christoc

Was feeling nostalgic tonight, figured I would see if I could come across any details on the car. Haven't seen anything lately, but if anyone has seen the car around the Denver area (assuming it is still there) let me know.

Anyone come across the car at all recently? Been a while since I've heard anything about it.

I emailed that guy last week to see how the car was, and he told me that he sold it a few months later. If you're the new owner, be sure to look me up and let me know how the car is doing. http://www.project240z.com and also, on the off chance that anyone sees this 1973 Super Beetle, drop me a line as well! http://www.projectvw.com/

It has been a while since I've been here. Last fall a guy contacted me with info about the 240z, having purchased it from the previous owner (the guy I sold it to) here's the blog post. http://www.project240z.com/Blog/itemId/479/The-240z-Lives-and-it-looks-great.aspx

And she's gone, here's a full blog post I just did Saying Goodbye

The more I think about this process, the more I really don't want to sell the car, but I just don't have the time to manage the project anymore. If anyone is interested in it please let me know!

Here's a blog post with all the details I can remember about the car. http://www.project240z.com/Blog/itemId/458/1973-Datsun-240z-For-Sale.aspx

I would love to get some money back out of this car, I realize I likely won't, but I posted it on Craigslist at $2k to see what happens. I will list it on Ebay over the weekend, though I might hold off a week or two on that due to some work commitments. If someone here is interested, make me an offer.

So, the time has come. I've decided to part ways with the Project240z car. I'm a new home owner, busy working, and missing autocross, so I really don't have time to do this car justice. I never have really, but I've drawn this out for many years trying to avoid selling the car. I've posted it on Craigslist here in the Denver area http://denver.craigslist.org/cto/1530101340.html If someone is interested in the car please feel free to let me know via a PM here, or using the contact form on http://www.project240z.com/ I would love to hold on to the car, but it really doesn't make much sense for me to do so. Here's the contents of the Craigslist posting. I've decided to part ways with my 1973 Datsun 240z. I've had it for a number of years now, but it's time to let it move on to someone who has more time for the car. You can find out all the info you could ever want to know about the car by reading my website Project240z.com, even see build photos and videos of the car. It's definitely a project car, the main things it needs right now to finish. 1) Fix up the wiring for the lights 2) Seats (I sold the seats with the intention of putting in race seats but never purchased those) (custom seat mounts were welded in place, original brackets cut out, to fit a Corbeau A4 seat bracket, seat bracket also available for purchase) 3) Body work and paint (see pics) 4) Fiberglass dash finished and installed 5) Steering column replaced (threads stripped for the nut for the wheel) The motor (L28E) is from a 1978 280Z 2+2. It has the intake/exhaust/turbo from a 1983 280ZX. You can see video of the car running from July (on the website), before we moved out here to Colorado. It has a Megasquirt, with a Ford EDIS ignition system. It has a 15 gallon fuel cell with AN fittings and braided lines, a high flow pump that provides somewhere around 40-50lbs of pressure when turned on. Ford Lightning Injectors (44lbs I believe?). 5-speed transmission out of the 78 280z 2+2 There is no interior to this car, the floor was cleaned up, holes patches and painted black (using an undercoating paint). I couldn't begin to list all the parts for the car but they include brand new urethane bushings (not installed) extra suspension parts fiberglass dash extra gauges lots more The car DOES not have a title at the moment, for another $300 I can get the title squared away, but it's going to take me some time to do so. I have a California title that has been signed by myself, and would need to be VIN verified, and then fees paid so I could get a Colorado title. If a title is important I don't mind doing this. Why am I selling it? I don't have the time for the project, I have too much going on to get any time spent on the car. The photos below are somewhat old, for a more recent "look" at the car check out the video on the site "Packing the garage, driving the car" that's the video of it driving around my neighborhood in July 2009. For a price I might even consider selling the domain name, and I also own 240z.net if that is of interest. Check out the website, you can see a lot of info about the car. Feel free to send me any questions you might have about it, I will answer any that I can. Remember, this is a project car, always has been. If I don't get any interest in selling it I will strip off the parts and try to sell everything individually. Contact me via the contact form on the website. http://www.project240z.com/ Similar Keywords: Datsun, Nissan, Honda, Toyota, 240z, 280z, 260z, 350z,

