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And so the story begins... My son and I were talking about a project to do together. My friend Larry has been building and racing Z cars for many years and his wild enthusiasm was infectious. So we started casually searching for a car. We were looking for a 240 but couldn't be happier about what we found, given all that we've since learned in the process. I was looking on Craigslist and there she was, a '77 280Z in Reno. This was late October 2017 and I think the seller was asking $2000. I forwarded the post to my son, who lives in Reno, to see what his reaction would be. He drove over to the seller's house immediately and looked it over pretty carefully (or so it seemed) and called me up. We talked about it and he offered $1500 with no title, and the seller accepted. So we took a leap of faith and purchased our project car. I rented a trailer and drove up the next day, loaded her up, and took her back to our shop in Gardnerville, NV. It was apparently all original, with 93k miles and a sticker on the license plate from 1993. The seller had found it covered in dust in back of his friend's shop and similarly couldn't resist the temptation. He was planning to get it running, but it ended up just sitting in his garage, undriveable. There was a small box of parts in the back, with license plate from Alabama, with a sticker from '93l. We did a title search and 1993 was the last issued registration for the car. Alabama is known as the easy place to get a replacement title, but the starter had a sticker from a motor rebuild shop, in Alabama and we discovered later that the EGR port on the intake manifold was disabled by packing it with mud that could only have been from Alabama. At the time of the purchase, Nevada had made it the responsibility of the civil courts to award vehicle titles... oh boy. While not impenetrable, we were not looking forward to going through a court procedure for old Donna. Miraculously, two months later it was announced that, come July, it would once again be the responsibility of the Nevada DMV to award vehicle titles. As it should be! After a bit of back and forth with the Title Research Department we were awarded a bonded title. And a good thing too as we had already stripped her down by that point (more on that later). Something tells me there is no way we would've found a car like this for $1500 bucks if the seller had known he could've nabbed a title for it so easily only a few months later. Timing is everything! The seller also knew things about the car that we had not yet discovered. We weren't entirely sure how far we were going to go with it but have ended up on a fantastic journey, much much more to come. Here she is, as we found her:
