Goal is to have it resprayed and assembled next year around this time.
Missed my goal by a whole year but that is okay lol. It's currenty at the paint shop now. Hopefully back in another month or two?
Took me a minute but I think I got the hang of the new forum layout. So I'm going to try my best to start where I left off. Alot has happened since my last post.
I obtained alot of BNIB parts from Nissan. Most of it being moldings and small tid bits to make the car feel a bit more solid. A small amount of it were exterior parts that Nissan still luckily sells new. Doing this helped me save time from sanding and body work. Two of the major items were fenders & the front bumper.
Brand new 180sx Fenders. Very glad Nissan decided to bring these back as finding ones not mangled is not easy. At the time I bought these, Olympia Nissan in washington did not ship them, so I had to drive about a hour and a half to pick them up. Luckily now they ship within the USA. Whats even better is now there is a company that makes replicas that are spot on. Very glad someone did this because Nissan tends to discontinue parts for abosultely no reason.
I then aquired a OEM Kouki Front bumper with all of the hardware and lights. I have wanted this for years as I've owned a replica for almost a decade.
I played around with the turn signals and position lights just to see what they look like. I kind of don't like how white the position lights are. I might try to see if I can switch the bulb so its a bit more yellow.
Beautilful, alot of guys tend to run just the position lights (even I was doing that for a moment) however I plan on installing the turn signals this time around as well as JDM sidemarkers. Really going for OEM+ look.
Speaking of lights. One thing with this car is that you just cannot see at night with the OEM halogen 5x7 headlamps. Typically people upgrade their lights to H4, or buy the LED 5x7 headlamps from a website. However I really wanted to upgrade my headlights so I could see properly without blinding other people so I decided to do a retrofit for HID bulbs.
Usually people tend to just slap a HID kit inside their headlights that are not equipped with a projector to hosue the HID and just blind everyone on sight. My goal was to do this the right way, so I did a bunch of research and noticed alot of RX7 FD guys tend to do this mod. So I basically copied them. I first bought Nokya H6054 headlamps as mentioned in the previous post.
Then the first thing I did was sunk them in gasoline for 24 hours to seperate the housing. Baking these in the oven would not work at all.
Once that was done, I then start cutting the backside of the housing to make room for the HID projector. Once I was confident enough that it would clear I mocked up the projector with the glass to make sure I had enough clearance. I am using ACME H1 Projector,ACME H1 bulb & a E55R Shroud
Once I knew I had enough clearance for the proejector. I bought a 3-2" PVC reducer with a 2" end cap and modified it so it could hold the projector. Once I finished modifying it, I then bought 6 packs of gorilla glue bonding material and slapped a bunch of the goop on my housings with the reducer attached. Once it fully cured, I fitted my projector and sealed the backside of it with a rubber o ring, spacer and nut.
Once the projector and bulb was secured I then sealed the headlamp back with black silicone (did a pretty sloppy job with this but it will do) and fitting it on the car to see how it would look and perform.
HID Headlamp vs the Halogen
Headlamp on the 240. HID vs the Halogen.
You can definitly tell that the HID retrofit gives the 240 a different look. Whether its good or bad is subjective. To me I think it still looks pretty good. Much better than the LED ones people run imo. As much as I love them, they do however take a bit of the character away of the car.
I had went on a test run at night with the car and even with just one of the headlamps properly aligned. It outputed so much better than the halogen bulbs. I cannot wait to have both of the lights properly aligned. I unfortunately do not have a picture, will probably have to attach one once its back from paint.
From here i then begin the body work. However it eventually became more than just body work. The ole "Since I'm here I might as well" really got to me and I basically revamped areas of the car that have bothered me for way too long. Originally the goal with this car was to be 70% Raw & 30% Streetable (if that even makes sense). However since moving to the PNW I've realized the weather does not get as cold as the midwest,they dont salt the roads & the roads are extremely well taken care of here. I barely see a pothole when I'm driving. This made me want to drive the car year round every weekend. To do this I had to alter my progress with the car which inspired me to have it 50% Raw & 50% streetable.
Will have more details on this on my next post. I was going to do spoilers to try to have more pictures. but I honeslty forgot how much work it is to do these build threads so I'm just going to go post by post.
Picture of the interior because I miss it

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