So I don’t know why I didn’t think of this a month ago, would have saved me some money on shipping, but the Corbeau A4s for the 240z are sold. John V, the guy who bought the Corvette has purchased them for use in his RX-7 that I bought and shipped to him a few weeks ago. Would have made sense to pack the seats in the car then, but I didn’t realize he was going to be interested in them, oh well. On an unrelated note, have you checked out our sister-site, http://www.Project350z.com? You might ask, but you don’t even have a 350Z? True, but I will, at least that’s the plan, to get another one in early 2010 so I can have a car to race next year. I’ve spent a few hours over the past few sick evenings sorting through photos of the old car, which just makes me miss not having a 350Z that much more. I posted photos and got a site design together, though I don’t have much other content up there yet, it will take a few months to get it all together, hopefully just in time to get myself a new (used) ride. Dozzle, if you read this, I still want to buy my old car back!!!!

originally posted here http://www.project240z.com/Blog/itemId/446/Megasquirt-woes-too-much-fuel.aspx So I will start this post off staying this: I know nothing, I am a noob when it comes to the megasquirt, and tuning a fuel injection car (or a carb’d car for that matter). That being said, I think my megasquirt is giving the car too much fuel when it’s trying to start. I don’t know how to prove this, other than to learn how to mess with the fuel map for the megasquirt and see if I can’t back off the fuel a big when trying to start the car. The car doesn’t like to start, it’s very hesitant to do so, and to me it just sounds like it’s flooded and can’t ignite because of this. I’ll have to do some reading here over the next week or so to see if I can’t figure it out and get the car to reliably start. I did start to adjust the fuel map a bit this afternoon but ended up not getting enough juice from the battery to power the starter and the fuel pump at the same time, so I’ve got the battery on the charge. The charger has been getting a workout today as it was plugged into an 89 RX-7 for a few hours while I charged the battery on that ride up so it can be loaded on the transport truck later today (if the guy ever shows up). Earlier this week I did manage to get the datsun started, and even backed it out of the garage, but I couldn’t keep it running enough to drive it back in so I had to push it. I moved it over into the third bay so that I could make room for the F250 to park inside for the winter. That truck is huge, barely fits into our 24ft garage (we also have 18” shelves in front of it), but it does fit, so that made the wife exceptionally happy! I’ll try to get some new photos of the Datsun later this week. I may start doing some body work prep on it, I have a coupon for a maaco paint job for $275, so I think I’ll get some bondo out to smooth out some rough spots and get it ready for paint. Bondo? Maaco? I don’t see any value in putting a lot of money into the exterior of this Datsun at this point. I just need it to run, and not be 5 different colors, so I’ll take it to Maaco for a flat black paint job and be done with it!

So I have been delaying wiring up the car a bit, partially because I don’t understand it all, and partially because I am afraid! I’m a computer geek, but not always the best when it comes to working on the car, I question everything I do, maybe because I blew up the last motor? Part of the wiring problem I’ve had is that I needed to get a fuse block to start hooking things up to, the original block had melted long ago, and only half worked. Last night I went to PepBoys and CarToys looking to see if I could find anything, with no luck. Today I decided to try Napa, SCORE! I actually got two different blocks. One 6 pole and one 10 pole, that way I can break things up if necessary. I hope to get the wiring started this weekend, I would like to attempt to have the car running again, which I think really just means I need to get a switch wired for the starter. I’m not going to deal with a key for the car, this car long run isn’t going to be something someone will be able to walk up and start anyways. So we’ll see how far I get, I may also have to go look at this on Saturday…. http://www.toolking.com/hobartwelders_500500a.aspx

Haven't made much progress as of late, I have played with the wiring a bit, but am trying to track down why I can't get the key to fire the starter anymore. I may just give up on that and wire the started up to a button, just trying to find the time! Hopefully later this week I'll get a chance to do that. I've also decided, for now at least, to not bother having the car blasted for painting. I'll likely just put my own elbow grease into trying to clean it up, and then even paint it myself. We'll see if I actually do that or not in the coming month, that's my goal at least.

I'm sort of in the same boat, cept I don't want to rewire my MS at this point in time. The rest of the car however I would love to do. Any chance progress on this has been made?

http://www.project240z.com/Blog/itemId/435/Organizing-the-garage-and-guess-what-I-found.aspx So we’ve barely been in the house three weeks and I already lost and found something! So in my last blog post I complained that I thought I left the fiberglass dashboard for the 240Z in St. Louis. Well I was wrong! Tonight while trying to get things moved around in the garage to make room for our two primary vehicles I was up on the loft moving things and came across the dashboard! So all is well again in Project240z.com land, well, as well as it can be! I was going to drive the car around the block tonight, and park it in the third car garage, but I quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen unless I wanted to take the wiring harness out of the old dash and hook up the wires. Right now the ignition wires aren’t going to anything, so that would make it kind of hard to start the car and drive it. Oh well, I moved it around a bit by hand and made room for one of our cars in the garage at least, the F350 will have to stay outside for a while longer. Hopefully by the end of September I’ll either have a new quieter exhaust on the car, or all the paint completely stripped off, or maybe even both!

