[KiLLeR2001]

Well it is time. I just got back from viewing one of the nicest S-chassis vehicles I have ever laid eyes upon.

It is an original 1989 two-tone coupe, silver-green pearl. Single owner, an old lady who originally bought it back in November of 1988. Car has 88,000 miles on it and has been garaged its entire life. It's a base model with a hardtop and factory 5 speed. It has been serviced at the same Nissan dealership where it was bought its entire life. A/C still blows cold!

It's only issue is it has is the head gasket is showing the beginning signs of failure. It still drives fine but after long hard drives it will start to overheat.

So without further ado...





























I have already made the proper arrangements and will be picking this car up on Friday.

Soon to be in her new home...



Stay tuned!

[KiLLeR2001]

on the way home...

[KiLLeR2001]

And I'm back!



Loading her up.



Naturally it came with the original Nissan keys.





The rain was absolutely terrible the whole way back, had to drive like 35 mph on the highway most of the way.



Then it started clearing up a bit and a rainbow decided to slice through the roadway. Quite awesome if I may say so myself.



Waiting for the rain to die down.





Home at last!



Original owner's manual and the original warranty information brochure! LOL.

I'm at work right now, if you guys want pics of certain areas of the car let me know!

[KiLLeR2001]

The coolant reservoir was all crusted and falling apart so I decided to throw on the one I pulled off of my s13.5 when I upgraded to the aluminum one.

Before (old reservoir already removed):



After:



I'm pretty much going to be doing small little fixes like this with the car. I just spent the last hour with a razor blade and some goo gone removing a couple of stickers that were on the back windshield. They were baked on there pretty good, probably 20 year old stickers.

A few other problems I noticed. The auto seatbelt on the driver side sometimes will stop mid-track as you are opening / closing the door. I already figured this out by jiggling the wire harness that runs between the door and the body. So I need to get in there and check all the wires out.

A/C runs but only on fan setting #2. #1 and #3 do not work.

Radiator was severely low, I filled it up about a gallon! Yikes.

The engine might be worse than I anticipated. I took the oil cap off and inspected the head, there is milkshake sludge everywhere. You can barely see the valve springs its so covered. I might have to upgrade to KA24DE. I will know for sure once I start breaking it down.

Oh and for official two-tone ballerness...



Paint code: 5G7

:likeaboss:

[KiLLeR2001]

Couple of other little problems I noticed...

- Exhaust leak.
- Steering rack boots completely shot.

She's definitely in need of some love, should be an interesting next few weeks!

[KiLLeR2001]

Well ladies and gents, I have some bad news. I filled the radiator up with over a gallon of water, let it sit overnight and then tonight filled it up some more. I went to go start the engine and I heard a horrible sound I am almost certain was hydrolock. I'm assuming the headgasket was so bad when I filled it up all the way water started leaking into the oil passages.

So, the hunt for a KA24DE begins. This is going to be fun.

[KiLLeR2001]

Holy fuck.

So I pull the plugs and go to crank it a few times, this engine spits out a concentrated stream of water directly out of the spark plug holes LOL!

Look at this shit...



All over my boxes and to the wall... I also put a white shirt in front of cylinder holes #2 and #3 to see what exactly was going to come out... And it literally propelled the shirt into the wall at an epic rate of speed.

So yeah, I think the starter is good...

All the plugs were wet, #4 was the least wet.



Plugs 1-4, left to right.

[KiLLeR2001]

Lets add a few more things to the list...

- Needs another stock exhaust, muffler broke from the welds and is dangling along with the piping.
- Exhaust hanger bushings are shot.
- Subframe bushings are shot.

When I put the S15 HLSD on my S13.5, I'll give the J30 VLSD to this car. I'd also like to get the HICAS rear sway bar. Stock one is a dinky piece of crap! haha.

[KiLLeR2001]

Oh hey guys don't mind my sludge...



Intake pipe leading up to the throttle body.



Throttle body plate.

I hope I'm not too late in saving this motor...

And of course we have our standard rusted out battery tray.



Going to have to clean it up good and then spray some rust preventative paint (POR-15) over it to make sure it doesn't get any worse.

[KiLLeR2001]

LOL! I swear I'm giving this SOHC a shot. It's the little engine that could. 88,000 grocery getter miles, I just have to believe its a good solid motor... I just have to...

Some friends decided to come over tonight and help me start to break down process... I'd really like to focus on doing the majority of the work in the daylight hours so this will probably be one of the very few night time pics.



I'm definitely going to eliminate all the emissions bullshit, its quite annoying how much shit is involved with it.

[KiLLeR2001]

Working on removing the pin striping and fender liners. With some goo gone, my fingernail, and a lot of patience, it is coming off nicely. At first I was reluctant to remove the pin striping in fear of the paint behind it being fresher than the rest. But the paint has been kept in such good shape there is no visible difference. So exciting!!!



Beginning of removal on the passenger side. The artificial lighting and my camera make the paint color look terrible.



Fender liner still in tact, and the back section of the pin striping still there.



Fender liner and pin striping completely removed and cleaned up on the passenger fender.

Slowly but surely, one section at a time!

ps, Wednesday I'm planning on removing the head (in daylight).

[KiLLeR2001]

Popped the valve cover off, this is what I got...



Not sure what to do at this point. I think I'll look to see if anyone is selling a good SOHC engine for cheap or look into doing the KA24DE swap.

Thoughts? Comments?

[KiLLeR2001]

Been so busy now that school has started up. Decided I had to do something today.

Here are some daytime pictures of all the pinstriping removed as well as the fender strips...







Spent a few hours removing the caked on intake manifold gasket. I still have to work on removing the one that is caked on the head... gonna be annoying I'm sure.

