My 1990 300zx Twin Turbo build by megaDan

4 minute(s) of a 731 minute read

Now that the Z is running great and my other car projects are wrapped up; I figured it would be time to start finally addressing the 'small' issues on the car.

I had a few hours in the middle of the day on Saturday to kill, and even though the Z has still been beading up nicely in the rain from last spring's wax; I elected to throw another coat on for peace of mind...and to bring back some looks. I hit some of the high dirt areas with a claybar to see what the current application looked like and it didn't remove anything. Given that everything was clean and I didn't have any dish soap on hand I elected to take the lazy mans route and just apply another layer over the existing wax. I did take time to wax the wheels too, as that makes a tremendous difference. It probably took as much time to do the wheels by hand as it did for the car with the 6" random orbital.

Not great at taking quick pictures. Especially not with this camera phone in the sun. Sorry  At least its ready for summer


A few years back I removed and disassembled the cruise control to help clean up some rust and get the visible bits powdercoated. The results were great, except it didn't work when I put it back together.

I reinstalled it this Sunday morning since the weather was crap and I had no other projects (yay!) and went through some troubleshooting procedures. There are two plastic bits on the clutch pedal that deactivate the cruise control when the clutch is depressed. When these plastic bits disintegrate, the cruise won't work. (un)fortunately, mine were intact so this was not the source of the problem. I verified the fuses/relay controlling the cruise were also intact. Sadly this is as far as I got. I was watching John Wick while doing the work and kept getting distracted. We had tickets for JW3 that evening so it was obviously necessary to refresh my memory as to what happened.

I found a few more tests to run, which I'll knock out when I get back from our Seattle vacation. There is a method to provide 12v to the vacuum pump and retract the cable. Either A)Vacuum pump wont work or B)Vacuum pump works but wont retract. This test should tell me if I reassembled the unit properly. If not, I'll source another unit and should have no problems. Long drives are comfortable in the Z....EXCEPT for my right foot. I fit mostly easily in the car at 6'5", but throttle position isn't ideal with size 13 shoes. Cruise would go a long way to making road trips more enjoyable.

So would AC.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned in a previous post that while I had many of the accessories removed I elected to replace all the AC o-rings. I replaced as many as I could, but the genuine Nissan kit I bought years ago didn't include enough. I replaced all except the two at the dryer and the two at the firewall initially. A handful in the engine bay broke in half they were so brittle. This left me with a rock-solid vacuum on the low side, but a high side that wouldn't hold for even a second. I ordered a generic kit on rockauto and replaced the remaining o-rings; but they were all very soft still so it didn't leave me optimistic for solving my high-side vacuum issue. I pulled vacuum and it held. I didn't hold it overnight....but I'll get that done soon. Baby steps. My AC belt tensioner was seized up pretty good, and after 90 minutes of screwing with it I STILL can't figure out how to remove the pulley. I need to drain the oil from the compressor, remove/install a tensioner, and charge the system. I'm excited to have what appears to be an airtight system, but I think this tensioner issue is going to be the end of me.