My 73 has a 78 hood on it. don't mind the many different colors

So I had a guy come buy today and got a quote on what it will cost to soda blast the car. I think I'm going to have that done here in the next two weeks and put the exhaust project on hold a few weeks, maybe a month. We'll see how this whole thing turns out.

http://www.project240z.com/Blog/itemId/434/Out-goes-the-dash.aspx So tonight after work I got the 240Z off the trailer, both of which had been parked in the Garage since we moved to Colorado a few weeks ago. I had lined up a storage lot for the trailer and wanted to get it out of the garage. Well the 240Z wasn’t easy to start, took a good 5+ minutes of attempts before it finally started up. Later in the day I realized the MAP hose wasn’t hooked up to the Megasquirt, that would explain the difficulty in starting! whoops. So I dropped the trailer off and came home to organize the garage a bit, moved the newly assembled shelves in place and started going through some of my boxes. After I got bored with the unpacking I decided it was a good time to put all the bulbs and fuses that I had purchased yesterday into the car. That was pretty quick and painless, but didn’t produce any fruit! I didn’t see any lights in the rear of the car at all. So what next? I simply decided to pull the dashboard out! The whole thing, gone, removed, not going back in (likely not) along with the blower and heater core. Why might you ask? Why not. The car will hopefully be somewhat streetable, but I won’t be using most of the gauges on the car anyways. For a speedo I’ll have the G2X (GPS data logging), for RPM I’ll likely have the G2X, or even a Netbook running the Megasquirt software to show me all the appropriate date from the ECU. So why do I need the stock dash? I don’t! Though I did realize after I pulled the dash that I left the fiberlass dashboard in St. Louis, and didn’t bring it to CO. Luckily I’m going back to STL next week for work and will hopefully get it packed up and shipped back. I’ll need to do some creative wiring, hooking up a switch for the headlights, a horn, turn signals, and even the ignition, but I think it will be cool to have all those as switchable items on a nice clean looking dashboard, not the big old clunky stock one. Here’s a photo sans dash.

So today was spent packing the garage (read about that over here). While getting things packed up made it a productive day, the real joy was with the car. I drove it today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It has been over 23 months since the car last moved under it’s own power, so getting it out of the driveway (harder than it sounds) and driving it around the circle made for a great day. The car is still hard to start, but once it starts up the first time it generally starts up easier (as you will see in the video). I then had trouble trying to get into gear, keep the car running, and letting off the brake as the ebrake isn’t strong enough to keep it at the top of our driveway. I finally just let the car roll down the driveway and started it at the bottom before driving it around. If you want to see it running and driving skip ahead in the video to around 6 minutes. Commentary provided by my beautiful wife Natalie. The video is in HD, so watch it that way After driving it around I even got more of the front end put together, with a grill and air dam installed, I’ll get a picture of that configuration tomorrow.

With the success last night I decided I had to work on the car this evening a bit. The first thing I did was get it up on all four jack stands so that they were under the frame and not under control arms of the car. This would allow me to begin working on the suspension pieces. When I got the car from Jeff, uhhh over three years ago now, it came with a second suspension that had been pulled off another car. This other suspension has springs (yellow), new(er) struts, a larger front sway bar, and also the addition of a rear sway bar. It also is a lot cleaner then the current suspension. So tonight I started pulling off the front suspension, starting with the sway bar, and moving on to removing the rest, at least what I could, of the right front. I got stuck at the tie rod, but I did manage to get most of the other bolts removed. I came to a conclusion though, I’m going to likely just drop the whole front suspension out, including the cross member as the second suspension has one as well. In order to do that though I am going to have to dismount the motor. I will attempt to do that by lifting the motor up off the mounts with the cherry picker, hopefully without having to disconnect the transmission and not removing the whole thing from the car. Before I do that though I will likely fully disassemble the other suspension and take it to a friend’s house to sandblast everything. I’m heading to Tampa for a conference tomorrow, so that will have to wait until the evenings next week. I’ll try to get everything disassembled during the week, both front and rear suspensions, and then probably go down to his place Saturday if he’ll be around.