The big water inlet for the radiator was rusted out pretty bad. So I had to chop off the rusted portion, sand it down nicely, and then spray a couple coats of high temp black.



Oh yeah and here is what came out of the oil pan after letting it drain out slowly over the past couple of weeks...



Yeah it's pretty much a solid with a thin layer of water on top, LOL!

If things go as planned, I should have the exhaust dropped and head off tomorrow! Going to try to get off work early to make it happen.

Stay tuned.

[KiLLeR2001]

Yay, doing work!

Got my new gasket set from Nissan.



Whole bunch of goodies, I also bought a new radiator cap, the old one was shot to hell.

Finally got the cylinder head off as well as the exhaust. Here is what I'm working with...







You can see on the bottom portion in between 1 and 2 being the problem area. It's even more obvious when you look at the head gasket itself.



This is the bottom area of the head.

Still waiting on the ARP head studs, should be here in the next few days. Got a long road ahead of me of cleaning up all the gasket material from all the surfaces, then using the straight edge to make sure the clearances are within spec.

Once everything checks out... assembly begins!

[KiLLeR2001]

Incoming night time picture...



Oh and rummaging through the trunk I found some brand spanking fresh as fuq Nissan wheel chalks...



I <3 this car.

[KiLLeR2001]

Got the gasket all cleaned off the head. Need to buy a straight edge and check the tolerances so I can have a peace of mind before throwing everything back together.

I still need to remove the gasket material off of the block. I worked on a little section the other day, seems to be coming off easily. I bought a 100pk of razor blades so I'm taking my time and using fresh blades.

However, the damn intake manifold gasket is BAKED the fuck on. I spent at least 2 hours on that thing and only got one intake runner section removed... So I ordered some gasket remover spray, I'm going to spray it and let it soak up good and hopefully that helps... If not I don't know what to do.

Here is a pic of my little storage area of the manifolds + head. You can see the little bit of gasket I was able to remove in this picture...



I bought a little EGR blocking plate off eBay since I'm completely eliminating emissions from the car (thank you Florida).





Installed (and yes I wiped the excess off).

And then UPS rings my door bell and the final piece to the puzzle arrives...





DERICIOUS.

[KiLLeR2001]

Cha ching!

So I bought new Nissan exhaust gaskets...



I still need to find a stock S13 catback exhaust. I'm probably going to end up impulse buying an HKS exhaust for the car...

In order to combat the impossible to remove caked on intake manifold gasket, I had to purchase this...



It worked pretty good... on the top layer. But the paper gasket was so hard, so solidified, that the chemical could not penetrate through it.

So I did what I told myself I was NOT going to do, and what is the wrong way of going about it, but in times of desperation, I must prevail. In comes the DREMEL!!!

My idea was simple, shave off the material thin enough so I could spray the chemical on the remnants and razor blade it off. Long story short, it worked just as I had imagined. Obviously I took my time, went extremely slow, and was able to do it successfully without damaging the surfaces.



Final product. Looks like there is still material there but its just discoloration, surface is evenly smooth.

Now we move onto preparing the block for head installation. First thing was first, I borrowed an air compressor from my friend so I could blast out any nastiness from the head bolt holes. Last night I actually blasted the holes with brake parts cleaner and let that soak in there to break anything up. Once the holes were clean and dry, head stud installation!



Obligatory ARP head stud install picture.



ARP'd.



Head installed. You can see the sprocket markings so that I put everything back just the way it came off.

Torqued in sequence, 25ft, 45ft, 55ft, backed it off, 25ft, 45ft, and then finally 60ft; Using the supplied ARP lube on the threads as per instructions. Hope I didn't forget anything!

[KiLLeR2001]

So I woke up in the middle of the night and decided to go out to the garage. Looking at the car, (the front end particularly), I realized the grilles on the pignose bumper are an ugly gray color.

Now I've seen people cut them out entirely, and I'm not a fan of that look at all, so I decided to paint them semi-gloss black. Boom, idea has been spawned, I have painters tape in my hand and I begin taping the bumper off.

Upon taping the bumper off, I was gazing down at the imprinted NISSAN stamp. It's almost as if the ideas are contagious at this point because I decided that I wanted to also paint these letters so that it would really make the bumper "pop".



One of the grilles, nasty looking 80's gray color, LOL.



Here is the front bumper taped up waiting for paint.

Now I had a funky method of figuring out how to black out the letters, and if I could go back in time probably would have done something different. I know there must be a definitive way to do this and get a 100% perfect laser-like finish, but I digress...

What I did was pretty much paint some grease in the areas where I DIDN'T want the paint to stick, so that way once the paint dries I could just wipe it all off. It worked to an extent but I didn't get the precision I was after. In order to get a crisper look I had to go into the grooves some more with a black sharpie.



Final product.

This should hold me off until I can save up for a Silvia front end.

[KiLLeR2001]

Good news folks. My school money should be here within the next five days, which means things will start rolling along much quicker.

Today I removed the airbox and installed these 180sx green fuse box covers...





Initially I was going to put them on the hatch, but I think the green fits the theme of the 2tone a little better.

Also, definitely thinking about painting the valve cover, any suggestions on the color? I'm thinking semi-gloss black.

[KiLLeR2001]

Got the valve cover painted in wrinkle black, came out really nice I think.

Here are some before shots of the valve cover...





Went over to my friend's house, busted out the wire wheel and went to town...



For the most part I did the prepping and I had him paint since hes a lot better than I am at it. I also used sandpaper in the hard to reach areas.



Ready for primer...



Starting to look good already, now time for the wrink-a-dink. Here is the final product just 2 hours after painting...





I'm planning on sanding down the NISSAN so it shows a nice polished color.

Friday was fun fun fun!