SharkSkin's 928 Pages

My Past Vehicles

Disclaimer: Yes, I did a lot of stupid things when I was a kid. I'm sharing some of them here for grins.... Please let there be no doubt that I know better now. As you read that should become more apparent. :) 1969 Datsun 510 Wagon 4 spd [Not Yet] Bought this for $300 at the beginning of the summer before my senior year in high school. Quickly added a stereo, and some rear window tint... then blacked out the trim. I quickly found out that this car only weighed 200 lbs more than the 2-door, and later I was to find that in addition, the live axle rear suspension kept the wheels perpendicular to the ground.... giving me an advantage over most of the local 510 cars, which were lowered with ridiculous camber and too-stiff suspension. My first accident was in this car. Wet day, pulling around the end of a row in the high school parking lot, stereo maxed, and my foot slipped off the wet brake pedal onto the gas. Lurched into a Chevy Nova, mid-70's, and broke a little $50 trim ring around the light. Pushed my front end into the engine, driving the radiator over the waterpump, spewing water and steam everywhere. Oh, by the way, the Dean was standing not 10 feet away, at the end of the parking lot when I did this. I'm sure it's his fondest memory of me. ;) My dad took me down to get a water pump, and a hood, then he stood by shaking his head while I attached a come-along to the hitch on his van and pulled out the front end. I had my brother's straight 510 to compare against, and after much measuring and head-scratching it seemed that it only folded up the hood, front apron, and the crosspiece that the radiator attaches to. Well, aside from the bumper, grill, radiator, etc. :) Using my Dad's torch, and a pair of pliers, I sealed up the radiator and welded the good half of my bumper to the good half of another bumper I had laying around. I put in the waterpump, radiator, bumper, and put the fresh hood on... I left off the apron and grill till I replaced them, but damn if I didn't drive the car to school the next day! Means squat, I know, but it felt like a personal victory for me. Nil Illegitemi Carborundum. As time went on, I put a 200SX 5-speed in it(which had the same odd shift pattern as the 5spd 928) then added Addco sway bars, KYB gas shocks, and BFG T/As. I quickly became known at high school as "the guy you don't want to try to keep up with in a corner". Later I switched the tired 1600 for a 1.8SSS motor, with dual SU carbs. Say what you like about these carbs, if you know what you are doing they are easy to set up and VERY reliable. Pulled the top end... you could still see the cross-hatching in the bores! Shaved the head, put oversize valves, port-matched the head to the SSS intake; had to remove a good 5mm on the radius of the port, then blend it in... When I put it together, compression was 195 plus or minus 3 on all cylinders, indicating a compression ratio over 10:1. This car was now a rocket! Later I upgraded to Pirelli P6 tires... these were phenomenal in the dry, and in the wet I could take corners faster with those tires than I could in the dry on the T/A's. Going downhill on highway 9 toward Saratoga, I was on one occasion able to keep up with a guy on a Suzuki... GS750 I think it was... I had two passengers in the car and even on the straights, we could see the guy on the bike grabbing handfuls of throttle and shaking his head because he couldn't pull away much... :) Thinking back, there may have been something wrong with his bike or his skills, but it felt good anyway! I was able to do the "5 minute run" on 9 in well under 5 minutes. Also, added cheap racing seats, MOMO wheel, many other small things. I used to race this car on Moody Road, Page Mill Road, Highway 9, Skyline, LaHonda.... I really learned "driving at the limit" in this car. Later, when the R/T became my driver, my girlfriend drove the 510 for 18 months or so. When we ended and I got the car back, the oil wasn't on the dipstick at all, and when I added 21/2 quarts, I found that at idle the blow-by was so much that oil would blow out the filler cap onto the hood. She killed it, even though she swore that she checked oil with every fillup. My fault too I guess, since I was so absorbed in the R/T that I didn't check for myself. Trust, but tie your camel, eh? Lesson learned... If it's your car and you care about it, YOU check the maintenance items even if someone else is driving it. I sold it to my brother to pick what he could off of it for his own 510(s), after which he donated it to the Nevada County Fire Department for "Jaws-of-Life" practice. They peeled back the roof like a sardine can, cut open the doors, and a few other things... ;) 1978 Dodge Monaco, 440 Interceptor model [Not Yet] Picked this baby up for $1100. had a 440(of course), torqueflite, Dana 60, HUGE brakes and swaybars, and a nice dual exhaust. Big free-flowing mufflers leading back to glasspacks alongside the gas tank. This car was a very well-behaved beast; it was actually a very fine touring car. I could go from 100 to 0 in no time at all with 5 or 6 passengers, and from 0-100 pretty doggone quick. I never clocked it, but it sure did move. The only problem was that people would get in my way and do the speed limit all the time because they thought I was a cop! At this time I was working as a tow driver for AAA, and I had access to lots of old