DJ_Party_Favor

BATTERY & BATTERY MOUNTING APRIL UPDATE One of the newer items I have decided to try and restore or improve upon this month, is a couple of OEM Battery Tie Down Bracket's. Originally when I brought my Z back in 2006, I didnt actually have a battery tie down bracket at all and so over the years I've managed to acquire a couple of spares before I brought a brand new OEM tie down bracket in 2008 and installed it in 2012 as part of my 2kspec conversion replica project. With all of my efforts currently this month working on restoring several old OEM parts with new paint, I thought Id give the spare set of OEM tie down brackets I have the same treatment. My plan was to simply stripped down the old factory black paint and then repaint them in some Raptor branded epoxy gloss black chassis paint. Simple enough I thought but it would turn out to be much more difficult to just remove the factory paint from the brackets then I anticipated but more on that later. Before I begin the restoration process on anything, I like to take a before photo of what the part or parts looked like before I started. Starting with the silver painted tie down bracket which I found in a wrecking yard back in 2007 or 2008, where the metal on this bracket had already began to rust quiet heavily at the end points by the time I had found it, and the reason it was painted silver was due to my Dad painting it that colour while we were repairing and replacing my original factory battery tray which I found out after buying the car that it had rusted away almost completely and so I was able to source a good condition used tray and install into the engine bay alonbg with the tie down to bring the oem setup for the battery back to factory once again. The other OEM tie down bracket is a another used item which I purchased to replace the ugly looking silver bracket. It was in almost new condition except for a couple of rust spots forming on underside of the bracket which lead me to then buy a third brand new tie down bracket which I have been using ever since. Comparison (New Vs Old) Anyways the first task I wanted to address with both of these bracket was all of the rust on the 2 brackets which required a soaking in evaporust overnight. The results were mixed to say the least, the rust on the old silver tie down looked pretty bad even after the evaporust treatment, the other bracket however was looking much better with almost all of the rust now removed from the exposed metal. The next step now, was to strip away all of the old factory black paint from both brackets to prepare the metal surface for the new paint I would be spraying over the brackets in the last phase of the restorartion process. Using the easiest method first, I soaked both brackets in my costic degreasing solution and cooked the brackets for about an hour inside the ultrasonic cleaner. I was expecting the brackets to come out of the ultrasonic cleaning machine completely stripped down to bare metal but this is where I hit my first brick wall on this restoration process. It turns out that the paint on these brackets seems to be very durable and the costic solution did barely anything to the old paint. So on my second attempted, I pulled out the brass wire wheel and my trusty power impact drill setup hoping that this more abrasive method would do the trick. But this is where I hit my second brick wall and even after switching over to a 60grit flap wheel, the time I spent tyring to remove the paint and prep the metal surface of just one of these brackets was taking far to long for my liking. At this point I had decided that the old silver tie down bracket was becoming to difficult and time consuming to continue the restoration process on and so instead I would solely focus my efforts on the better condition bracket which I was hoping would take less time and effort to strip down and then paint. Knowning how difficult it was to strip the factory paint off of the first tie down bracket was using the wire wheel and flap wheel attachments on the power impact drill, I figured Id go all out on my next attempt and use a sand blasting method to acheive the results I wanted and having just recieved my new sand blasting attachment for my pressure washer and a 20kg bag of kilned dried sand, I gave it a shot and the results were mixed yet again. As you can see the sand blasting on this part did remove alot of the paint but I wasn't able to remove all of it and even though it was removing the paint efficively, it was still taking alot longer to do then I was expecting and being that the sand was going everywhere using this specific blasting method and even after trying to continue the paint stripping on this part using a wire wheel attachement on my impact drill the paint just wouldnt budge so I ended up deciding to stop and leave the bracket in its current condition. Unfortunately a really disappointed outcome to be honest, maybe I was expecting to much from all of the paint stripping methods I have tried on these battery tie down bracket's but after spending all of this time on them and I still have yet to get the results I am wanting, I have decided for now to postpone any further restoration plans for these parts. They are not essential to getting the car back on the road anyways and I already have a perfectly good condition tie down bracket which will do the job fine for the time being.

FRAME RAIL LOWER MOUNTING BRACKET RESTORATION Again another item that I didn't get a chance to post an update on last month was for the lower frame rail mounting brackets and so here is what I was able to get done in April. Starting off where we were back in February, the brackets had been stripped of their factory black paint coating and the brackets were then soaked in evaporust to remove the hidden rust buildup that had formed under the factory black paint. Like the mounting bracket restoration for the 2kspec intercooler ducting, I wanted to coat these frame rail brackets in the same gloss black epoxy chassis paint to not just make them look brand new again but to also prevent the metal from corroding and or rusting in the future. Even though I had removed the rust on the metal using evaporust 4 weeks ago, Upon removing them from storage, I noticed that the metal surface on the brackets had already begun to flash rust again even though the brackets had been left in a sealed zip-lock bag. So to prevent further rusting of the metal I went about preparing the surface of the metal on the brackets for paint using a power impact drill and a brass wire wheel attachment. The process probably took me about an hour or so to complete the stripping down of the metal which removed all of the flash rust and as you can see the metal surface is now cleaner look and abit more shiny. Unfortunately I ran out of time to paint these brackets this month but now that I had started the painting process on other parts of the car, I can fast track the painting process on these brackets in the next update.

