DELIVERY DAY
PICKUP DAY
After carefully inspecting each and every one of the pictures he'd sent over (some of which are shared below) and being completely satisfied with all of them, the deal was made, and it was time to get the ball rolling. Shit - it's real now. Where am I gonna put this thing? How long before my wife hates it? Where do I even begin working on it? Do they still make parts for these? What is the community like? Oh who gives a shit I have a Datsun!
Once we agreed on a pickup day and our schedules aligned, I contracted a freight carrier to pickup the car. I didn't want to take any chances so I went with a fully enclosed trailer - none of this open trailer BS. I was positive this car would have enough work to do without 1,900 or so extra miles of stone chips and bug grime. At the same time, I had a money order made up from my bank and was waiting with it in-hand at my local branch of his bank... if that makes sense. Anyway the idea was to have him send me a photo of the car being loaded up, at which point I'd hand over the money order, they'd verify it was real and deposit it directly into his account, to take effect immediately. And that's what happened. The car got loaded up and it was on its way.
I've never bought a car sight-unseen before, but I gotta say - this was the easiest and smoothest transaction I could have possibly hoped for. It's 2020 at this point, everyone seems to have turned into a lunatic and you can't trust anybody right? Well - there are still some real great people out there. To the seller - thank you so much for that.
IT'S REAL NOW
Alright here we are. The car is en-route, I'm like a kid on Christmas morning except you know... it's a car and not a Pez dispenser or Axe Body Spray. This part was hard. I had a good interaction with the seller - he was great. So great in fact I'll occasionally still message him with updates on the car. Hopefully one day we can meet up and grab a beer. But now, it's in the hands of a guy who spoke with the thickest Russian accent I've ever directly heard. It's in limbo now... the great unknown. I'll admit I usually have pretty damn good luck with things so I knew I shouldn't be worried, but still, you just never know.
DELIVERY
I finally get the call with the delivery date and time. I worked things out at work to be home for it and took off around noon that day. I waited around with knots in my stomach. What was I in for?
Dude showed up in the biggest car hauler you could imagine. I live in a development, and this monstrosity rolled in like Hitler's Heavy Gustav railway gun. It took up all the room, and was decorating the roads with various oils like a Jackson Pollock painting. No way this thing got here in one piece.
Sure enough though, he dropped the rickety back door, held together with old rusty chains and bearings that sounded like an air conditioner getting crushed by a pneumatic press and there she was. He pushed a bunch of buttons, pulled a bunch of knobs (partly because that's how you operate the thing but mostly because several of them were broken) until the car was lowered down far enough to get on the ramp.
The intention was to simply get in the car, start it, and back down the ramp. Except it wouldn't start. It wouldn't even turn over, actually - so, off to a great start. We had to push it. And know what? We had to push it really hard because the car as it was, was lowered. It was lowered so much that it only had 2.25" of ground clearance, and the bump between the rack and the ramp was about 2.75", so we literally pushed the car on it's floor rails until it was on the ramp.
Once we got it on the ramp, the rest went pretty smooth. We pushed it back in front of my driveway, I signed a few papers, and the most terrifying Russian man I've ever encountered muttered 'Goot Luck', and drove off leaving a solid trail of Royal Purple behind him that still stains those same roads today.
After he took off, I grabbed a new battery I had lying around from the Probe GT project and put it in the car just to see if it actually ran. To my delight, it did! It fired right up, and I was able to get it off the salt covered roads and into the garage. It was home.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Now comes the make-or-break part. The real life, in person inspection. First impression was sorta weird - I was shocked at just how small this thing really was. Remember - it was lowered, so the highest point of the car came up to just below my nipples. Now if I were 6'7" that's not saying much but I'm a short chubby guy, 5'7" on a good day - so yeah this thing was small. Which was actually great for my self confidence - I could finally sit in a car that didn't have to have the seat adjusted all the way forward, good for me - I look normal sized when driving this thing. Plus - I could probably drive it underneath a semi trailer like in The Fast and the Furious or Christmas Vacation.
This thing sat so low, I couldn't make a fist and fit it under the car. This was a problem because how would I get a jack under there? The good news is that it had an adjustable suspension setup - I could deal with this later. The wheel/tire combo was alright. The chrome was a nice accent for the rest of the car. The wheels were 17" instead of the stock 14" that came from the factory, but the tires themselves were smaller than stock which was certainly different. That also meant that the speedometer wouldn't be accurate. The tires would take more revolutions to get to 55MPH, but the car wouldn't know any different and would read say 63MPH. Another thing to address.