truck tires. They could only re-cap them a few times, then they had to be scrapped. In a pinch one day, I put a set of these on the car and quickly discovered.... nothing, I mean nothing, makes as much tire smoke as these things! Plus, after a few retreads, there was LOTS of rubber on them. At this time the El Camino in Santa Clara was a big hangout for kids... "the Strip" we called it. Think American Graffiti. :) Well, there was this one parking lot on the south side of El Camino, just east of Pomeroy, that had a narrow alley that let out onto El Camino. This one night, the breeze was blowing gently north, and I just sat in there doing a brakestand for at least 3 minutes. The tire smoke filled up the parking area, then a huge wall of smoke wafted down the alley and across the road, blanketing all 6 lanes of El Camino. In retrospect this was very stupid, because anyone on the main drag had to negotiate through this zero-visibility wall. Sure was fun, and people talked about it for some time. I also pulled many, many other shenanigans with this car... and I take the Fifth. :) See disclaimer above. I really beat on that car for the better part of a year, and when I sold it for $1300 it was every bit as tight and solid as when I bought it. The guy who bought it didn't seem to notice the 1/2" or so of melted rubber lining the wheelwells... maybe he thought it was undercoating. :) 1967 Dodge Coronet R/T [Not Yet] This car I bought from one of the guys I worked with at the grocery store. Think 400+ HP in a wide 3400lb car. It had the original 440HP, Torqueflite, and 2.92:1 gears. Had the original rally wheels, welded to 10" rims and rechromed. The whole car was lowered about 2". It actually handled pretty decent for such a front-heavy car, better than the Interceptor. This car was just plain incredible. It would do 75 in first gear, and on the shift to 2nd it would launch hard, leave 2 strips of rubber and tire smoke, and gain me another 3 or so car lengths on whoever I happened to be racing at the time. My favorite was a Turbo Carrera on 280, both of us getting on southbound at Page Mill behind some granny. We both pulled out from behind her at about 30mph, and it was pretty even up to 75. When I hit 2nd I was GONE. I backed down a bit later and he caught up, grinning and shaking his head. :) Back when there was a grudge night at the now-defunct Fremont Drag Strip, I pulled a 12.9 @131MPH, using only 1st & 2nd gear. I was very pleased with that, since I in no way intended it to be a drag car. :) Anyway, this car woke me up to the error of my ways. I got out of shape somewhere north of 130mph on Skyline, spun around I don't know how many times, and ended up with one rear tire starting to go over a horrendous drop-off. The entire back end was hanging into space... 6 more inches and I would very likely have died. It was a miracle, as the only damage was a tire that got pinched and had a slow leak that was nice enough to let me make it to the gas station at Hwy 84. I had the car for another 6 months... I still drove it fast, but not crazy/stupid anymore. One more point on my record and I would have lost my license. I decided I needed to slow down somehow... 1967 Chrysler Town & Country Wagon [Not Yet] Picked this sled up for $300 at a time when I had the R/T down for a fresh tranny. 383 Carter 2bbl. It had a bus-sized steering wheel, am radio, power locks and windows including the tailgate, the A/C was like a freezer and the heater was like a furnace... It became my driver/thrasher. It had 4 seatbelts across each of the front and back seats. I would load up with 7 friends, leaving one car near Stevens Creek Dam, and cart everyone and their bikes to the top of Page Mill Road. We would then race our mountain bikes down through Los Trancos & the back side of Black Mountain, arriving at the reservoir. We would then go get the wagon and do it again, sometimes 3 trips in a Saturday. What fun that was. Sometime later I sold it for $300. 1978 Dodge Colt 4 door [Example of Car] This car was going to be towed to a junkyard for the cost of towing. I paid the towing, put a $50 carb kit in it, and used it for quite some time as my daily commuter between Sunnyvale and South San Francisco. Not terribly exciting, but it helped me keep a low profile while points dropped off my driving record. 1976 Dodge Ramcharger [Not Yet] I picked this truck up around 1986, with the idea that it would slow me down. :) In fact, I sold the R/T to pay for it. It did slow me down, alright. 318 and full-time 4wd, it has always been the opposite of speedy. I made many changes to it... it already had a 4" lift; I put bigger tires on it. I had San Jose Driveline build up a set of driveshafts with 2 ton hardware. It has been a ragtop since I bought it, and I still love it to this day. I've put one replacement top on it.. In about 1988 though, I rolled it on a trip to Hollister Hills. I seemed to be the only one in our group that could make it up "Truck Hill", an incredibly nasty section with 4' deep ruts up an insane grade. I started doing laps, up the challenging part, down the return trail.... then I got a bit sideways on the return trail, and the front wheel caught a rock and tipped me over. It was a very slow roll, in fact for a moment I thought it might not roll. But it did, crunch on the side then crunch upside down where it stopped. We brought another truck up the