2000 MODEL NA INTERCOOLER DUCTING UPDATES (APRIL) Last month, I didn't get a chance to make any updates on the progress of the 2kspec intercooler ducts mini project I started back in Janruary, as I got caught up working on other things. However this month I was able to get the replica mounting bracket prepped and painted in a gloss black epoxy chassis paint which was a huge achievement for me to see the finish product of me and my Dad's handy work replicating this now discontinued mounting bracket. The bracket had been put into storage after its de-rusting process was completed back in February and this is how the metal had faired after a month of storage in a sealed plastic ziplock bag. The first step I needed to do was to prepare the metal surface of the bracket as best I could and my chosen method to achieve this was by using an abrasive brass wire wheel to strip the surface of the metal down as much as possible. This process will not just clear away any of the remaining surface contaminants off of the metal but it will also scuff up the metal surface up which will help allow the epoxy chassis paint I'm going to use to have something to bond to when I paint the bracket. I spent about 30 minutes or so working on this prepping phase making sure to get into as many of the tight areas as much as possible. As you can see the metal surface is now no longer dull looking and has abit more shine to it. When it finally came time to paint the bracket, I first wiped down the entire metal surface of the bracket using wax and grease and a microfibre cloth to clean the surface of metal as much as possible. Then I painted the bracket with 3 coats of Raptor's gloss black epoxy chassis paint waiting 10 minutes between each coat. The bracket was then left to dry over a entire week in the garage to allow the paint to dry as much as possible. And here is the finished product, a nice fully coated metal bracket in a durable epoxy coating which I hope will last for 10+ years or more. I am very happy with how the bracket now looks and I can't wait to get it installed on the car.

April has been one of the biggest months for project so far, I have spent hours and hours of work stripping down, derusting and grinding a ton of metal parts for the front end of the car so that those parts can then be painted making them look better then ever did when brand new. Also this month I got to use for the first time my new sand blasting attachment for my pressure washer to help not just strip down larger parts I am trying to restore but to also speed up the paint stripping process on existing parts I was having difficulty in cleaning up last month. I also made changes to my plans for my cooling fan setup from last month and I finally got to apply paint to a couple of parts bringing their restoration work almost to completion. Though I didn't recieve any new parts for the second month in a row, I was able to make a big parts order this month from Nissan Japan mostly containing a heap of OEM replacement fasteners and various other front end parts I missed in previous orders from Japan. These parts will be vital to me being able to re-install not just the existing part setups that were on the car that I took off during the teardown of the front end but will also help me to be able to install all of the new parts I'm currently working on restoring at the moment. There is still a ton of work left to do on this rebuild project, but thanks to my efforts this month I am one step closer to getting my Z back on the road.[/center]

With my Z being a JDM NA model, I don't have an engine cooler setup from the factory which is why I am able to use the UK cooler for my trans cooler and not be altering any mechanical setup of my engine. The UK cooler will add to my OEM parts list to my car that it never had from the factory which is one of my projects primary goals. I know the UK cooler will be overkill for a trans cooler but as I said in my post, I am very pro active in protecting and maintaining my current 4 speed auto as I don't want to go down the blow transmission hole for a 3rd time as much as possible.

This was what I was going to do if the hoses I had were too far gone to be used. I have been researching into ways of making a custom hose that replicates the bends from the original hose and I found a product that uses a copper hose bending tool which you can insert into the rubber hose and you can bend the hose to the shape you want and then heat it up with a heat gun to set the rubber in place. It looks promising but I need to do more research. The other idea I have is to make a replica hard-line pipe in the shape of the original hose I have and use rubber elbows to join it to either end of the cooler and oil cooler hardlines.

