# 4 - what am I doing? Little build thread!

March 3, 20178 yr

Yes, a number of folks know and I'm shite at keeping schtum about work being done to my Z.

In an ever increasing quest to have the cleanest Z I could possibly create, I have become more and more fussy with how things look resulting in me going back to a more original look. So over the past few months I have been buying up more and more original new OEM parts; dispensing with my 2-din Z Thirty Two fascia and replacing it with a brand new OEM one were the first steps, a rare DIN cubby with door from Richard Smith, all new centre console plastics, re-foaming the seats, all sorts of other things and many brand new exterior pieces.

Spurred on from JP's awesome example and Andrew's take on OEM+ and idealistic car plus deep knowledge, my Z is going back to the paint shop next week for some major surgery. I've been let down time and time again by poor quality workmanship from the various bodyshops I've used (which has been both stressful and upsetting) and this time around, I've decided to go all-out, get more new stuff and have the car stripped of what's already on there and repainted properly.

Not content with trying to find somewhere locally to me and getting let down as previously described, I've elected to use Kraftworks near Chelmsford who are some 3 and a half hours from me and a trailer is being sent next Friday to pick it up!! Some folks may have heard of these guys as they are the very same paint shop that did Joel's car who many have seen and love (myself included).

I was lucky to get hold of a brand new OEM 89-93 spoiler (still boxed), so that's going on....and because I thought it would be great idea to de-wiper and de-aerial my car whilst being in a terrible mental state following a nasty relationship breakdown, I made some silly mistakes and welded up stuff that I really shouldn't have, I have decided to go back to how the car once looked (my Z originally came over from Japan with no spoiler, so it's never had this fitted in my ownership) and despite liking the 99-spec, I think the original looks a lot better, at least on light coloured cars like white and silver and more befitting of the car's age (it's a 1991) and the rest of the body. Gary (GSC60) very kindly gave me a non-welded tailgate with no rust on it (VERY hard to find these days). I have a brand new wiper arm, seal and all the gubbins to go back in it. The aerial hole is being re-instated and that's going back in.

I argued with myself on what spoiler to go with for a while; having made up my mind on the TwinZ Type 1 as I love the style and have never seen a decent quality copy of the original, I went with what I thought was my only and best option, that was until a brand new original one was found, still boxed! AndrewG and myself, I think, took the last two available from Nissan, they've been NLS for about a decade in the US and I had thought they weren't available here either (Thanks for your help Ash). The quality of original spoilers is fabulous, they're very tactile and fit like a glove, something cheap fibgrelgass replicas just don't do, there's also a way of protecting them against spoiler-rot found in older cars (thanks to AndrewG for that one).

I'm very excited. The rest of the car will look almost the same....except for one thing...the paint!! I'm totally done with pearl white paints. They can look nice, but almost all of them look cream/beige in off-light situations and that has started to bug me. The rear quarter of my car is a very slightly different shade on my passenger side for reasons unknown and the previous paint shop just couldn't rectify it; some keen beans may have noticed that when they've seen the car in person! Trying to rectify damage or repaint areas with pearls is an utter nightmare as you end up chasing the paint round the car in an effort to blend.......soooooo......the new colour is going to be a metallic white which is a paint I'd not really known about but had wondered whether one existed. It turns out quite a few do and I've had the colour chips through today of those that I'm interested in comparing. The beauty of these new metallic whites is that they lay like a traditional metallic so you don't have that pearl mid-coat that is the thorn in my side. Metallic whites don't look beige or off-beige/cream out of direct sunlight, yet they still sparkle in the sun like a pearl coat, some more than others. It's almost like a modern take on QN0 which is a pearl white used on 94+ Z32s, but with half the maintenance and a better look.

Although mine's in good condition, a new t-top bar is going in and rear screen top trim and other new things are going on. I have boxes and boxes of new Nissan parts.

The colour - Jaguar's glacier white metallic as Nissan don't do anything similar. I looked at a VAG metallic white also, but this didn't have much metallic in. So the Jaguar colour has been chosen as of today! It's a stunning colour and really quite subtle. Range Rover also use this same colour code (2201/NAK) under the 'Yulong White' moniker. I thought about a straight-white, but I owe it to the car's origins to keep a special finish on it.

Here are a few images of the colour in various lights.