2003 Nissan 350z Touring $9000

Well, the time has come for V3 of Project350z.com to be put up for sale. Before we part it out we will post the car is as, with all the autocross bits installed and attached. If the car doesn’t sell in the next week, we will likely start removing all the autocross bits and putting it back to as close to stock as possible. The car is available in St. Louis (Wildwood) Missouri. If you are interested in seeing it, give me call. (Chris: 650-260-8344)

Pictures available on Instagram

Videos available on another Instagram account

So the 2016 ProSolo series is nearing its end, with the final two events of the year being held within 6 hours of the house, I entered both. The Wilmington event turned out to be another disappointing one for me, not because of the location or people, but simply due to my lack of ability to drive this car lately.

So here we are, another month has gone by since the last blog post, time for an update here on the status of @Project350z.

TL;DR: Crap

 

It was a good weekend on the 350z, I made progress on pretty much everything I needed/wanted to do to start the 2016 season, with only the corner balance and wheel alignment remaining. Those are scheduled for Monday at Solo Performance.

We’ll try to keep this list updated with current modifications, and a list of past modifications as well as we build and compete our 350z in the SCCA STU autocross class.

Vehicle

• Year: 2003
• Make: Nissan
• Model: 350z
• Package: Touring

Earlier today I took the leaking wheel/tire to Solo Performance Specialties to take the tire off the rim and take a look at the wheel and see what the damage really was. After popping the tire off the wheel we quickly found that the wheel had a repair attempted both inside and outside of the wheel, it actually looked like someone had taken JB Weld to it.

When I picked up the 350z in Chattanooga back in November, I figured out that the radio wasn’t great, the sound was weak, and it didn’t appear to pick up any FM signals whatsoever. Over the Xmas weekend I decided it was time to rip into the car to remove the stock Bose amp and subwoofer (behind the driver’s seat) as well as try to tack down why the FM reception was non-existent.

The first step was to get into the subwoofer location behind the driver’s seat, a quick screw driver inserted into the panelling to pop the cover off. pry and then pull it off. Once I removed the cover, I quickly found that the stock Bose setup had already been removed, I figured that might be the case, but wasn’t 100% sure until we pulled the cover off. While in there I took the time to clean up some of the stray wiring that was in there, some exposed wires, and some live power wires that simply had electrical tape wrapped around them.

After working on the (lack there of) Sub, it was time to rip into the dashboard. I’ve done it so many times on my prior 350zs that it is straightforward and fairly painless to do. The one thing that gave me trouble was disconnecting the wiring harness from the center console where the harness powers the hazard, and seat warmer switches. I ended up pulling the panel up and off of the emergency brake in order to get to the plug for the wiring.

Once I pulled the plastic for the console out of place I dug in behind the stereo itself. First thing I checked was to see if the antenna wiring was plugged into the head unit, unfortunatly it was, so that wasn’t going to be an easy fix! I tracked down some wires from the stereo by pulling down the manual from the Pioneer website.One thing I did find was there is the “mic” for the handsfree bluetooth setup was plugged into the “wired remote” port on the back of the head unit. I unplugged that, but unfortunately couldn’t plug it into the proper MIC input as the jack was the wrong size. I plugged the mic back into the W/R port and started playing around with the headunit to see if I could get any stations tuned.

While digging in the center console compartment I found a wireless remote for the stereo, thinking that might work with “options” better than the touch screen I try to start using that, with no success. I checked the battery in the remote, and found it was a CR2016, but the remote said it took a CR2025, so I grabbed a spare and popped that in place. Ends up, that didn’t work either, no matter what I tried I couldn’t get the remote to work. Until I once again unplugged the mic from the “wired remote” port, one I did that the remote started working properly. So apparently whomever installed this radio, the wiring was done incorrectly on the MIC, and that was causing problems.

I went ahead and left the MIC unplugged and put everything back together in the car. I immediately tried to tune FM, and found that I could actually tune to a specific station, where previously I was only able to scan, and with the lack of signal previously, the scan would continue until manually stopped by switching input sources. I still wasn’t able to get a clear tune on a station, but when I pulled the car out of the garage to reposition where it was parked, I did find that it started to get a signal to a local radio station here.

So it looks like the ultimately problem with the radio may just have been the miswired Mic, we’ll see, next time I drive the car, how things play out. It might be a while though before I get back out in the Z, it has turned cold here in Missouri and I don’t plan to drive the car too much in below freezing temps, due to the abuse on the tires.