POWER STEERING TT HARDLINE RESTORATION (PART 1) In order for me to consider putting the UKDM Oil Cooler onto my car, another important part that I needed to acquire was the twin turbo version of the power steering hardline that runs from the reservoir and along the front cross member. The None turbo version of this hardline runs along the top of the cross member as shown below. The twin turbo version however has a section in the hardline where it dips down and along the front of the cross member so that the oil cooler mounting bracket can be fitted to the cross member. So it was vital for me to get one of these twin turbo varients of the power steering hardline as the NA hardline would block my ability to mount the oil cooler mounting plate onto the top of the front cross member. But buying one brand new is of course a no go as they are discontinued and a used unit would have to be sourced to progress any further. I did try several wreckers for a while but noone really knew or had what i was looking for. But in 2022 I was lucky enough to find a gentlemen advertising 300zx parts for sell here where I live in victoria and after meeting up with him at his yard, I had a plentyful supply of Z parts to collect along with one of these TT hardlines. After being in storage for over a year, I was finally ready to pull this part out and try and restore as best I could. I first had to disassemble all of the hardware attached to the hardline leaving me with more rusty Z parts to deal with. A soaking in evaporust overnight fixed all of that though. The plans are to strip down the paint and rust on the hardline itself so it can be repainted in either a silver or factory green paint. The mounting hardware for the hardline I was hoping to paint them in a gold paint and maybe add some new fasteners in either titanium or stainless steel. UKDM POWER STEERING COOLER RESTORATION (PART 1) This has to be one of the hardest and rarest parts I've ever tried to source for my Z project and it took me nearly 10 years of research and being in the right place at the right time to finally get my hands on one of these very rare OEM 300zx p/s coolers. The UKDM power steering cooler was only avaliable on the UKDM models due to the fact that the higher speed highways over there like on the autobarn could cause overheating issues for these region specific models, which is why the UKDM models got a larger oil cooler, twin automatic trans coolers in the radiator, a differential cooler and a power steering cooler. The power steering cooler is mounted in front of the factory oil cooler on the UKDM specific oil cooler mounting plate which is mounted to the front cross member. There were 2 versions of the P/S cooler released during the production run of the UKDM & euro based 300ZX's. The series 1 p/s cooler (90-93) was routed to the HICAS pump inside the engine bay. The series 2 p/s cooler (93-96) was re-routed to be part of the loop for the power steering hardline as the hicas system went from hydraulic to electric and I believe the series 2 cooler had a slight redisign making it have a better cooling efficiency over the series 1 varient. This is the setup I will be trying to replicate on my Z. More Information: https://z32enjoytheride.wordpress.com/2015/05/19/post-39-euro-spec-power-steering-cooler/ I attempted to dismantle my p/s cooler back in 2022 but I was unable to remove the rusted hose clamps at the time. Months later I asked my Dad for some assistances and he was was able to help me get the hose clamps removed which then allowed me to remove the old p/s hoses off of the coolers inlet and outlet pipes which allowed me to separate all of the attach parts from the cooler. As you can see everything is in an extremely rusted and crusty state, the amount of metal flakes coming off of this thing was crazy but I was hopeful that after a bath in evaporust the cooler might not be as bad as it looks. And to my surprise it came out looking heaps better then it did before the treatment. Even the hardware didn't look to bad after the treatment and I was over the moon to say the least Though the cooler and its hardware looked more like car parts again and not all rusty looking. I then began the pain staking process of gently scrapping off all of the remaining old factory black paint or coating that was still on the coolers piping and what was left of the cooling fins, my plan was to repaint the cooler to protect it from rusting in the future. This is where things took a turn for the worst, after chipping away at it for a couple of weeks I noticed one morning before heading off to work, that the cooler which had been stored in a sealed container after its derusting treatment had began to flash rust while inside the container which was not a big deal at first but when I inspected the cooler more closer, I found the one thing that I never wanted to see and that was several pin holes in two of the inner cooling pipes. Needles to say I was devasted and I knew straight away that this cooler was now toast and unusable going forward. I did a quick leak test of the cooler which was found to be leaking at the pin holes I had found. Unfortunately the weakened thined out metal can not be welded close and I will have to source another cooler to keep this mini project alive. I did contact a couple of 300ZX breakers in the UK hoping I might get lucky twice but the only one that got back to me stated that they didn't have one of these coolers avaliable to purchase, bringing me back to square one again. All is not lost though as it has always been in the back of my mind that this cooler was not usable and that it would be just as valuable as a working unit is as would a template would be for me to get another cooler fabricated. Or use it to find an aftermarket cooler that i could then purchase to replace the oem cooler with. I am currently looking into my options but who knows how long it will take for me to find a solution.

