Reviving The Claw

[Dat240zg]

Dat240zg submitted a new DSM Profile :

The Claw


Read more about this vehicle here...

 

[Dat240zg]

A bit of history....

Back in '99 I had a '91 Talon TSi. Nice straight car but unfortunately it leaked oil from every orifice known to man. I had just recently gotten married and ended up trading it in for a new Mazda Protege. Ugh.

The car ended up making its way to another member here on DSMtuners and ended up going to the Denver area where it was raced (maybe still?).

From there, I got back in to early Datsun Z cars, culminating with me doing a bare metal restoration of #00248. That car was a beast, with a built LT1 and 6 spd from a Firehawk, full NOS system, coil overs and on and on. Car won best in show for its class twice at Bikes, Blues and BBQ. A growing family meant the Z had to go and I was without a project!

Fast forward to the last few years and the DSM bug was biting bad. I was looking pretty regularly for a 1GA to replace my old one. Everything I saw was either sketchy, ragged out, or so nice that it was cost prohibitive.

Then, my panda popped up. Higher mileage than I was looking for, but after contacting the owner, it seemed worth looking into. Timing belt, done. New ECU with chip for DSM link, check. No oil leaks, check. Rough, but ready? You bet. After getting my better half to give me the thumbs up, I flew out to SLC to take a look.

The car had an interesting history that grabbed my attention. It had 128K miles, but had been stored for about 9 years. About as close to a DSM barn find as I'm going to get. Covered in dirt, grime and leaves. The PO aired up the flat tires and it started up. The brakes were soft (that's being generous), but there was enough there that I could drive it around for a bit to get an idea of what I was getting in to. I took it to a car wash and dropped $15 to pressure wash some of the layers of crud.

After the scrubbing, no surprises popped up. It was scruffy, needed a significant amount of TLC, but was solid where it needed to be. I paid and set up transportation arrangements. A week later, it showed up at midnight! One cool thing was that when the car was picked up, the PO told me that he had just loaded it in to the trailer. I just took that to mean driven it up on the trailer, as I hadn't paid for an enclosed shipment. Surprise, surprise, he wasn't wrong!

I'm back baby!

 

[Dat240zg]

Day 1: So what did I really buy?

Spent the better part of Sunday trying to answer that question.

Started by giving the car a thorough washing:

Foam cannon!

Megs Gold Class wash (x2)

Tons of debris - stuck in wing, growing in the engine bay (no joke), spider webs everywhere. After the body was scrubbed well I moved on to the engine bay.

Covering Electronics:

Started with engine degreaser - set for 10 min then agitate and rinse. Followed up with another wash with Simple Green and and rinsed. Much better:

Pulled the car back in the garage and began cleaning glass - found some mildew on inside of hatch glass. Accidentally knocked over my wood prop. Brained myself. Stopped cleaning and installed new hatch struts:

Removed carpet in hatch area and its clear why there's mildew - standing water from wash. At that point, I went ahead and pulled all of the carpet in the car. Found mold behind the passenger seat. Carpet in the trash can!

Cleaned the inside of the car/hatch: vacuumed all areas, sprayed Simple Green and let it sit for 10 min, then wiped up. Good, but not great. Followed with a diluted bleach mix. Sprayed that all over and let sit for another 10 before wiping up the residue. Much better now.

 

[Dat240zg]

The car's paint is toast - to be expected. Looks like the hood has been painted before. For some unknown reason someone added a basketball sized decal to the center of the hood, then for good measure let it bake for 10+ years! #facepalm

The roof is pretty toasty too. I'll see what life I can work back in to it. One benefit is that the faded paint doesn't show up on a white car as bad!

Wing is totally faded, so it'll be getting pulled, sanded and sprayed gloss black along with the mirrors and door trim.

Both window regulators are junk.

Still had a pretty strong smell of moldy bleach, so rinsed the floor pan(s) down with warm water and then hit it with lysol wipes followed by another rinse. Then sprinkled baking soda over night. Much better today! Added benefit is that the floors are really clean and ready for the new carpet:

Before:

After:

Spent a good 15 min steam cleaning the vents:

Parts should start getting here tomorrow. Stay tuned!

