1977 280z driving project from the Netherlands

[Mitchel0407]

Hello everyone and welcome to my 1977 280z project! I will be using this thread to document my journey with this car and all the little thing that will be done to it to ultimately restore and modify it to be my dream car.

 

I bought the car last week at auction for the decent price of €20.500,- kind of on a whim as this has been my dream car ever since I first learned of there existence (thanks Wangan Midnight and the Devil Z, I know its cliché). Yes €20k is a lot of money but a mid-condition one sells for over €32k here in Europe nowadays.

 

 

(You can see which side I tied up and which side my dad tied up 😂)

 

 

What drew me to this car was the paint (absolutely not perfect and needs a repaint at some point but looks good enough for now), the goodies like new wheels and tires, new wooden steering wheel, factory 5 speed gearbox, R200 diff and the claim that the engine was rebuild 10 years ago. Although when picking up the car it turned out there was no documentation what so ever.

 

The car runs and drives and is in fairly decent condition but currently has no valid inspection (called APK in the Netherlands) as the previous owner stats it’s because of the car running rich. Of course it has a cracked dashboard, some small surface rust forming and is missing bolts all over the car but these are all thing that can be fixed over time.

 

 

 

For now my main goal is the fix some little stuff and get her on the road so I can start to enjoy the car. So naturally I placed the car on my Quick Jack lift and ordered a bunch of parts from Z-Services EU in France.

 

 

There are a few thing I like to address before taking it in for inspection. The hood doesn’t open as the cable brackets are missing, the door hinges need rebuilding as the doors won’t close properly, some general maintenance and fixing some sweating oil seals around the car.

[FastFloridian]

1 hour ago, Mitchel0407 said:

Hello everyone and welcome to my 1977 280z project! I will be using this thread to document my journey with this car and all the little thing that will be done to it to ultimately restore and modify it to be my dream car.

 

I bought the car last week at auction for the decent price of €20.500,- kind of on a whim as this has been my dream car ever since I first learned of there existence (thanks Wangan Midnight and the Devil Z, I know its cliché). Yes €20k is a lot of money but a mid-condition one sells for over €32k here in Europe nowadays.

 

 

(You can see which side I tied up and which side my dad tied up 😂)

 

 

What drew me to this car was the paint (absolutely not perfect and needs a repaint at some point but looks good enough for now), the goodies like new wheels and tires, new wooden steering wheel, factory 5 speed gearbox, R200 diff and the claim that the engine was rebuild 10 years ago. Although when picking up the car it turned out there was no documentation what so ever.

 

The car runs and drives and is in fairly decent condition but currently has no valid inspection (called APK in the Netherlands) as the previous owner stats it’s because of the car running rich. Of course it has a cracked dashboard, some small surface rust forming and is missing bolts all over the car but these are all thing that can be fixed over time.

 

 

 

For now my main goal is the fix some little stuff and get her on the road so I can start to enjoy the car. So naturally I placed the car on my Quick Jack lift and ordered a bunch of parts from Z-Services EU in France.

 

 

There are a few thing I like to address before taking it in for inspection. The hood doesn’t open as the cable brackets are missing, the door hinges need rebuilding as the doors won’t close properly, some general maintenance and fixing some sweating oil seals around the car.

 Beautiful Z, it’s in great shape for an almost 50 year old car. I like those wheels too.

[Mitchel0407]

4 minutes ago, FastFloridian said:

 Beautiful Z, it’s in great shape for an almost 50 year old car. I like those wheels too.

Came with four almost brand new tires and the original wheels on also pretty good tires. The original wheels good use a repaint tho.

[Mitchel0407]

 Had a busy weekend working on my girlfriends car (brakes, oil, alternator, water pump and timing belts) but yesterday I had some time left to work on the Z. The car was running rich so I ordered a cheap AFR gauge to measure the air-fuel ratio of the car. I installed the gauge in the engine bay for now with the power wires just clamped to the battery as I can’t drive the car till I get my inspection done.

 

I read some threads about the EFI Z’s running rich or running rough in general so I cleaned the contacts on all the electrical plugs and readjusted the throttle position sensor. The contacts of the AFM and the cold start valve where actually pretty corroded but cleaned up nicely.

 

 

For good measure I also decided to change the spark plugs and do a compression test. O boy was I glad I did that. The spark plug in the number 1 cylinder turned out to be a different one without a manufacturer name. It was also heavily cracked and the spark plug wire wasn’t even attached! (am I glad I ordered new once). The compression was pretty consistent from what I could tell but my battery and probably also the alternator are dying, only to be caped alive by my battery charger. The engine cracks very slow with the sparkplugs in (even only one) and when dialing back the idle the engine can’t keep a consistent rpm. It even died after a while.

 

 

I the end I just jumped the battery with my girlfriends car witch helped a lot. After the cleaning the car also ran much better with an AFR of 11.2 and after warming up for a bit it changed to about 13. When revving the car to about 4000rpm the AFR changed to about 15. I’m not very familiar with AFR ratios but 13 at idle (after warmup) seems pretty good to me and hopefully lets me pass inspection. But for that I still need to wait for some backorder parts from Z-Services.