UKDM OIL COOLER & MOUNTING BRACKET RESTORATION (PART 1) After several years of being in storage, its finally time to pull out one of the rarest mechanical OEM parts I will be installing onto my Z, and that is the UKDM Oil Cooler. I picked this unit up about 2 or so years ago off of Ebay and as you can see its in pretty average condition but its intact, it doesnt have any visible holes in the unit that i can see and it doesnt leak any fluids from my initial flushing of the old engine oil inside the cooler. Now your probably wondering why I have this cooler when my car is a NA model and doesnt require the use of an oil cooler especially one this large. Well its kinda a long story but basically it has been a pipe dream of mine for years now to create the worlds first factory style extrenal transmission cooler for a 300ZX Z32 and so this oil cooler is actually going to be part of my new transmission cooler setup for the car and should provide more then enough cooling performance for my factory 4 speed automatic transmission when compared to the tiny factory intank cooler inside the radiator. As for the long version of the story it goes as follows, over the 18 years or so that ive owned my Z, I have been through 2 OEM transmission's and I am now very pro active when it comes to taking care of my current 2nd replacement transmission which I had installed about back in 2017. When I had the first replacement transmission installed I was told that it was advised by the shop who installed the trans, that they needed to install an extrenal trans cooler into the system to provide better cooling for the transmission and so an universal aftermarket cooler was installed by the shop onto the front of the car. During my 2kspec replica build in 2012, I decided to remove this aftermaket cooler as it didn't fit with my project goals and because I had plans to install the PWR alloy radiator, I thought the cooler that was included in that unit would be sufficient enough to keep my transmission cool for the forseable future. When my 1st replacement transmission randomly died on me 9 years after it was installed and a month after I had serviced it for the first ever, I learned that because I hadnt serviced my transmission in such a long time, the none friction enviroment that the transmission had be operating in after 8+ years or so had turned into a friction enviroment causing the transmission blow. Fast forward to today and I have now ditched the PWR radiator in favor of a more OEM style cooling setup and I now have the skills and know how to service my transmission myself which I intend to do every 40,000 km. Anyways since getting this new transmission which I was about to service after it had reached its first 40,000 km service interval, I wanted to go with the recommendation by the shop about installing a external trans cooler to help protect the transmission from overheating and failing on me, and this is where the UKDM oil cooler comes in. I can fit it to the car in its factory location infront of the aux fan on the front cross member and use the factory oil cooler hardlines to route the coolers hoses around the condenser and then run hoses to the factory transmission cooler hardlines. Hose sizes will need to be reduced from 10mm down to 8mm and vice versa going from the oil cooler hardlines to the transmission cooler hardlines but it should all fit up fine from my research. Being a delicate part I decided I'd first try and soak the cooler in a 1 to 1 mix of water and simple green all purpose concentrate cleaner and regularly scrub the cooler over time. So I placed the cooler into a suitable sized box and left it to soak. OIL COOLER MOUNTING PLATE RESORATION (Part 1) The UKDM specific mounting plate for the UKDM oil cooler was another used part I had sourced a long time ago and as you can see it needs some serious restoration work done to it as you can see. I first wanted to strip the bracket down to bare metal and so I placed the bracket into my paint stripping solution and let it sit for more then 2 weeks but like the carbon canister bracket, the paint barely came off at all mainly because I hadnt figured out a way to heat the solution to soften the paint at this point. So this is where I brought out my hand held sand blasting gun, to try and abrashively strip the paint off in no time but that was far from what happened. After 30 mins or so and 5 refills of soda media for my tiny blasting gun, I just couldnt get the unit to work properly and I believe the issue lied in my compressor not being setup correctly and so I would only get 10-15 seconds of blasting before nothing would happen and I would have to reset the compressor and refill the gun and I had to give up on using sand blasting as an effective stripping method for now. OIL COOLER HOSES ACCIDENTLY DESTROYED So out of all of the issues I was having cleaning up the oil cooler mounting bracket, I got hit with a major setback which unfortauntely was entirely fault, sigh. So what happen? Well I put the used UKDM oil cooler hoses in my paint stripping solution to remove some overspray paint that was on the hoses, just to restore them a little bit and I only intended to leave them in for a few hours but I got caught with other things and I ended up leaving them in the soultion for almost a week before I finally went to check on them and as soon as I pulled the hoses out of the solution both of the hoses began melting in my hands, it was a disater. I tried to rinse the hoses off with water but it was too little to late. Turns out that the solution that the hoses were submerged in was a costic form of degreaser which is great for stripping paint when heated but very bad for rubber parts and so I basically had just destoryed the factory oil cooler hoses in a moment of stupidity i guess, sigh. Not all is lost though, as I did have a spare of the longer hose but the shorter hose, no such luck unfortunately and since then I have found out that both of the hoses are now discontinued from nissan and no longer avaliable. I even tried contacting a few UK breakers online to see if I could source a used pair again but, the only breaker who got back to me so far stated that he doesnt have any of those hoses for sale, so yeah not very happy but I differently learnt a valuable lesson after putting rubber parts in a costic solution thats for sure.

WATER PUMP CLUTCH FAN UPGRADES (PART 1) One of the awesome new aftermarket cooling products I have chosen to go with on the rebuild, is with a GKTech High Performance Engine Fan which I did in an effort to try and improve the cooling efficiency of my OEM cooling system without having to go with an expensive thicker core radiator. I discovered this prodcut a couple of years ago and it has been on my wishlist for the Z ever since I saw but like all things before the accident, I never had the funds to be able to go through with getting one of this units until now. According to GKTech's website, the new high performance fan has been designed to be more capable of pulling more air through the front of the car and then through the radiator to improve cooling performance then that of the OEM clutch fan and when tested on a dyno, the new fan can apparantly pull 40% more air through the radiator then that of the factory VG30 clutch fan and though the GKTech fan has designed to fit SR engines it can easily be fitted onto a VG engine when paired with the RB/VG billet adaptor plate. More Information: https://au.gktech.com/products/sr-ka-rb-vg-high-performance-engine-fan-60-more-air-flow?_pos=1&_sid=06b1d71be&_ss=r With all of this information I had to get one of these fans as it ticked all of the boxes for me and my setup. It required no modifications to be fitted to the engine, it looked cool and it will improve cooling performance in the engine bay which will lower temperatures, its a win win situation the way I see it. During the Easter long weekend I got a chance to compare the GKtech fan with my OEM clutch fan as part of my photo archieving work for the project and it was cool to see what the differences were between the two fans side by side and I thought you guys might like to see the comparison as well. All in all I cant wait to install this new fan design onto my car and hopefully see slightly lower temperatures in the engine bay.

