Hi everyone,
It's been a long time since I've been on the scene, or logged in to this forum. I was an active member from about 2004 - 2006 and in early 2005 bought myself a black (fastest colour, obviously) LWB 300ZX TT manual. Loved that car and for the first 18 months all was well. I see the odd name on here I still recognise - sometime during that period I met Gaz 300 and his partner (think he was driving a SWB NA back then) and we had a pint.
At some point in that period I also bought a grounding kit but for reasons I no longer remember never quite got around to fitting it to the car. In fact I've never even taken it out of the bag. Anyway, I bought a house and money was tight, and various things went wrong with the car all at the same time, and with the new mortgage I didn't have the money to get it fixed.
So it just sat on my driveway under a cover for a few years until my mate Tim mentioned that he was looking for a project car to fix up, and I offered him the 300ZX because without an MOT, and with all the work it needed doing, it wasn't worth more than a few hundred quid (this would have been early 2012 - I suspect it might be worth more now given the prices I see decent ones going for these days). He was doing a PhD at the time so I just gave him the car - I saw it as doing me a favour to get it off my driveway, and he'd get a car to tinker with.
Anyway, he started coming over and after two or three days work, changing all the fluids, putting fresh fuel in, getting the brakes freed up, tyres inflated - I think he might have changed plugs, and maybe coilpacks and/or leads as well - he was ready to give it a start. I have a video of this somewhere. It pretty much started first time, and without the misfire it had been suffering from when I parked it up (in fact that misfire never came back). It still, of course, needed a new clutch, new driveshaft (both of which I'd actually bought but sold on eBay for an absolute pittance about 18 months before Tim mentioned he was looking for a project car - really annoying; I'd actually sold the car as well but the prick who won the auction was a timewaster who never came to collect, and I was away for a couple of months on a sabbatical so it ended up that I never got round to listing it again), new exhaust system, new brakes, and a few other bits and pieces.
Still we managed to drive it up and down the road my house is on and, I kid you not, all the neighbours came out and gave us a round of applause. I'm sure you can imagine the racket a 300ZX with a completely shot exhaust system where the backboxes have completely rotted out makes, and it drew rather a crowd.
Tim spent the best part of a year working on that car at evenings and weekends to get it back up to scratch again. He spent probably £2.5k on parts, but did all the labour himself. He let me drive it once or twice - in fact he was basically happy for me to drive it whenever I wanted but I didn't take him up on it in case I ended up wanting one again - and he'd done a great job getting it working again. He kept it a good long time as well and used it as his daily driver for years. He eventually sold it on to the guys at SCUZZLE in early 2019 (he'd also offered it back to me for the cost of the parts he'd put into it a while before that, but I resisted the temptation - not without some regrets).
This is the car in this video here from September 2019:
Hopefully they've still got it: hopefully it's still running and on the road. If you're from SCUZZLE and you're on here, let me know - I'd love to hear.
Anyway, back to the grounding kit. It disappeared somewhere in the house move, but I found it fairly recently during a clear out of some old stuff. It's still in its bag, never used, complete with instructions, but it's also 15+ years old so I don't want to charge anyone money for it in case there's something wrong with it. If you'd like it, drop me a message and I'll send it to you. I was thinking about putting it on facebook marketplace for local collection but then thought, stuff it, might as well give it to somebody who's still got one of the cars and will be able to make best use of it.
Here are a couple of photos:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2qc3dt0aqg844jt/IMG_1965.jpg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ogrujnmbq4iwssr/IMG_1966.jpg?dl=0
Like I say, if you'd like it, let me know. First come, first served.
Also, to the committee and mods, I'm sorry if I've posted this in the wrong place: do please move it to somewhere more appropriate if you'd prefer. I think, as I'm not a full member, my options for posting are pretty limited.
All the best, and glad to see that the forum is still going and that there are plenty of you still out there running 300ZXs.
Cheers,
Bart
