So I thought I would put together a thread on a rebuild of a little Datto ute I bought for my Mrs in Jan 2014. I have many datto's over the years including 1600's that I just love but with time at a premium over the last few years, I hadn't touched a old car until now.

The bug came back to me when I was talking to my brother at Christmas (2013) and he was telling me about all these motorbikes he was doing up in his spare time and I got a little jealous. I wanted to get my hands dirty so I started the hunt for a 1200 ute as it looked like there was a lot of aftermarket parts around online and the community for them looked pretty helpful. Originally I was just after something as a runabout for the Mrs that I could tinker with but after I looked at a bunch of utes, everyone was asking way to much for poorly looked after rust buckets. That was until I found this multi-coloured farm machine just outside of Brisbane.

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It didn't look like much but compared to all the utes I looked at and the price the guy wanted for it, I couldn't pass it up. The guy who owned it was young and started to do it up but ran out of money and didn't have time for it. It had a A14 in it that had been recently rebuilt and it had all the receipts that had been spent on it. It also had 120Y disc brakes on the front which helped it pull up a little better than the original drums. I took it for a little spin and I was sold. I had to have it. As it had no rego (and no bonnet) I got a truck to come and pick it up and deliver it to my house on the other side of town. I cleaned out the garage, put the Subaru outside and made a new home for the little guy.

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So I started work on finding out what needed to be replaced, repaired or modified to get this thing back on the road. My Mrs big concern was what colour should it be painted. All panels bar one needed to be either filled or replaced due to dings/dents but I was lucky as the only rust was at the front where the bumper bolted on (drivers side). At this point, I decided that I was going to make it a bit more than a runabout. I wanted to keep it as stock as possible but leave the A14 in it. After ordering new panels (doors, front guards, bonnet, tailgate, rear quarters, apron) I started the fun job of removing everything. I received all the panels a couple of days later so I put them on to check the fit. It seemed like I would need to do a lot of panel work on these new panels. Everything looked good but was just a little out.

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After some tweaking of the new panels to get them to line up right we removed them and stripped everything from the car. The car was bare bones as you can see from the pics and the Mrs helped out more than I ever expected. Every bolt was removed, inspected and bagged then photographed to ensure nothing went missing. This only took us a week of working in the evenings and a weekend to do.

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The colour!!!! We didn't want it in a modern colour and we didn't want it some boring old colour. We looked on the net at what other people were doing with similar period cars but nothing took our fancy. It was about a week later when we were going to the shops we saw this old Holden that had awesome paint. We rushed home to find out what it was and found it to be a Pontiac Firebird Verdoro Green http://paintref.com/cgi-bin/colorcodedisplay.cgi?type=sample&ditzler=43745&syear=1968&smanuf=GM&smodel=Firebird&sname=Verdoro%20Green&name=firebird1968WA3771

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With the engine out we thought we would look at painting the block and replacing all the gaskets and seals just to be sure as it is a a lot easier doing this out. I also replaced the clutch with a new one. One thing I did find is that a A12 gasket set is completely different from an A14 set (my fault when ordering).

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We removed everything and scrubbed everything. The Mrs spent a solid day under the car with a high pressure hose and a wire brush. Over 30 years of mud, grease and wasps nests were removed.

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It's a big job but looks like you're going about it methodically .... good to see

With the car now clean, I started the rust repair work around where the bumper bolted up on the drivers side. I ended up having to cut out a section around 25cm x 12cm from inside the wheel arch and welded in a new formed sheet section. I welded in two new nut lugs as the old ones were stripped so everything would be nice and secure. We were pretty lucky as there was little rust anywhere else and it looked like the previous owner had fixed some other parts in the past (tray to cabin sill).

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So with the car cleaned, rust repaired, panels aligned and most importantly a colour selected the car was ready for the painters. We spoke to a over 10 paint shops/panel beaters to find someone who could do the job at the right price and more importantly to the level of quality we expected. Most people seemed useless and I would not touch them but we ended up finding a guy that really liked the car and had many years experience in painting metallic paints. With the car ready, painter ready we were really excited but then I had to leave the country for work (USA) for three months leaving my Mrs to look after the build. I worked with her to create a giant list of things that needed to be done (she loves lists) and talked her through the next steps for when it comes back from painting. I headed off and left her to it.