This one has been a long time coming! COVID lockdowns feel like a whole lifetime ago, and yet that is where this build got its start! Of course, the state of the world at the time made building a custom car a little more challenging; whether it was delays on parts, some vendors being locked down, and others that never reopened. Thankfully, we were able to keep pushing, continue making progress, and now it’s complete!
Let’s roll the clock back a bit though, and see how this all got started. This Z was actually originally purchased in 2018 as a parts donor for another Z that we were building at the time. We were in need of a clean, original gas tank among other things, and this car fit the bill. It wasn’t the cleanest 240, by any stretch, but the parts that we needed were in tip-top shape.
As much as this car started as a parts donor with us, it was still clean enough that it absolutely had a future build waiting for it. Fast forward to 2021, and we were ready to start digging away at this thing! Obviously we’d need to do some bodywork. The car may not have been completely rotten, but the Southern US sun had literally baked some of the paint right off the car, which had caused some surface rust to form in various areas. And of course, like many Datsun 240Zs out there that are still alive, this one had been in a minor collision or two.
So, what was the plan with this one? Put simply: we wanted to build the ultimate driver’s 240Z, while maintaining street drivability, and a pinch of custom comfort. Sounds easy, right? This build would be anything but. When all was said and done however, we feel that we accomplished our goal! Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here though, the first thing was to strip the car, and get rid of anything that we didn’t need (which was a lot). Once that’s done, it was onto some metal work! Let’s dig in!
