Project 240K

Cut out the roll cage, and The car sold today, and was picked up.. sad day.. but glad to get some extra space again.. it has been a LONG time since i have been down to 1 car (the Z doesn’t count yet)

just waiting on one of the adaptors for the rotisserie to arrive, then it’s game on!

Here are some more detailed pictures of the front suspension setup including the r33 gtst brake adapters, custom front coil overs (i am pretty sure they started life as C210 struts) and the japanese adjustable top hats

Time to pull out the original L24 from the new car and to put it aside (it too, will eventually go with the old car, unfortunately breaking the matching numbers, but the RB26 will hopefully more than make up for that!)

It was a difficult decision, as there was nothing fundamentally wrong with my current car (plus the countless hours spent stripping and priming it!), but everyone i had asked had concluded that the new car was too good to let go (probably only for the fact that this car was “complete” and not just a shell that had been sitting around for way too long!)

I decided to base the final descision on the bodywork, if i had a good poke around and didn’t find anything substantially wrong then i could somehow justify the changeover I pulled of all the trim, took out the interior, checked the firewall, floorpan, boot, engine bay, window frames, doglegs.. nothing substantial, other than a few small areas around the front and rear windows (obviously where the glass had been refitted at some stage), and a small bit of rust from the trim strips under the doors. There were of course the odd bits here and there, but nothing bigger than a fingernail.

The descision was made.. I was going with the new car! which meant pulling everything off my 240K and swapping them over. The side benefit was that i could fully document it all and finally get some pictures of the finer details for things like the suspension. the decision would mean however, selling my “old” car at some stage in the near future, so expect to see that on the market as soon (if your interested, hit me up through the “contact me” at the top of the website) as i get it all together!

As i had decided before, if you are going to go to the trouble and expense of getting a car painted, there is no point doing it and the having it rust/bubble a couple of years down the track, this meant that i would be, for the 3rd time this project, stripping a car back to bare metal!

Luckily a rotisserie with 240K attachments came up on the forums, so i took the plunge and bought it from him (i figure if i am going to do it, may as well do it properly!).. In the meantime, i stripped the rear suspension and crossmember from the old car, and replaced it with that from the new one.

Unfortunately there was a delay with the car carrier, and it took longer than expected to arrive, during which i had managed to convince myself that the car couldn’t possibly be as good as the photos showed (take for example, any photo of a car for sale on ebay ) and that there would be the usual 240k rust and problem spots on the car.

Well finally the car arrived, and it was everybit as good, if not better, than the photo’s! i was truely amazed at how good the bodywork was (straight as a die), even the underside of the car was spotless!. the chrome Trim was a little dinged in places but also relatively good, and surprisingly, very little in the way of surface rust bubbles.

It was clear after a little investigating that the car had been resprayed at some stage, but it seems to have been done quite well.

It was clearly a car that was too good to give up, and the knowing the previous owner had cared for the car for so long reinforced this fact. The idea of moving all the good bits from my current car came up, and this idea gained more and more ground.

It all started with an email from a guy in melbourne to this website, he owned his 240K hardtop since 1976. The coupe had travelled with him for a significant part of his life, and unfurtunately it was time for him to sell up in Australia, and return to his home country. He was looking for somebody to not only buy his car, but to continue giving it the love and attention that he had for so many years.

I agreed to help him find a buyer, and asked him to send through some pictures of the car. The only ones he had were relatively old, but he assured me that the car was still in good condition today. I couldn’t believe what i was seeing, if this car was truely in the condition that the photo’s show, it was going to be an amazing car..