This weekend, being what is likely the last warm weekend of 2015, I decided it was time to wash/claybar/wax the 350z. The weather was beautiful, I spent most of Saturday afternoon performing the first two steps, washing and clay bar’ng the car. The car was pretty clean, but there were some decent cone marks/residue on the side skirts from the previous owner, most of the time spent with the clay bar was there, though there were various other locations on the car that needed attention as well.

So the time has come, I am currently car shopping again. I’ve been threatening it for a while now, but with the 2015 Solo National Championships going on this week, and a few other life things figured out, it is time to make the 2016 autocross season happen!

So a few details. I’m once again looking at early 350z’s, this time around I’m not looking for a daily driver, this next car will be built specifically for autocross and a fun weekend toy, with some daily driving here and there (thankful I have a short commute). I am looking for the perfect car, how do you define that? Well, in an ideal world the perfect 350z for me would be

Well, the car was in my hands for almost three years (2 months shy), that is longer than I've owned any car since the first Project350z left my hands in September 2006.

One day perhaps I will own another 350z, it isn't in the plans right now, but never say never I suppose.

(SOLD)

The time is nearing for when the 350z must be sold, so if you are interested hit me up 2004 350z Enthusiast, <75k miles, currently sits stock other than a K&N CAI and a Plenum spacer, and a grounding kit (installed by previous owner).

Also has a receiver mounted to the rear bumper that I use for a bike rack.

The car is well maintained, looks great with lower than usual wear and tear of an 8 year old car.

I also have the suspension still in boxes, see previous posts for more details, but TrueChoice Koni DAs up front and SA Koni Sports in the rear with springs/perches for the rear. This will be sold separate from the car, unless the buyer wants it for additional $$.

Car is located in Half Moon Bay, CA, and available for purchase at $9,000, if you want the suspension throw in another grand and you can have it all.

Alright the time has come to part with the parts. I took some time this evening to take photographs of what I have and what I am trying to sell. Right now I am trying to sell everything locally so prices don’t include any shipping. If I don’t have any interest locally I’m willing to ship the coilovers/springs/shocks but only as a package.

I’ve been one to do a lot of time lapse videos, I’ve actually been doing them since 2006, I think this was my first one, it is at least the oldest one I could find on YouTube. Over the years I have used a number of different cameras, different software and as you can see from my YouTube Channel different subjects (predominantly cars, though lots of them).

So what did you do this weekend? Did you spend two days under your car? I basically did, well more like 1 day, but it was broken up over an afternoon/evening and then the following morning after I ran to get a new “nut” that I needed to finish things up.

Why was I under the 350z? Well, removing the fun parts of course. I planned to remove the front and rear Hotchkis sway bars, along with the TrueChoice Phase 4 Konis (front) and the off the shelf Koni Sports (rear) along with springs/perches. Though in order to deal with the rear sway bar I also ended up pulling the Injen Super SES exhaust system off the car as well and put the OEM exhaust back on.

Read the whole blog post for the time lapse video

This morning I began the process of converting the 350z back to stock, or close to stock. Mike Lane over on the east coast requested the control arms/custom bushings that I have on the car, so he sent me his original OEM set. A couple of months ago I actually tried to remove the arms on my car so I could lube them up and try to get rid of some of the excess noise in the car, but I wasn’t able to. One of the nuts on the upper strut mount was stuck and no matter what I tried I wasn’t able to get the nut removed.

I picked up some tools from the local Ace Hardware in Half Moon Bay to get that pesky nut off, and this morning when I got started, things didn’t go well. I managed to  break an extension I was trying to use, then I managed to break the bolt extractor as well! I was not a happy camper, though I decided to try one more thing, a better quality extension and turning it by hand. After that nut was removed replacing the control arms was nice and easy.

So the first parts of the car are back to stock, I’m shipping out Mike’s new control arms early next week, and hopefully they will see some autocross action soon!

With all of the changes to DotNetNuke 6, a lot can be lost in the fact that you actually maintain the content of your website, and while the maintenance UI has changed, the content that you present is still up to you. A CMS can only do so much for displaying you content, if you want to do some fancy things, branch out of your standard HTML.

I recently wanted to do a couple of things for my car website (yes, I’m a car guy, so it is easy to use the website for examples).

1. I wanted to have a random image loaded in the top portion of the pages of the website, changing, or randomly loading, on each page load (not rotating live on the page).
2. I wanted to display a list of recent photos on the home page, and when you click on one of them I wanted them to open up in a light box.

I could have done this in any number of ways, but I chose to implement some simple jQuery for each, below I will show you how.

