Some crazy progress has been made on my ute to prepare for shipment. I've been building her for about 10 days straight now, 9am to 1am. zZzZzZz

Sneak peek...before I begin the documentation process

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Sweet baby jesus..... wheres the vanilla... nice work

Work began on the ute build by taking off the rear end which comprised the rear wheels, diff, leaf springs, shackles, and bolts. The shell did not come with rear brakes, any of the cabling, fuel lines, brake lines, exhaust, driveshaft, gearbox or any of the other items you might usually find underneath a Datsun ute.

With the help of borrowed oversized jack stands, with the help of a friend we were able to lift the ute up to examine the underside and prepare for paint.

Here you can see some modifications made by the original owner. So far I can tell that he planned to locate the battery to the rear and unfortunately for me the gearbox mounts have been removed. You can see that he also sealed some of the seams between the frame and rails with some sort of filler. Can you see any other modifications here?

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Mik, the tray, cabin, and engine bay have been all sprayed a Toyota color....very creamy vanilla color. Reminds me of ice cream.

The next part of the build I took out the front suspension and steering components for painting and refurbishment. I don't know if these were the original components but I could definitely tell at least the ball joints and outer tie rods needed replacement. I took out the engine crossmember, lower control arms, radius rods first and used paint stripper on them to try and get to original metal before paint. I used gloss black Killrust brand paint in a tin, sprayed on with air gun at 40psi. Took a few days to get a few coats on the components. I had a terrible time with the ball joints. The ball joints would not separate from the steering knuckles! Also the replacement ones I bought turned out to be the wrong hole spacing.

Also I started to contemplate ways of getting underneath the ute with an air gun to start applying the Upol Raptor Liner. I borrowed a rotisserie from a fellow Datsun owner but never got around to actually using this on the ute because it seemed very difficult to fabricate mounts and get the ute high enough in the air under my carport to spin.

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Found some more pictures of the front end before I pulled it apart. You can see some of the damaged and worn components.

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Are you keeping this one or preparing to sell it over there too?

No man, this one is going to be my personal car over in the states. I had 10 days to prepare it for the container. Managed to get most of it together. Unfortunately though it was too much of a risk to go L series so for now it's got an A14 (DatsAndy) and my 5 speed gearbox that I pulled out of the orange ute. I have a set of Dellorto's that I plan to use eventually as well unless I find something else over in the states.

Here are some photos of some restoration I did on the leaf springs. The springs were reset by a suspension shop but I don't know by how much. I bought them from Sanitora Works. They certainly give the rear end a lowered look. I used a wire wheel on a drill to clean the springs. Washed with wax/grease remover and sprayed 5 coats of gloss black Killrust on them. Hopefully the paint lasts a long time.

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