It was also noticeable that the front of the car looked weirdly blank. This was because the front valance was aftermarket, and had a gigantic gaping hole in the front, exposing the Mishimoto radiator and giving the Z a huge derpy-looking grin. I remembered seeing a nice aftermarket grill from Skillard that I could buy later to address this... noted.
Lastly from the exterior, the tail light panel. From all my reading, I knew this could be hit or miss because as these cars age, the plastic gets super brittle, especially being from hot, dry Arizona. As it was, the tail light panels looked pretty good. The previous owner had refinished them and they presented nicely. My intentions for the car were far different than what these were though, so I knew I'd be refinishing them again anyway.
The interior was really rough. I fully expected this - no surprises there whatsoever. If anything, because there was no carpet, headliner or anything else I could see the steel floor. The floor had no rust. This was good news for me! The dashboard was cracked (very common with these old cars), the center console was beat to hell, no shift boot, and the drivers side window regulator was on its way out. I had a lot of work cut out for me for the interior, mostly stuff I've never done before... should be interesting.
The underbody looked great. I know that 'great' is all relative, but if you care to understand where my perspective came from visit my Probe page. Again - this came from Arizona. There's no snow down there. No snow means no salt, and no salt means cars survive longer than they do here. I'm not saying it was perfect - there were a few dings and dents, most certainly due to how low the car was. Going toe-to-toe with a speed bump would total this car in an instant. Or at least teeter-totter it. No rusted bolts, no holes, no rust damage and I was even surprised to see that the bottom wasn't really scraped to hell either. Overall, so far so good! Until I looked behind the front bumper cover.
It might be tough to tell from the picture, but do you see that weird looking dark blue tinted, rough textured disaster right there? It was foreign to me. So like any human would do when you don't recognize something, I poked it. It felt filmy. I then scraped at it with my fingernail and it peeled up. Like a film. It was goddam Plasti-Dip. The arch-enemy of anyone trying to restore a car. Plasti-Dip is sold in either buckets or aerosol cans by the devil himself and can be sprayed to cover literally anything, with a film that peels off in inconsistent, little tiny bits. It sucks. Everything about it sucks. There's no quicker way to lower the value of your car than spraying any single part of it with Plasti-Dip. Sonofabitch, how deep will this rabbit hole go.
VINYL WRAP
I mentioned one of the things the previous owner listed in his post was that the car was wrapped. For those of you who are not familiar with this concept, I will explain what it is. A vehicle wrap is an alternative to painting your car. Typically it's cheaper than a full repaint of a car, a lot less labor-intensive, and in most cases is not permanent. Vinyl is a thin, self-adhesive durable and forgiving film that you pull, stretch, heat, and apply to a cars surface to change its color and add some flair. If you get sick of it a few years later, you wait for a warm day, peel up a corner and pull it off. It's a neat concept that's really gaining traction as an alternative to paint.
Lucky for me, I have a lot of experience with vinyl so good or bad, I wasn't worried because I knew I could handle it regardless. But I'll admit, I was curious - vinyl is a tricky thing. It's not easy to install, and even if you manage to do it, getting it to look good is even harder. It's not so much the flat surfaces, it's the curves. The edges. Tucking under trim. Door handles. Things like that. This car is 40+ years old, and by design it's curvy. On top of that, it's not built like cars today where body panels are sectioned off and have visible manufacturing seams where parts can be removed and replaced - instead it's a big giant one-piece shell, meaning that you'd have to create seams in the vinyl and overlap in certain areas just to be able to cover the surfaces, and when you do that you have to be very strategic so as to hide the seams from sight, making the car look as though it is in fact painted. What that meant for me is that I was on the hunt for imperfections - after all, I'm a wrap guy. I can't drive around in a car that's wrapped, and isn't damn near perfect (or my own work for that matter).
This is where the pictures didn't do justice. This is a 'good from far, far from good' situation. The seams are very visible. They overlapped too much. There were parts peeling up. The hood vents are impossible to wrap, but he tried (he actually did well given the circumstances). It wasn't gonna work for me.