Nissan weekend #3 1/2

Okay ...it's been a bit more than a weekend; closer to 5 days. I mentioned in the previous "week 3" entry about bringing home the valve covers and stuff to clean up, and I did indeed clean them up. The valve covers had some type of funky paint on them that seemed almost rubberized ...it was damned thick, that's for sure. All the real crap started with the plenum cover though. I started with a simple cleaning ...then progressed to a bit of harmless sanding to get rid of some of the nicks and such. How in the world I ended up at polishing, I have no idea ...but that was EXACTLY where I ended up. So this is what I began with:

I had seen pictures of 300ZX's with the valve covers painted red to match the plenum cover red (you can kinda see that it's red originally in the picture). That was where I had INTENDED to go with things, but when you take an extremely OCD person who has way too much time on his hands, what you actually end up with can quite often be something altogether different.

I started with a wire wheel and a sanding attachment for my Dremel to get off the "crud" and get rid of most of the red paint. It didn't take long to figure out that wasn't going to be enough all by itself, so I ran to Home Depot and picked up a little bit of sandpaper. I think it was probably the 400 grit paper that killed me in the end; when I made it down to that, the aluminum was so smooth, it was nearly reflective. The polishing compound and tools with the Dremel looked just a BIT too good not to at least TRY. The next step on the cover looked like this:


The next thing I tried was the first of the valve covers. I sort of wish that I had decent pictures of them before we pressure washed them in weekend # 3, but not only were they nasty as hell ...it turned out that they were also painted silver. I started with grinding/sanding the paint off ...the sort of rubberized paint they had used on the damned thing wasn't going to be exceptionally receptive to being simply painted over; it was all going to have to be sanded off, and that sanding off was a bit more work than just a simple buzzing it with the sanding disc and wire wheel. I'm not sure what that paint was made up of, but it must have been partly crazy glue; I lost track of how many times I completely depleted the battery on my drill just doing the first one. I used the Dremel a LOT, and one who has used a Dremel before can imagine how long it took to go over an ENTIRE valve cover with one of the tiny attachments ...but that's exactly what I did. But oh man, what a difference:


Honestly; given the chance to do it over, I'd likely just go with the quick sand and paint ...but I suspect this will look pretty nice when all is said and done and it's actually on the car. I had to set the first valve cover and plenum cover on the dining room table and KEEP looking at them to convince myself that it was worth that much trouble to do the other valve cover and the plenum itself. The actual intake plenum really turned out to be a bit TOO much for me; I polished the sides that will be most visible from looking under the hood, but doing the whole thing was just a bit too much. I tried to sand smoother as much of it as I could, and I'm going to hope that it just looks "good enough" for the casual glances. I want it to look good, but it's not as though I really have any intentions of attempting to make a show car out of it. I want it to get me from point A to point B, and hopefully look as nice as possible in the meantime. The whole red/black color scheme for the engine got tossed for the time being, and I've decided on a simple black/silver scheme instead. This MAY be subject to change later; painting the red part of the plenum cover black REALLY made me think it might actually look better that way ...it certainly isn't a color scheme I've ever seen before at least:


I'm probably going to have to buy a lot of rubber before it's all said and done ...perhaps a whole roll of vacuum tubing, and then some regular rubber hose for some of the other stuff ...probably some elbows for flex places and I can paint the elbows black or silver. I think there's some potential in that idea, especially given that buying the formed rubber hoses would cost at least 10 times more than what buying regular hose and elbows will (and it might look pretty cool if I play my cards right).

This particular "weekend" was a hell of a lot more trouble than I initially figured I would be letting myself in for, but I still think it'll all be worth it when it's all over and done. I may have to look at/consider quite a few things in the "dress-up" end of things before I actually stab the engine back in. We'll see, but the fruits of my labor for the weekend are as follows:


I think it looks pretty good ...I guess when it's all stabbed in and I start doing the hooking up is when I'll decide exactly HOW "showy" I want the other stuff to look.

The good news is that this coming weekend will be weekend #4 and there will be two full workdays ...AND my engine rebuild kit finally made it in, so at least I don't have to worry about what I'm going to be doing this go round. I was starting to get worried ...I REALLY didn't want to be "going there" with body work until I had the engine stuff at least mostly out of the way. I'm hoping that the front end stuff will make it in before I leave, but I guess we'll just have to see. The other variable, of course, will be in how sick all of this will make me. Even this cleaning & polishing work has hit me a bit harder than I want to admit, and I'm obviously just compounding it by keeping going this weekend. I'm loathe to admit just how much I've missed this sort of thing though...