OEM FRONT TOW HOOK RESTORATION (PART 2) Like the carbon canister's mounting bracket, I left the tows hooks inside a container with my paint stripping solution and left to soak for a good week or so. Even though the hooks did get a bake time in the ultrasonic cleaner, it didn't really soften all of the paint and the paint that was left over had a pinkish stainning to it. With my second failure using the chemical solution on 2 different parts, I was quite fustrated to say the least and so I pulled out the electric drill and a 60grit flap wheel attachement and basically went to town on the surface of the hooks. After about an hour of hard work, I was very happy with how both of the tows hooks came out, where most of the paint had been stripped away. But it wasn't 100% stripped as I couldn't get into the mounting holes and hook opening with the flap disc wheel, but it was good to see some progress being made none the less.

OEM CARBON CANISTER RESTORATION PROJECT (PART 3) For the third monthly update on the carbon canister's mini restoration project, I wanted to begin the stripping process on the canisters mounting bracket so it can be restored back to new again. The mounting bracket was placed into a large container and left to soak in my paint stripping solution for a full 2 weeks expecting the old paint to just flake off the metal when I removed it from the container but that was not what happened at all unfortunately. As you can see the solution has not been very successful at lifting the old factory black paint off of the metal bracket and I think I why. The biggest problem with this bracket for me at the moment is the size of the entire area the bracket takes up and so the container it is submerged in wont fit inside my ultrasonic cleaning machine where I can heat the solution up which seems to be the key element to making this paint stripping solution work as effective as it has done so far for me on of all of the smaller sized brackets I've stripped previously. With the disappointing results from the chemical stripping process, I decided to try and use an abrasive type of stripping method going forward to finally get this bracket stripped clean. I connected a nylon wire wheel onto my electric drill and began aggressively stripping the surface of the metal down as much as I could. Initially the wire wheel was making quick work of the paint and I was glad to see progress finally being made, but thats when I realised that using this method might work well on flat smoove areas of the bracket but it wouldn't be able to get into all of the norks and crannies that I would also need to strip down as well. So here is where I'm currently at with the bracket which is only about half way stripped down and I'll need to find another way to finish stripping off the rest of the hard to reach areas before I can progress with the restoration.

After 2 massive months of working on the rebuild project, I ended up with 2 major setbacks occuring in march for the project. One being me damaging a pair of rare oil cooler hoses and the other being the devasting results of my restoration attempt on my rusty OEM power steering cooler. Even with theses setbacks occuring progress for the month of march was still made, with me finally taking at look at my used UKDM oil cooler and mounting plate parts along with starting the restoration process on my used twin turbo power steering hardline part. I also got to compare my new fancy GKTech high performance clutch fan with my OEM fan and more work was done to prepare the carbon canister bracket and front tow hooks for paint. Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@adamzx Instagram: instagram.com/adamzx_z32

PARTS ACQUIRED DURING THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY For this months parts acquisitions, i purchase a couple of items that I think will be great improvements over their factory counterparts for not just oem carbon canister setup but for a couple of other setups in the car as well. SAAS SILICONE VACUMM HOSES Starting off with my purchase of several different sizes of new aftermarket black coloured silicone vacumm hoses to replace as manay of my original oem rubber vacumm hoses as I can. These new hoses will be the perfect upgrade for hoses like the ones that I took off on the carbon cansiter where the rubber hoses basically falling apart on me due to age as I was compressing them during the removal process. For more information: https://www.shopsaas.com/performance/silicone-hose/ NEW SPRING STYLE HOSE CLAMPS The only other parts that I purchased for the month of February was a 100pc set of spring style hose clamps from ebay. I have learnt over the years that regular worm drive hose clamps are not suitable for use where a hose is connected onto a plastic hose inlet/outlet as the worm drive clamps can loosen over time and cause leaking issues. These new spring style clamps will prevent this issue from occuring and as they can expand and contract along with the hoses as they expand and contract when the temperature rises and then falls during heating and cooling cycles providing constant tension on the hose which in turn will prevent leaks. Using this knowlegde, I will be trying to replace as many of the factory worm drive hose clamps that are used to clamp down hoses to any plastic style hose inlets/outlets just to reduce the chances of having to deal with hoses leaking in the future.[/center]