First things first, the website uses my free DotNetNuke skin, MultiFunction, available via Codeplex. I have some example documentation on how to customize the CSS for the skin to make your site unique, feel free to check out the Documentation page for those examples.

I was looking around at Flickr today and happened to check out my "photo stats". The most viewed photo for the day (having just started according to the Flickr servers) was this photo

I kind of liked the white stripe on my old 350z. I’m still thinking I will wrap this one, but the stripe got me reminiscing.

What do you think of the stripe? Yay or nay? Add a comment below and let me know!

You can find a number of photos of the car during the striping process at 350z White Stripe

I can’t believe it, but tonight after work I came home and washed, rain-x’d and waxed the Mazda CX-7. We’ve owned it since December, and this is the first time I’ve put wax on it.

I’m so ashamed, I don’t know if I have ever owned a car (besides the 240z) that ever went that long without getting waxed. Even the Turbobird got waxed and it was a huge mess.

The CX-7 was a mess, as is the 350z right now. One of the downfalls of living in Half Moon Bay, if you don’t park your cars in the garage (we don’t currently have room) they WILL be wet almost every morning.

Perhaps this weekend I can get the garage cleaned and come up with room for at least one of the cars.

If you want to read the details, check out yesterday’s post. If you want to see the video, you are in the right place!

So the time finally came, or I finally got around to it, the hitch is now on our 2004 Nissan 350z.

The hitch is a Curt Hitch for the 350z, available via Amazon. I purchased it quite a while ago, but haven’t taken the time to get the car apart and install it. Today that all changed.

To get the hitch on the car, you first have to remove the rear bumper fascia from the car, that’s fairly simple to do, remove the rear tail lights, remove 6 or so screws, 4 clips, and pull. The 350z Service Manual is helpful for this.

Here are the photos from the American Autocross Series Round 8 from 7/3/2011. The car is of course our 2004 Nissan 350z in half prep for B Street Prepared. Unfortunately I don’t have times, but let’s see if I can recall the order of the runs.

So here we go, yet another blog for me, but this time for something a little different than what I usually (project350z.com, project240z.com, dnndaily.com, solo2.org) blog about. Bicycles! Read the full post for all the details

I’ve been doing some work on SOLO2.ORG the past two evenings, working on restoring a bunch of my old blog posts from over there from the early days of the site. There was a lot of content that went missing over the various conversions of the site the past 4-5 years. I managed to bring a number of the posts back, and found a lot of old posts about my original 2003 350z (the current one I have is a 2004), at which point in time I just called it Project Z (rather than Project350z).

So I finally had it with listening to my Motorola Droid (Google Music and Pandora) for my commute. Why don’t I have a stereo? Well back in February I ripped it all out. Not exactly the best choice, but hey, I was in the hear of the moment thinking I was prepping the car for a fully competitive 2011 season. That has changed, (more on that later).

This evening, after work and taking Pylon to the vet (he’s got a ulcer or something in his eye) I took 40 minutes to put the new hitch on the Mazda CX-7. I ordered a Curt trailer hitch for our 2010 Mazda CX-7 from Amazon on Thursday, it arrived today.

Why would we need a trailer hitch on the Mazda? Bicycles of course! A couple of weeks ago we got Natalie a new bike, a hybrid, a Cannondale Quick CX-3. I wanted to get one as well, but we decided to hold off a bit as we planned for the move. Well, my wonderful Auntie Carol sent me a graduation gift! Which I am going to use to buy myself a bike!

The problem we have is that the Mazda isn’t big enough to put a bike, at least comfortably inside, much less two of them. Of course we could get a roof rack for the CX-7, but I really didn’t want to stick a rack on top, for the aesthetics and the noise. I also want to be able to take a bike or two behind the 350z, and I sure as hell couldn’t (wouldn’t) put a roof rack on it! So a trailer hitch attachment is our best option.

I’ve got a trailer hitch for the 350z (though it is not installed yet), so it was just a matter of getting the hitch for the Mazda. The installation was super easy, basically the process was to. 1) Remove the 4 rubber hangers for the exhaust to let it move out of the way (resting it up a jack stand as to not put too much pressure up stream. 2) File a frame hole on each side of the car to be side enough for the bolts and spacers to fit into the frame. 3) Fish the bolts and spacers in. 4) Tighten the nuts (75 ft/lbs) 5) Reattach the exhaust.

Pretty simple, I didn’t clock myself, but I can’t imaging it took more than 40 minutes. to get on.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to go get the bike and a trailer hitch bike rack. I’ll post more when that happens.