. However, I do know that everything really has to happen to make these drums at the same time. The least useful thing again is to remove any surface rust, similar to how I once stuck a motor valve into a drill to clean it evenly. The same principle can be applied here only this time with a free bench grinder and three dollars. worth of 3D printer filament with just a few measurements, 15 minutes in CAD software, and just a general disregard for my own safety. I was able to install this brake drum where it probably should never be installed and let me be the first to say it. bad idea oh my god holy that's scary what I ended up doing was never letting it get up to top speed.

I'd turn it up, turn it off, and as I slowed down but was still very fast, I'd take down everything else. I did it again. and sanded again with 220 grit sandpaper until this didn't seem like such a bad idea after all and I only lost three fingers. The results are far from what a professional would do, very far indeed, but the surface finish is absolutely good enough to work. and at least much better than when I was driving the car previously, so this little experiment actually worked now, that being said, it wasn't at all worth it to cantilever such a heavy object so far away from where any spinning mess was. designed to be on a bench grinder with a piece of plastic was downright dangerous and certainly one of the stupidest things I've ever done, sorry, one of the stupidest things I've ever done, press it twice, okay, yeah, No, that's good, we're working. it breaks well let's see how uncomfortable I look doing this I have rear brakes I have front brakes and we have the handbrake working we also have all the brakes working and more than just brakes working that means the car is going to pass inspection why you laugh?

You're laughing? They're laughing because the Texas DMV actually requires 20 things to be done with Snuff for a car to be considered roadworthy and brakes are just one of them, surprisingly, although there's nothing on this rust safety list . or even just overall structural integrity since this is a criterion for a safety inspection that is a complete disregard for actual safety and incredibly irresponsible for the Texas government; However, it does mean that I don't actually have to do anything about the frame rails that are literally taking the car off, so yes, I will do something about that when I fully restore this, but not today, so we have breaks and of course In fact, we already had all these things too, but we don't have anything regarding electronics because, for some reason, they all decided to stop working.

No lights, no horn, no windshield wipers, no wait, just kidding, uh, literally everything came back. to turn on and, uh, I'm not going to question that actually everything except the headlights came back on. Honestly, they've never worked since I've had the car and oh, now I think I know why, luckily for me, I have the Wonders cigar box that I mentioned in the first video, but to the car's original owner, the guy who He sold it to the guy I bought it from, he loved it. as for keeping a log book of every purchase made, as well as a surplus of spare glass fuses, so with a couple of them in place the headlights came on until of course I lost all power again.

Oh come on, everything was on. the battery is perfectly fine at 12.7 volts and none of the fuses are blown, so what's going on? It took some digging but I finally realized that the four fuse links have incredibly loose connections with the relays turning on and off and the dome light flickering simply from barely touching the wires as these are essentially the main fuses that power every subcircuit of this car. I would really like to not lose power when driving over a speed bump, so hopefully I rectified this. I cleaned each terminal and tightened the Spade connector to make them a very tight connection and that seemed to fix everything.

The overhead light is on and it doesn't flicker at all when I move this, so yeah, they all feel solid, they should be good to go. and instead of using the old covers that are broken, my dad bought new ones four years ago when we first bought the car, so thanks dad, okay, long story short, we have headlights, high beams with the indicator lights running, windshield wipers, license plate lights, running lights, brake lights. lights left signal right signal dangers horn and reversing lights oh we don't have reversing lights well technically the reversing lights aren't on the list so actually we already have everything checked but if I'm here too I could take care of them. oh, you know, those rust holes, you know, the ones that are caused by the water that likes the pool here, well, they're practically directly above the reverse lights, yeah, the bulbs and sockets They were completely rusted, but after taking them out, we cleaned the connector and put a new bulb in here, yes, it still didn't work at this point.

I realized it might be a good idea to check the reverse switch on the transmission and when I did, oil started leaking out of the electrical connection, oh my. Ah, that's it. The faulty reverse light switch could be faulty so I made a small jumper just to verify that this was actually the problem and sure enough the lights came on correctly so a new switch later we finally have running lights back, so this time the real car is actually there. I'll have the inspection at least as soon as I find out why the engine won't start right.

The last time the engine wouldn't start, the culprit turned out to be dirty fuel injectors and I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case as well. now because even though I cleaned them and added new gas, the tank was most likely contaminated from fuel that had

been

there for over 20 years. Gasoline is very badIt has a habit of rusting over time into a solid, rubber-like varnish that loves to wreak havoc on everything it touches, including steel gas tanks, so not only do I need to clean the injectors again, but I also need to remove them. from the tank any oxidized fuel that is still there, as well as any rust that is now, hopefully not too.

