Z Fever

This is a 1977 Datsun 280Z a customer brought to us to have the engine bay restored in his 100% original one-owner car. He has owned the car since new and it has 208k miles on it. He had the car painted at a well known body shop here in Tampa that does mostly Mercedes work called Jene Perez Paint and Body. They do high quality work.
But after having the car painted the engine simply looked terrible and he had been by here several times in the past buying misc parts and loved the show quality work he had seen here. He is not a glitz and glamor guy. He is about 70 years years old and just wanted it like new.
The following pics document the engine's restoration we did for him. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did doing the work. I actually got out from behind my desk and did a lot of this work myself.
This was a fun job!
Enjoy..........

The car the day it came to us:





Then we pulled the engine, dismantled the intake, took every bracket off the engine bay, pulled the hood latch, hood prop, fuel system, engine bay light, and every bolt, and nut from EVERYTHING AS WELL AS all the hoses.
Then we sent some parts to the electric plated for yellow cadmium plating and we sent some parts to be powder coated. We ordered all the new gaskets and parts we were replacing like:
oil pressure sender, fuel pressure regulator, plugs, wires, cap, rotors, coolant temp sensoe, thermotyme switch, and more.

All of these parts had to be wire brushed, polished and acid etched before going to the electro lab plater.


When they were finished they looked like this:



The powder coated parts looked like this:



Then we started putting it all back together again. First, we painted the block and installed new freeze plugs:


Then we installed the head, timing gears, timing cover, oil pump, etc...


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The manifold was sent out to be straightened, machined, and ceramic coated.

Here is the engine fully reassembled before installation:



Then the install process:

Genuine 70's Nissan oil filter (with directions for install, hilarious but cool):










I sincerely hope that you appreciated this build. It took a lot of time and detail to do it. It took us 2 months over all. We also had to replace the intake manifold and machine the head, remove broken studs in the head, and tap and helicoil threaded holes. Those things require patience but the job turned out perfect! (at least I think so).
What do you think?