Our Second Date

Chris and I spent some quality time with the Z on Friday. While I was off selling dreams to the upper half, he spent the day stripping her innards. There was plenty of treasures to uncover.

Only $249.74 to get back under budget.

With the inside cleaned out it was time to get under her. Lucky for us, Kettering has a full chassis lift. I'm glad my tuition money went somewhere I could use.

When we bought the car, both of us noticed a severe "clunk" any time the clutch was let out quickly. The Penzoil guy (he worked there and made sure we knew it) we bought it from said he couldn't figure it out. And he took it to the shop and they couldn't find the problem either. Hmmm... that's a Tuffy. I hope we can take care of it.
Luckily, 4 years at Kettering has taught me plenty about cars, but as soon as I got underneath and looked at the u-joints it was obvious...

LOLCAT! OMG!

But seriously, the bolts on the u-joints were finger tight. We thought about leaving them like that to up the intensity when we when drive her, but we decided not dying would be cooler.

Now this blog isn't just going to be ramblings on what we're doing. We want to help you readers as well. Here Chris gives us a lesson on how to remove an exhaust system.

So after about 2 hours of work we got everything including the catalytic converter back off the car and tightened down the u-joint bolts. There's still a little click to it but it's a lot better than it was. A LOT better.

The next day one of the frats at school was had a dyno at their house. We decided to see what kind of numbers she'd put down. Unlucky for us, Penzoil guy had one of the lug nuts cross threaded and they couldn't get it back on. They wouldn't let us run with 3 lug nuts, safety issue... pft...

The Purchase: 1984 Nissan 300ZX

After deciding to enter LeMons Detroit 2009 (http://www.24hoursoflemons.com/), we needed a car. After two weeks of fruitless car searching, we finally found our Lemon. On Tuesday I went with Ben Reichard and Chrissy Kaltenecker in Ben's '90 4DSC to pick up our LeMons car: a 1984 Nissan 300ZX GLL 2-seater.

The car was located in Holland MI, over 2 hours away. The only problem with the car: The slave cylinder doesn't work sometimes in the wet. Tonight's forecast: rain, and lots of it.

Seller was asking $1000 and we bought it for $750. We should have no problems selling at least $500 of stuff off of this car. I compiled a quick spreadsheet based off of Z31 parts sold in the past on EBay, and I'm at $1500 without even getting into some of the more obscure bits. The trip back took about 3 hours, but she ran like a champ, with the only stops being to change drivers and take breaks.

Some pictures of the car that night:

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