TOW HOOK RESTORATION Something I never thought I would care enough to worry about, but after seeing the horrible state that both of my front factory tow hooks were in during the test fitting of the intercooler ducting and the removal of carbon canister, I just had to do something about it, so off they came. Before After The cleaning process for the hooks and the fasteners that go with it, was done just like all the others parts ive cleaned as of late, expect that the hooks themselves would also need to be stripped of all the factory silver paint before I could attempted to soak them both in evaporust, to removal all of the surface rust present on the hooks. After a bath in some simple green concentrate cleaner and a soak in some evaporust, the oem fasteners came up looking pretty good with little to no rust present anymore but they all came out of the process without the oem factory dark green coating on them anymore and looking more like just raw steel fasteners as you can see. This could be issue with further rusting occuring in the future, so to combat this I am looking into coating all of the high tension fasteners that ive stripped of their oem protections, in a DIY black oxide coating that can be done at home easily but I have yet to purchase the required chemicals needed for that process to happen just yet but it is on my to buy list. The hooks themselves were submerged in my paint stripping solution and left to soak for the rest of the couple of weeks and I hope that the paint on the hooks comes off as easily as all of the paint that were on all of the little brackets have done so far, but we will have to wait and see what happens in next months update.

Post removed as requested from the poster... needing pictures editing

KOYO RADIATOR DISCOVERY & UPDATE (PART 2) Continuing on from last months update, I was able to compare side by side my original 300ZX NA radiator with the new Koyo Maxima J30 radiator and to surprise it turns out that the new Koyo radiator is actually double the thickness in its core size when compared to that of my original 300zx radiator. This is great when you think about as the new Koyo radiator should have a little bit more cooling ability then the thinner sized original 300zx radiator. Other then the core size differences, the radiators are almost identical expect for the couple of differences I mentioned in last weeks blog post. OEM LOWER RADIATOR HOSE BRACKET With all of the radiator comparsion stuff now finished, I turned my attention onto another little bracket that I think needs to be looked at and have some restoration work done to it. That being the lower radiator hose's mounting bracket. This mounting bracket, I believe has been discontinued from nissan for a while now, so replacing it is not really an option and though it has been slightly modified from its original design, The bracket like all the others Ive looked at recently have been better days. So into the paint stripping solution it went to remove all of the old paint and then the bracket was soaked in evaporust to again make me another perfect candidite for some glossy black chassis paint to restore it back to new again. Other then that, I am going to look into stripping down the OEM NA radiator upper mounts while I going to all this trouble paint brackets and what not and maybe add some titanium fasteners where needed. Plenty more work to be done for sure.[/center]

INTAKE DUCTING MOUNTING BRACKET RESTORATION (PART 1) Ever since removing my oem intake ducting setup as part of the tearodwn process from the accident, I of have been wanting to restore a pair of mounting brackets that secure the plastic intake ductings to the frame from underneath the headlight bucket panels. These brackets are part codes 62866M & 62866N and like the frame rail lower brackets from section 747, were both showing blistered paint work and rust forming where there was exposed metal from paint chips. The brackets where stripped of all of the factory black paint and soaked in evaporust to remove any remaining surface rust left on the metal. The brackets will be repainted in a glossy black chassis paint to bring them back to new condition again. UPGRADED SILICONE BUSHES DISCOVERY One neat little discovery I was able to find during the above process, was that I realised after removing that the rubber bushes from the mounting bracket look very much like the same dimensions as the Sspec Designs silicone bushes do for the power steering reservoir. When I finally compared the two bushes side by side along with the oem collar installed ontop of the zspec bush, I was indeed correct in my assumption that the bushes are pretty much identical.:) Though it may not make any huge difference what so ever in the functionality that the silicone bush would have over the oem rubber bush, I see it as an longer lasting upgrade path to switch over the the zspec bushes for this application and so I'll be ordering more silicone bushes in my next parts order with CZP or from Zspec Designs direct.[/center]

