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Respectfully disagree. Get it running and drive the heck out of it. Focus on function over form. It still looks decent. Restoration is a whole nother thing though...

The stock color matched the rear panels for license and tail light surrounds. Many don't get that right. It wasn't until we got the "museum car" in the shop that we understood what the correct color (paint) should be. Of course that's an individual choice but there are few surviving examples of the actual paint used 50 or more years ago. We thought many of the restoration examples here in Arizona ( a place notoriously hard on paint, plastic, and rubber ) were correct until we saw the panels from a car that had very little real world exposure (less than 4K miles) and was stored in a Pennsylvania Toyota dealership automobile collection for most of it's life. You would also be blown away by the original Nissan weatherstrip - we were - and it was actually awesome compared to most new offerings...

John, I’m saving your trip for the electrons. 😮

It sounds like the clutch disc was stuck (possibly due to corrosion) to the flywheel. When you disengaged the clutch, it would have released from the pressure plate, but remain stuck to the flywheel. It’s also possible that the clutch disc had difficulty sliding back from the flywheel on the transmission input shaft splines. Next time, I would use 4th or 5th gear. In 1st gear, the engine has very little resistance due to the gearing, allowing the car to move forward too easily. Nice to hear it was an easy fix.

I also started on the IZCC mailing list. It was a great place to get info and make friends. You are right and we don't say it often enough, ... We owe a HUGE thanks you to Mike for making this great community available to Z Car nuts everywhere.

So some more progress and some lessons for today. My brake light was always on unless I pulled the signal wire off the safety brake failure switch. The parking brake wouldn't light up the brake light either. After pulling the sensor and exploring some and stealing a switch off the brown Z and opening it up some Cody could see it. We determined the sensor threaded in too far. I rebuilt this in Jan 20, 2018. I used a small viton o ring instead of the black ring on the end of the sensor. It should probably be a small hydraulic D ring instead. If it threads in a hair too far it will close the ground circuit all the time. We took the black ring out of our stolen switch and that fixed the always on brake light. The parking brake switch had to be wire wheeled to make it work but we still didn't have a ground path. So that meant we had to pull the bolts out of the parking brake mechanism and clean off some paint so that we had continuity. Then the parking brake switch lights the brake light as it should. :) So the lesson here is very similar to Chuck's steering wheel anecdote. If you paint everything, you're electrical might not work! I also made a little heat shield for the 123 ignition. I have heard that heat from the header could kill the electronics. It's flimsy but I will redo it when I decide what I want the finished product to look like I also worked on my parking brake adjustment. Using all the adjustment available the handle was almost out of travel. So I bought some 10mm OD 5mm ID aluminum tubing off Amazon and added a small section of tubing to remove some of the slack in the system. I used some heat shrink to prevent it from rattling around. It works much better now. Five clicks and it's tight at about a 45 degree angle.