Tonight was successful! Here's the blog post with embedded video http://www.project240z.com/Blog/itemId/424/It-runs-twice-and-therersquos-audiovideo-proof.aspx So tonight after work I came home to get the starter out of the car and took it back to Autozone, fortunately the lifetime warranty was honored! Though I did have to run off to the Autozone Hub to get the replacement starter. The guy at the hub was kind of lost, but he eventually got everything worked out and I headed home with the new (remanufactured) starter. So the last starter started off working, but after a few days just started spinning without engaging the flywheel, no grinding either. This one, once all wired up worked like a champ. I even got the car started up for a minute or so. I did all this without hooking up the computer, so I didn’t want to spend too much time keeping it running. So now was the time, time to hookup the laptop and get the video camera out and record the car actually running! Well I am proud to say it was successful, here’s the video below.

original blog post with video-> http://www.project240z.com/Videos/itemId/423/A-little-success-found-1-of-3-missing-screws-AND.aspx So last night after work I came home with the intention of trying to figure out why the car wouldn’t start. My intentions were to check the positioning of the 36-1 wheel for the VR sensor that drives the Megasquirt/EDIS setup. After checking the positioning of the sensor I was going to do a compression check on the motor. Well I threw those intentions out of the window, I wanted to see if after charging the battery the night before things would be better as the changes from the night before were not completely tested due to the drained battery. Well wouldn’t you know, the car started! And not just once, but twice! It actually even ran for a bit, assuming I had my foot on the pedal, otherwise it would die, but that didn’t concern me, not yet. So it ran, and I have megasquirt log files to prove it! I went to try to start it again, and got nothing, but this time it wasn’t timing, it wasn’t motor, it was the starter. The starter wouldn’t turn over, it would only click, which made things really weird because I hadn’t had that problem before. Rather than trying to make it work I simply decided to pull the starter out of the car and check it out, it looked okay. I decided I would take a picture of the flywheel, and as soon as I took a picture I noticed something shining off the flash. As soon as I took a second look at it I knew exactly what it was. Here’s a photo of it after I pulled it from the flywheel. Want to know what that is? That is one of the three missing screws from the starter when it fell apart a few weeks ago So with that revelation I decided that I would call it a night from trying to make the car run. I worked on cleaning up some things in the garage, I need to get it up on jack stands and find the remaining 2 screws which I believe are also still in the bell housing. Perhaps this weekend, or early next week I’ll get it up and find them. I also started disassembling the old block, crank and pistons as I need to get rid of those here soon, especially if we find out about our home offer soon (http://www.going2colorado.com) Here’s a brief video of today’s work, nothing too fascinating, next time I have it running I’ll get audio!

http://www.project240z.com/Blog/itemId/422/Another-night-with-not-much-success.aspx So tonight I came home from work and decided it was time to work on the Datsun a bit, after over a week of barely even looking at it when walking in and out of the garage to and fro. Terec came over and helped me out for a bit as well. The first thing I checked was to see what the starter looked like, I was worried based on the noises that I’ve been hearing that the newly installed starter was bad. Well I pulled it out, it looked fine, as did the flywheel itself, so there went that theory. I put the started back on the car and connected the wires. From there I attempted to start the car again. The grinding happened a bit, but I swear it doesn’t last, and even got less frequent as the night wore on. Terec showed up as i was attempting to start the car. We spent most of the evening trying multiple things, rewiring the VR sensor for the megasquirt was the main thing. I attempted it multiple ways, running some new wires for the sensor, and trying different combinations of connections on the wires. At the end of the night we really didn’t seem to get anywhere. Throwing the timing light on the car it does appear to be close to the correct timing, though I need to find TDC again tomorrow night and check to make sure that the VR sensor is 60 degrees from the missing tooth on the wheel. The last attempt at starting the car seemed to only get 100rpm from the starter, so we assume that the battery was drained a bit too much. Because of that we threw it on the charger and called it a night. Another thing that just struck me, I need to check the compression on the motor tomorrow, that hasn’t been done

Well it did run for about 10 seconds, then I redid the wire for the VR sensor and created some problems. So I redid the wiring tonight, and went to start it. Then the starter did this.... It quit engaging so I pulled it out and it fell apart as I was lifting it out of the car. Off to see if I can get it replaced under warranty.