FRONT USDM REO BAR MODIFICATION UPDATE With my plans to use a USDM reinforcment bar instead of a JDM fiberglass version, I needed to make a small modification to the USDM reo bar in order for it to accommodate a mounting bracket specifically used for installing the 2000 model front bumper bar onto my car as Nissan intended. Going back to 2011 when I first installed my previous 2000 model front bumper bar onto my car, I had also sourced a new later model JDM fiberglass reo bar ([i]p/n: 62030-40P00[/i]) to complete the install as close to how Nissan would have done it back in the day. As you will see below when comparing my original 1989 reo bar to that of the later model reo bar, the later reo bar has 3 additional mounting holes moulded into the fiberglass to allow for a new mounting bracket to be installed onto the reo bar as part of the new mounting setup for the 2000 model front bumper bar. As like with my original 1989 JDM fiberglass reo bar, the USDM reo bar would also not include these 3 additional screw holes needed for the mounting of this specific mounting bracket from above onto the USDM reo bar. So one weekend while at my Dad's place, he helped me drill to out the 3 mounting holes I was wanting to add onto the USDM reo bar I had and then he showed me how to tapped new threads for each of the new screw holes into the allumium bar. With the modifications completed, the reo bar is now finished and ready to be installed onto the car. FRONT BUMPER BAR UPPER BRACKET RESTORATION (PART 1) Another item that I needed to address, was the replacement upper mounting support bar for the front bumper bar. This support bar allows for the front bumper bar to mount onto the radiator core support and as mine was badly damaged in the accident, I had to sourced a undamaged used support bar to replace it as brand new ones are now discontinued from Nissan. But being a used item meant that the replacement part I sourced from a 300zx wrecker was in need of some restoration work done so that the item could be installed back on the car the way that I like it. The first thing you will probably notice about the replacement support bar is, the orange overspray paint on mounting arms which from what I can tell is a common thing to happen when 300ZX's get a resprayed paint job done on the front end and unfortunately overspray paint makes its way onto the arms. On top of that, here is a comparison photo of just how badly bent out of shape my original mounting arms were when compared to that of the undamaged used replacement arms I will be trying to restore. The replacement arms were of course cleaned thoroughly and then left to soak in my paint stripping solution to try and remove as much of the old paint as possible. Unfortunately this is where I came across an issue that I wasn't expecting to have and I couldnt solved it for over a week or too. As you can see, even though all of the old factory paint work has been removed from the arms, what was left over was a rough powdery like residue substance that was stuck on the surface of the metal which no matter what I tried to do wouldnt seem to come off. I tried using a few different types of checmial cleaners including an allumiuum deoxider solution and even a steam cleaner all of which made no change to removing any of the residue on the metal. After consulting with a mate at work who suggested the solution to me, he said that the paint stipping solution I'm using doesnt work as well with alluminum parts and it does with steel parts, and so now I know why it happened but I still didnt know how to solve it. With none of the chemical options I tried going to solve the issue I had, I decided to go with using an abrasive tool option to hopefully strip away the surface of the metal removing the stuck on residue in the process. I pulled out my trusty corded power drill and a brass wire wheel and got to work. After 20 mins or so here is the results of the abrasive wire wheel option I tried and i was pretty happy with what I ended up with. The metal might have been a little bit shinier then I would have liked but it was close enough to bare alluminum as I could get and so I then finished off wire wheeling the rest of the mount arms to leave me with this. While I was there I also used the wire wheel to clean up the mounting point for the arms where they mount onto the support bar itself.

HORN COVERS UPDATE (PART 2) For this month's update on my new horn cover setup, was that because the RH side horn cover is now discontinued from production, according to Concept Z performance as of 2022. I was originally planning to just install the brand new LH horn cover that I already had in my possession but I then realised later on, that if I did that it would look kinda funny for me to only be installing one of the 2 required horn covers to complete the look that nissan originally intended for this setup. So I did a quick google search and found only one listing for sale of a pair of used horns covers on ebay in the US and what makes it worst for me is that the cost to purchase this pair of used horns cover, was going to cost me more per cover then what it cost for buy the one brand new cover I already had. Regardless with no other options to choose from, I just bit the bullet and purchased the pair of used horn covers, which then arrived to me about a month later. The covers where in ok condition for the most part with one of the covers showing small signs of slight melting of the plastic in certain spots but thankfully that was on the LH cover that I already had brand new, so the only issue I needed to deal on the RH cover was that i needed to remove some oversprayed paint covering the front part of the horn cover. Being plastic I wasn't sure which method of stripping I could using to remove the paint, with paint stripper being to corrosive to use on plastic. In the end I realised that the concentrated degreasing solution I was using to strip the paint off of all the small brackets which so far had proven to show results was worth a try. So I submerge the cover in the solution and left to soad for a few days and as expected the paint just flaked straight off with no damaged to the plastic on the cover what so ever. Unfortunately the pitting of the plastic underneath the paint from most likely harsh road condition could not be repaired but I did give the cover a thorougher once over with a megiaurs plastX plastic polish before the cover was coated in megiaurs all season dressing, making it ready to be installed onto the car. All i need to do now to complete the setup is a new set of fasteners and I have yet to decide if I want to go with an OEM set of zinc coated fasteners which would be cheap and easy to source or possibly got the with a set of expensive titanium dress up style fasteners which would not just look amazing but be a super anti corrosion resistant fastener but the costs for just one titanium screw might be overkill for the application, I am not sure which route I'm going to go as of yet.[/CENTER]

OEM AIR GUIDE PANEL RESTORATION & INSTALLATION DISCOVERY Another part that needed some restoration work done on it was the oem air guide panel which sits between the reo bar and air fitler housing and as you could imagine after 10+ years the plastic panel was looking quite dirty and dull looking. My thorougher cleaning and coating process really did bring this part back to almost brand new condition again, which I really do enjoy seeing old parts being restored instead of them just being replacing if possible. The next hurdle I needed to figure out now was how this panel correctly mounts back onto the car? You see its been almost 7+ years since I've had this panel fitted to the car in its original factory location and all I could remember of its mounting location was that it roughly mounts between the front reo bar and the air filter housing assembly. In order for me to figure this out I basically had to lay the reo bar, air guide panel and air filter housing out on the ground and line up the mounting points until I ended up with this. Even though it was a simple problem to figure out in the end, the funny thing is I was actually really excited to solve this myself and it really did help boost my motivation to continue pushing through with this rebuild, so ill take all the little victories I can when they come along. FRAME RAIL LOWER MOUNTING BRACKET RESTORATION Next we have a pair of lower mounting brackets for the front frame rails which I featured in the horn cover update blog from last months progress report. After giving the brackets a good clean up, I noticed a few little issues that need addressing. There was some silver paint overspray present on the brackets as well as a little bit of paint chipping and possibly some surface rust present on the exposed metal parts. To bring these brackets back up to newish condition again, I first strip all of the old factory paint off of the bracket and then soaked the brackets in evaporust to removal all of the hidden surface rust I found that had formed under the factory black paint coating, leaving me with a pair of bare metal brackets ready for a coat of gloss black chassis paint.