 

[Dat240zg]

Now for the fun! I had ordered a bunch of parts and they finally got in:

Outlander Sport brake upgrade (including the 3g MC), AC compressor, condenser and drier, new carpet, Kumho tires, tuneup parts (NGK wires and plugs), fuel filter and air filter, a new (to me) Pioneer NEX1400 and speakers, and new window regulators.

Reliable daily driver, here we come!

 

[Dat240zg]

Well, so much for staying on top of updates! I've had two weeks - pretty much uninterrupted - to work on the Talon. The days have pretty much blurred in to a big stretch of working from sun up to sun down.

The more that I dug in to the Talon, the more things required attention. While installing the stereo, I found that one of the previous owners had simply cut the harness. So a one hour install turned in to a half a day harness repair just so that I could install the Pioneer. While installing the stereo, I went through and replaced the speakers but found that there were no speakers at all and that the harnesses were, you guessed it, chopped!

I pulled the rear wing to refinish it and then took time to cut/buff/polish the body underneath the wing and get rid of the oxidation line below the wing. While the wing was off, I decided to install a back up camera just to the left of the third brake light. It turned out really nice and next to invisible, unless you know what you're looking for.

Refinishing the three piece wing involved some prep time sanding and repairing numerous dings and chips. Once the pieces were in good nick, I sprayed them gloss black.

 

[Dat240zg]

After the wing pieces were done, I jacked the car up and began work on the suspension and brakes. Plan was to do the Outlander brake upgrade and replace the shot KYB AGX struts and shocks.

Disassembly was pretty straightforward: hit anything and everything I was going to work on with PB blaster the day before. After I pulled the struts and brakes, I went ahead and re-undercoated the wheel wells.

I had ordered new slotted rotors and due to a mix up on the companies part, it took them almost a month from when I first ordered them to get to me.

While I waited for the parts to come in, I went ahead and pulled the front spoiler off and swapped out the AC drier and condenser as well as installed my LED headlights and fog lights.

I used JDMAstar bulbs as I've used them previously on my Infiniti and really like the quality and the light that the bulbs give:

Here's how the front end looked after the new parts and doing paint touchups:

 

[Dat240zg]

The brakes still hadn't gotten in so I took the time to pull the tail lights and clean up the area behind and underneath. No one will see it, but I feel better knowing it's not full of 10 years of crap anymore.

 

[Dat240zg]

While I waited for the rotors to come in, I tackled a number of other jobs on my list - recovered the headliner and the cargo cover, installed new tweeters in the door panels and refinished the wheels (buying new wheels is out of the question at this time, so refinishing/repainting was my only option).

Sound deadening:

Tweeters installed:

Cargo Cover:

Headliner material - vinyl with 1/4" foam backing:

In all of the work, I forgot to take pictures of the wheel refinishing. Process was pretty straightforward: sand by hand the face of the wheels, paying attention to address any corrosion that was there; taped off the colored section and sprayed 4+ coats of charcoal metallic paint, then followed with several coats of clear. Let dry in sun for several days and then mount the new tires.

The result is fine for me; it won't be to everyones taste, but it was $40 in supplies vs. $400 for a set of used wheels.

 

[Dat240zg]

All of the brake parts finally came in - new rotors front and back, new front calipers, ceramic pads, new braided stainless steel brake lines and a new 1 1/16 master cylinder.

Again, I got excited and forgot to take "during" pictures, just got a couple of the after shots. While I was at it, I installed the new KYB struts and new tie rod ends.

I show the last picture because I need peoples input on this. When reading the tech articles on the Outlander swap, everyone states that you need to come up with modified lines or use an adapter due to the banjo style mount on the caliper. What I found though was that I could remove the screw from the back of the caliper and run my line directly into the back of the caliper. There was enough length i the braided lines that it worked fine. Anyone believe there is a problem that I'm missing?

I also swapped in the new MC taking time to bend the one line. All of my lines fit the new MC without issue, despite the difference in the line ends. No leaks.

We'll see how it works out...

 

[Dat240zg]

Here're a couple of pictures as it sits tonight including one of the wheels up close:

Questions and comments are always welcomed.