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Nick's - 1972 - Datsun 1200 Coupe


NickTheFox

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The ride back from chch was interesting to say the least. The first incident happened right after I payed the owner and tried to start it. Somehow the fuel pump wiring had come disconnected on both the earth and positive, thankfully it didn't take us long to figure out what was wrong. We hooked the pump straight to the battery and drove to Supercheap to grab a few tools for a more permanent fix.

We soon realised that something wasn't quite right as the rear water outlet was touching the firewall. There was also massive vibration coming from the driveline when we were going 50kph. We decided to carry on with the trip home and just avoided going 50kph, which is easier said than done.

The rest of the trip home went without any issues. However, our 6pm ferry was delayed by 4 and a half hours.

Thankfully they let us know about this while we were still in chch, so we spent a few hours cruising around looking at the city.

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  • 10 months later...

I think it's well past time I updated this thread. A lot has changed since so I'll try update this thread with the progress.

One of the first things I did when I got my hands on this was to pop of the rocker cover. It was a nice surprise to see Nissan Japan on the head. This shows that it is a gx head which have bigger intake ports than a15 heads and they're pretty rare.

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From now on the upgrades began, the first being a 5 speed swap. Luckily I had brought a sunny with a 5 speed a few months before buying this so I switched the 4 speed that was in this with the sunny 5 speed.

As this was originally an auto it has a bigger tunnel than the manual 1200s. The main benefit of this apart from the extra room is that you don't have any issues with the 5 speed reverse switch hitting the tunnel. Here you can see just how different they are, manual on the left auto on the right.

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Once I had both boxes out I had to have them a quick clean as they were both pretty filthy.

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Next step was to make a new crossmember for the new 5 speed. After a few measurements I drew this up in auto as and got my mate to laser cut it out of 10mm steel.

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I drilled the holes myself as I wasn't sure how clean it would laser cut out. Here's what it looks like mounted up without round spacers that I had machine up to space the bracket from the body.

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Finding a new 5 speed rubber mount to use on this without paying a fortune was a pain in the ass. In the end I got one from a ceff, I can't recall which model but it did have two studs hanging from the side which I had to cut off

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Before I got the box all bolted up I gave the tunnel a quick clean up as there was 40 odd years of oil and dirt layered on it. Not that I'm composing as it certainly has held any rust off.

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I had a few issues with the clutch not disengaging which turn out to be that I needed a longer release bearing. Thankfully I was able to get another one fairly easy which did the trick. Here's the difference between the two

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Once the gearbox and motor was all bolted up and I was happy with how it was sitting I went to go put in my driveshaft. It turns out that it was over 20mm too long even though the 5 speed boxes are the same length as the 4 speeds. The previous gearbox mount had the gearbox hanging much lower, so low that the heater outlet on the back of the head was smashing into the firewall. As the engine and gearbox were on such an angle the driveshaft just fitted with the old setup. Luckily my old man is a fitter so I got him to shorten up the driveshaft by 25mm. One interesting thing was that this driveshaft had already been shortened. This picture below shows what my old man found when he parted of the old weld and yoke from the driveshaft. It turns out insulation tape can be used for spacing the difference between two different pipe sizes. This would probably explain the terrible vibrations I was getting a 50kph

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