Home Built by Jeff

This week it was time to start cleaning up the engine block and paint it up ready for the rebuild. Jeff

This week I have chosen to have a big swing at getting the bodywork on the Z finished.

Looks really good. Now you have a booth you may as well paint the whole thing yourself. Do a couple of practice panels first to get the hang of getting a nice finish. You can always cut and buff it when you are finished, and you will more than likely need to anyway. Great work, keep it up.

No, I am just giving this a light freshen up. I am not going to town. That said, the seats all look to be in pretty good condition. There is definitely no pitting in them, and they actually seem quite hard compared to the valves when I was doing the lapping. The valves would wear much quicker than the seats with the lapping paste. I know I should get the seats re-cut and then lap the valves to match, but I have checked the seal on them with bearing blue and they all seat well so I am happy.

This week I have got myself some extra valves to replace the dodgy ones I had previously, so I get them lapped to fit and then move on to more body work.

Absolutely, but I really don't want to go crazy with it. I am only looking at giving this engine a quick freshen up, not going to town, otherwise I would have replaced the valves, recut the seats, and done a lot more porting.

I shaved 1mm off the head and I actually stuffed up the calculation, as I didn't add the combustion chamber volume to the swept volume, so it is more like 9.57:1. 459 + 53.5 = 512.5 512.5 / 53.5 = 9.57

This week I learned a lot more about engine rebuilding and I lapped the valves. I then needed to work out my engines compression which meant CC'ing the combustion chambers.

This week I get stuck in to do the final alignment of all the panels and start the body filler. It is a slow process, but if I want it done right I need to take my time and keep plugging away at it.

It has been brought to my attention, that it is more than likely to get the driver out of traffic, when opening it on the side of the road. Also the fact that I need to track down the torsion bars for the bonnet and then it should stay up with out the stat anyway

It has just done it again. No idea why as there is only one link?

I finally threw in the towel and I bought a new repro bonnet for my Z. It took a lot of time, but I finally have it all fitting up the way I wanted.

Thanks. I don't know why it was doing that, as I was just pasting the one link straight into the text box and it would come up with multiples. I couldn't work it out with my small brain, so thanks for sorting it

You can't just put body filler over anything. The old rule of thumb was body filler must go straight over bare metal, but with some of the new epoxy primers you can put filler over the top of them. You still need to make sure you sand them up well too to 'key in' the filler. It is always less it best with filler too. So you shouldn't put it over any old rust converter. Only an epoxy primer designed for it.

This week I continued work on the head and the got back into body work on the rear end.

The Datsun engine is back!! This week I give body work a rest and I get stuck into porting the head.

I was thinking of doing something like that. Just making sure it is neat and last a few more years.

That is true. I avoid lap welding wherever I can for that very reason. I will have to flip it over at some stage and do something there to make sure the rust is slowed at least. May be hard to cut the end of it off now that it would have to be done from inside the bar. I will sort something out

They already step in and overlap, so I just lap welded them. Butt welding would require far too much work to beat out the recess to line up with the rest of the bar, and then it probably wouldn't be as strong anyway

The tiny areas which are remaining should not be an issue, as the surface will be keyed again with 80 grit and then high filled, I am not concerned.

This week is all about the rear end and who doesn't like a nice rear end.

I will sand a lot of it off when I go to put the 2k high fill primer on, but some of it will still be there, but it won't be an issue for very small areas.

It is just a zinc based primer to protect the bare metal until I am ready to paint it properly.

This week I have finally gotten to primer the inside of all the panels, and I get on to tackle the fuel flap.

Haha, I am a Firefighter, so I work 24hour shifts on strange days. That gives me a bunch of days at home when everyone else is at work, to work on my cars