CARBON CANISTER RESTORATION (PART 1) During the testfit mockup of the intercooler ducting setup, I couldn't help but notice several times how digustingly dirty my OEM carbon cansiter was and I just couldnt stop the feeling that I needed to do something about it and so once I had finished work on the intercooler ducts, I began the process of removing the carbon canister off of my car which will be the first time I will be attempting this removal procedure. Turns out that removing the carbon canister off of the frame rail is actually quite easy to do all things considered. I first had to disconnect all of the factory rubber vacumm hoses attached to the canister via 3 hose ports on the top of the canister and one larger hose port at the bottom of the canister. Following the removal of all of the vacumm hoses, I then loosen the mounting brackets holding clamping for the canister which then allowed me to slide the canister out and away from the body of the car. All that was left to do now was to remove the carbon canisters mounting bracket itself off of the frame rail. With the canister now removed, I had all of the access I would ever need to thoroughly clean and prepare the frame rail before the reassembly process could begin and I was so glad to have overcome my fear of removing the carbon canister off of my car. Oh and I also made sure to cap off all of the hardlines that the carbon canister's vacumm hoses were connected to on the car. I didnt want any kind of debris or insects making their way into the pipes while the car sits outside for the next few months or so. [img][/img] Once I got everything home, I then began the restoration process for the carbon canister and all of the related hardware that was attached to the canister before it was removed. BEFORE AFTER The carbon canister came out looking almost brand new again but some of the rubber vacumm hoses where damaged during the removal process and I'll have to look into replacing them at some point, maybe even upgrade them. The mounting bracket is going to take alot more effort to restore it back to new again. The badly damaged containmated painted surface along with paint chipping and rust forming in some areas will require me to have to strip the bracket down to bare metal and remove all of the rust before it can be repainted again.

2000 MODEL NA INTERCOOLER DUCTING UPDATES (PART 2) Continuing on from last months update on the successful test fitting of the 2000 model intercooler ducting setup, I still had one major issue to address to allow me to install both sets of the intercooler ducting pieces onto either side of the front of the car. The problem I had was that according to my contact in Japan, Nissan have offically discontinued the outer most L shaped bracket (Part code 14486U) and though I was lucky to have been able to buy the very last unit of these brackets brand new from Nissan Japan in 2022, sourcing a second unit was now going to be near impossible feat to do, unless I could find another bracket on the second hand market in Japan through websites like yahoo auctions. After several weeks of searching the used market in Japan, I found no one selling one of these bracket used and so the only option I felt I had left to do, was for me to somehow fabricate a new replacement bracket from scratch. Obliviously the first person I went to to ask for help was of course my Dad, who after showing him the bracket and detailing out to him my plans he said to me "yup, no problems" and so off to work he went to fabricate this bracket for me and the rebuild project. I wont go into full details on the process involved that my Dad went through to make this bracket up for me, as I did film alot of the work he did of the making of this bracket and I think the footage would be better suited for showcasing in a future youtube video at some point down the line. But needles to say after about an hour of hard work, this is the result of my Dad's amazing efforts to reproduce this special bracket for me and I was over the moon as you could imagine. A quick test fit was also done just to double check that the new bracket would mount onto the car exactly like the oem bracket did and the result was pretty much spot on. All in all, I was very happy with the new bracket but it wasn't 100% finish just yet, as I still need to clean up the unit, do some de-rusting and I of course I need to paint the bracket in a glossy black chassis paint to match the oem bracket look as much as possible.

PROGRESS REPORT FEBRUARY 2024 February was a huge month for the rebuild project and I was able to get a ton of work done when compared to that from January. First I was able to get further along with progress on a couple of sections that I have already touch on from last month, bringing those sections closer to completion. I also made big improvements with my part cataloguing process's for each section and I also made some very interesting and exciting discoveries on a couple of parts which I hope you guys might like to see.

Your welcome Peage, but there is plenty more where those parts came from trust me. I have made it my mission with this car to find as many of the 300zx's rarest and optional parts as I can over the past 15+ years or so and I can't wait to show everyone what I've not just collected but actually installed onto my car. It's what drives my passion for this car and if that passion and excitement can inspire other z owners then it was all worth the journey of discovery in my eyes.

My pleasure gaz, I will try and post a February progress report by the end of the week with even more exciting developments and information from my progress on the rebuild project, so stay tuned..