Bad for the uninitiated. I hate gas tanks. I went through three junk tanks on my Pontiac Fiera restoration project, each one full of debris and holes before I finally got a good one and was forced to repair the absolutely destroyed tank that my gpz1000rx came with when the only one. Another clean replacement in the world was confiscated by US customs when I tried to import it into the United States and now I'm as sure as I am that everyone wants to see me fix another gas tank. I'm going to let someone else deal with this, it took a few phone calls but I finally found a radiator shop that was not only willing to come within 10 feet of this but was confident they could fix it and after a few days, they turned this into Turns out, paying a professional to do a job for you could be a good investment, after all, the easiest gas tank repair of my life, except for the fact that it wasn't, While being rust free is definitely an important criterion for a well-functioning gas tank, another possibly more important criterion is that the fuel should be able to flow out of it, you can say, Ronnie, you just forgot to clean the injectors, so that the car doesn't run and that's true, my enthusiasm got the better of me and I forgot to do it, however, if the fuel was flowing and consequently pressurized, then it should have exploded. everywhere in the moment I took out the return line but it was completely dry and the irrefutable proof was that not even an ounce of fuel came out of the pump directly, there is definitely a blockage in the gas tank at 100 dollars.

I paid 200 to have this fixed professionally so I didn't have to and it's not even fixed let me ask you a question what size shirt do you wear? Hello and welcome to Ronnie's Automotive, where there are absolutely no gas tank repairs. That's right, I'm done with this commemorative shirt. Last time I'm going to fix a gas tank on this channel, so if you two hate gas tanks with every ounce of your body and want to support my projects or maybe you're just looking for something to add to your growing beige collection , then call 1-800, run automatically and pick up one of these t-shirts today, don't actually call that number we checked and it doesn't go anywhere, but you might when this video comes out, so just click the link on the right description. below the one on my patreon anyway back to the clog so yeah this was pretty bad not even 120 PSI of air pressure was enough to remove all the rust that must still be trapped here so if it's not air, what about chemicals with some vinyl? tube and a funnel.

I was able to fill the entire collection tube with evaporest; Hopefully a few hours of soaking should do the trick, but going a step further, I also improvised this simple filtration circuit using a cheap 12 volt fuel pump and a motorcycle battery. The idea was that it could now suck out the clog now that it has been loosened trapping all the rust particles in this filter and that didn't work at all. No, it's still clogged. Wait, what if it's not rust? That's a very good question and apparently I wasn't the first to ask it. Looking through some old forum posts, I discovered that Nissan made these tanks with a very fine metal mesh filter at the inlet of the pickup tube, where it doesn't rust but is varnished. it loves to foul, so if we are dealing with oxidized fuel, it will need denatured alcohol instead, it's like normal natural alcohol, but you just have to steal it from its home and force it to live a life in captivity, but with a collection tube .

Full of it, the level was going down within minutes and after letting it sit overnight, if I use compressed air now strange, yeah, it's not building up at all, it just flows down, oh my goodness, I blew out the clog, holy crap I did it, but I'm still not sure about doing that, it just exploded varnish everywhere inside the rotating bowl, so I took out the filtration circuit system once again and this time it started working immediately; In fact, it worked so well that the filter clogged within the first 30 seconds. to run it and I had to clean it up and in fact over the course of the next half hour I was running this which happened several times but eventually I got to a point where nothing else was coming out which was perfect timing because the switch decided it was done, good oil pressure, fuel level is not below vacuum like before and maybe we are overcharging the battery so it needs to be checked, but this is working fine considering it runs horribly. so yeah, it's running great, it basically just needs a tune up and the first thing I did was an oil change, although that may not be as big a factor in how it runs, it was something I still had to do in the It's been four years since I've had the car and that's not good.

I also went ahead and changed the fuel filter, capped the coolant, and changed a silicone coupler to replace the factory intake boot that had a slight vacuum leak. Once everything was done, the car was running perfectly or at least I thought so. I thought it sounded good. Roman thought it sounded good, but as soon as I put the wheels back on and tried to take it on its maiden voyage after repairs, the engine was no longer running. However there was no power, the brakes worked so ok, the engine accelerated perfectly fine and in neutral but as soon as it was running and under load time it had problems, great way to test if a cylinder is

dead

or it's not pulling the spark plug wires while the car is running and if the engine misfires that means it was running but if there's no change that means it wasn't doing anything to begin with and it turns out the spark plugs were changed last seen 40 years ago they were incredibly dirty so with a new spark plug head and a new set of wires this car will finally run properly so to answer the question I asked at the beginning of this video it was very difficult Going from a car that ran smoothly in 21 years to one that will start like new took months of work and I can only imagine how much longer it will take once the garage renovation is finished and the full restoration of this car begins, so thank you to watch, buy a t-shirt from the link. down and until next time I will see you later foreigners