return trail and pulled my truck through the remaining 180° onto its wheels, put in 3 quarts of tranny fluid and 2 quarts of oil, and drove it back to the Bay Area. A couple of weeks later, with the help of a forklift at work and couple friends of varying degrees of usefulness, I replaced the entire body pan in one weekend. That's everything from the top of the windshield to the tailgate. The rest of it took several weekends to pull together, and once I had it straight and primed I sort of quit fooling with it... turns out it's a lot of fun having a 4x4 that you don't mind scratching up a bit. :) For about a week I drove it fully smashed up, no windshield, and oil trails still coating the smashed fenders. I have to say that during that time I had the most fun EVER driving in traffic. When people saw my turn signal come on, they would get WELL out of my way. :) Unlike smaller cars, where people take your turn signal to mean "I better speed up and get in this guy's way". But it's been a great truck, and is my heavy parts & firewood hauler to this day. Incidentally, I have not had a single moving violation in any car(except a Carpool violation) since I started driving this truck. Knock on wood. 1977 Datsun 200SX [Example of Car] Picked this car up for $200 or $400, I don't recall exactly... but it was in decent shape overall except for a blown head gasket. This occurred during a short period where I actually had a garage to work in... I fixed that and the other small gremlins and it became the daily driver. Not much to say about it, except that it was ugly, extremely reliable, and served me well during a period just after Gulf War 1 where I was too poor to do much about it. 1974 Datsun 260Z [My Z] Still poor(Thanks, Bush), I picked this car up at a tow yard lien sale for $600 in around 1993. It needed a diff mount right away, and a side window. Strangely, it's a 260 but it had a 240 motor. I set the window and diff mount to rights, and began to drive it. At about this point I sold the 200SX. The Z had always been one of my dream cars, and I wanted to really fix this baby up. Over the next couple of years I began to make a reasonable income, and made some progress fixing up the Z. I upgraded it to a 5spd, did various brakes, wheel bearings, U-joints, suspension bushings, Heater valve, etc. Finally the head gasket blew, and I had to make a decision. Rebuild the head on top of an unknown bottom end... or... just do the right thing. I decided to do the right thing. :) I had Scott Performance in Santa Clara get a new-in-the crate 1982 280 motor... the one with the good P79 head. Before it was ever run, Greg Scott tore it down and replaced the rings, which he said would solve the problem with new Nissan motors burning a quart of oil per 1000 miles, and improve the leakdown. He was right.... new, leakdown was 3% and it has never burned a drop of oil. Also at this time he put fresh rebuilt 1970 SU's and manifold on, a Nismo header, aluminized 21/2" exhaust, new radiator, all new belts & hoses, and an oversized Borla stainless muffler. I don't mean like a ricer 3" muffler; I mean it was just a larger muffler than was supposed to fit with pipe sizes matching the rest of the exhaust. He & his exhaust guy shoehorned it in there, making for an extremely clean setup. Also replaced all of the belts and hoses, as well as the radiator, new water pump and distributor, and a new Nissan alternator(never put aftermarket electrics on these cars!). Within a few hundred miles, the rear end self-destructed. Even though I was breaking the engine in, keeping it mostly below about 4k RPM in the first miles, it had a LOT more power than the previous motor, and I think it just finished off the gears which I think had close to 300K miles on them at this point. So, I replaced the 3.23 gears with 3.54 gears from an AT car. WOW! what a different car this was... after I had broken it in, I discovered that it would eat the average 5.0 Mustang or Camaro alive, as well as many other "fast" cars..... it was a whole new car! Still though, I make sure I see the man before he sees me... ;) Other things I've done to the car... Greg Scott had a source for a replacement clock with quartz internals... I put that in, replaced some of the window moldings, put in the MOMO wheel, built my own kicker box powered by a 400W amp, replaced all of the bumper rubber and some light lenses, put in Hella H4's, replaced the headlight combo switch, replaced brake & clutch master cylinders, brake booster, A-arm bushings, front bearings & seals, Had the speedo recalibrated, replaced the tach, and a ton of other small things. Lately though I have been extremely busy at work, and have let many small things go. The heater control is jammed... the ventilation fan is kaput... It was broken into some months ago and the ignition switch was pounded into mincemeat, as was the turn signal switch. I picked up a new ignition switch at the nissan dealer the next day and installed it. I have a new turn signal switch ready to put in, but just haven't made time for it. The shroud that covers that area was broken by the would-be crook, and I have yet to find a replacement. Soon, once the Shark is sorted out, I'll start cleaning up the Z for sale. Well, that about brings me up to date, If you want to know where I went from here see my First Shark page.

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