one man. two cars.

zero cash.

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They say you should never look back...

Feb
08

Lately I've seen a few retro 240z posts on Facebook, and I reckon half a dozen stories of stalled restoration projects. It made me think back to the state I found the car in back in  2017 ( above pic ).

When I parked my 1971 240z the year was 1998, and the plan was to do a 12 - 18 month "freshen up". The car had been restored in 1990 so most of it was in great shape , but work was needed to get it up to a more satisfactory level. My budget was a very modest $5000 - $6000, and since I was in a nice cushy job as a tech at a university at the time, I knew the bank would gladly throw me the cash. Of course, I could have just saved up for a year, but I was keen to get to work on the car and have it back on the street by the year 2000. Long story short... everything changed over the next 2 years, but not before I'd at least managed to spend $1500 of my budget. 

I bought everything I needed to rebuild the L28 engine - 0.5 oversize pistons & rings, engine bearings, seals and gaskets, even spark plugs and leads. I took the block in to the machine shop and got it bored and honed, got the crankshaft linished and had the N42 head pressure tested and faced.  And then it all sat in my garage, out the back of my house, two streets from the ocean, for 20 years.

Here's a recap on how it all looked, back in October 2017.

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