New World Datsuns...

My boss is super cool but I'm thinking about productivity and having my shit in the shop does not lend towards good productivity. Anything I do I finish in the weekend typically unless I can stick it out back. there's paying jobs and there's my shit, guess which one I want in the shop more LOL.

Anyway got the camper shell off peeled off the old nasty leftovers of foam tape on it. also ended up sanding down the rails a little bit where there was some rust starting and painted it with Chevy engine enamel because I didn't have any other paint. it's mostly covered under by the canopy anyways so not like you really see it. Eventually I'll actually do some body work on the bed and paint it but that's when I eventually paint the whole truck which isn't going to happen anywhere near soon.

Anyway got the engine on the stand got the bed painted taped canopy on and I'm good to go home for dinner. I'll bring the box van back tomorrow to get the engine.

And since I can't get a seal kit for this vision canopy which is apparently from 2004 according to the stickers on the inside of those windows, I ended up beating the frames back into place with a block of wood and hammer and then put right stuff in to fill in the gaps.

I'm torn between having a camper shell for the dogs and just getting a trifold hard shell tonneau cover or a rolling soft tonneau cover. More money I don't need to spend we'll see if this keeps most of the leaks out now.

Have I mentioned how handy a box van is? I also got the rearview camera hooked up. So nice! I can back right up to the hitch now. it has a second camera option too and I think I'm going to hook that up so I can actually split while I'm driving down the road and see what's behind me instead of the narrow view by the rear deck.

The wood hanging off the mounts was from the old pallet the engine was mounted on. Just haven't removed them yet.

Sent my core camshaft off to Colt Cams in Canada, eh? today. I bomb-proofed it with some wood trim I had leftover, and some bubble wrap, and a cardboard box. It was 13 pounds on sending. The wife said that's going to be expensive to ship. I ignored her. And yes, it certainly was, lol.

Finally got my left pull, left pull while braking figured out. We found the nut for the center link wasn't tight at the pitman arm. It probably was tight initially. Found the shoulder of the ball joint wouldn't allow the nut to tighten all the way. Pretty close, just not quite. Added a washer there and re-tightened, that cured the drifting left while driving.

The second issue I had was a left pull while braking. We finally confirmed the tension rod on the driver's side has too much movement. I suspect the frame horn mount is wallowed out. Passenger side moves in and out on braking, driver's moves up and down at the rear, which changes the control arm angle and causes the pull. So two options there. Yank the tension rod and make a new washer plate for the mount and otherwise repair it...OR...hurry up with my solid axle swap in the front. For right now it's not terrible so I'm ignoring it until summer.

The third thing for today is Geoff just called from Colt Cams! My Tri-Flow 1 is ready to be shipped back, so I should have the cam next week, woohoo!

Check out what came today!

Finally got around to unboxing the camshaft today. Looks beautiful!

Have the d21 all loaded up to fix the tension rod mounts tomorrow. That should stop the deflection under braking that makes it dive left. Super annoying. I haven't been driving it because of that. And wow, this new phone camera is so much better than the old one!!

Well this is just spiffy so far. I started smelling brakes and it felt like the box van didn't have anywhere near the amount of power it normally does on the way to the shop this morning. After I thought it was the trailer brake controller and a couple other things I realized I had the e-brake on about 2 or 3 clicks. Just enough to drag. Pretty sure when I released it I didn't pull all the way and it caught the last couple. So basically I've been dragging my rear brakes from my house to the shop which is about 10-12 miles.

The good news is it doesn't look like it was on enough to completely melt the brakes although they are smelly but at least it wasn't smoking out the back. And I only really smelled it once I got to the shop. So I'm going to crawl into there with a creeper real quick and see if I can check the pad condition if there's an access hole and just see if I have any left. Sigh.

Next up on the list is to make the e-brake light that's supposed to come on the dash (wherever the hell it is) actually work.

Okay the good news is I still have a quarter inch of shoe left on both shoes on both sides. I can't remember if they were bonded to riveted but either way they seem to be attached still so that's good. Sure I didn't do them any favors but it looks like just the being on a little bit probably didn't kill them all the way. So, on to the hardbody.

So this isn't actually my idea this is what I found off the internet and it's super sweet. Big props the guy who originally figured it out to use bearing cups as the new cones for location. You can see the shiny mark on the upper going to that left tension rod that's where it's been deflecting and causing the dive to the left under braking.

Herein lies the problem. There are supposed to be locating cups on the front and rear of these anchors. The front ones had fallen apart a long time ago but I still had the rearward ones so sure why not right? Well as you can see, rust has taken its sweet revenge.

The split at the middle left has detached and that whole top portion of cup moves up another 1/8 inch when you hit the brakes.

So I'm going to do my version of this slightly different. I'm going to make the cups like the other fella did but then I'm going to drill two holes on each of these and instead of welding around the sides which is a giant pain in the ass due to the location and it's all shrouded in bracketry, I'm going to do two plug welds on each side. The initial Villa who did this held the two pieces together with a bolt so they were even I'm probably going to make a sleeve in the middle that fits and get it pretty damn close. I may be able to bolt it together someday but I haven't figured out but short of it is I can locate the rear portion against the mount with a little spacer of sorts to keep it located perfectly on the back side and then basically do the same on the front side it'll just be slightly trickier.

By the time this rots out it'll be another 20 years.

Kind of like this. Just have to clean off a few little balls there and I did throw some wells on the backside also but should work quite effectively.

Please ignore that giant mound of welding I had to grind off. I was trying to weld with the tire still in the way and it didn't work very well. Anyway remove the tire and the appropriate way to actually do this is to remove the entire control arm so you can actually get at what you're working on. Of course that requires removing the torsion bars and a whole bunch of other crap that I really don't want to deal with. Consequently I've gotten it good enough and I'm going to reassemble the one side and screw the other side until next weekend! I also decided my plug welds weren't good enough and so I welded up a few spots on the outside. I found the plug weld not happy on the upper on the outside because as I was whacking the crap out of it with a chisel cleaning up stuff, it decided to break loose and twist after about 20 whacks. Granted I was putting some pretty good force into it but still it should have held so I figured I should reinforce it just a little bit more.

Threw some black engine enamel on them just to keep them from rusting a little bit.

There we go much better. And actually because we've added some distance on here this is probably going to do a little bit to increase the positive caster, which I'm all for.

It was nice of Nissan to make that a 2-piece part. Fuck those horrible Ford twin I-beams.

Agreed, at least it's not that. Though the twin I beam was a good suspension for jumping!