Scraps in the mist


Wow! It has been over a year since I brought home the Frankenroadster – a 1967.5 Datsun 1600 with the body from a 2000 and an H20 engine from a forklift.

Here are a couple of desktop images for you to download for the New Year!

Standard 1600x1200 desktop image

Widescreen 1920x1200 desktop image

Scraps, as she’s now known, has come a long way in the last year. There have been quite a few projects that I have neglected to post – I really need to catch up with my blogging in 2012!

Here are a few teasers!


I installed a set of 40mm PHH Mikuni-Solex sidedraft carbs. Replacing the stock SU’s with Mikunis is a common upgrade for the U20 engine in the 2000 roadsters. Nissan made a kit and it is a bolt-on and go affair. Much less common on the R16 found in the 1600s. There was a kit available from Nissan, but they are long gone and extremely rare.

There was a lot of head-scratching and tinkering done to make this work – the linkage pieces and carb spacers had to be custom made, as did the throttle arm and the pipes for the heater. Top that off with many rounds of tuning by my local carb guru. It has a nice growl/suction noise at idle – you can almost imagine the air pressure dropping around you as the carbs swallow huge amounts of air. Put your foot in it and it roars.


Then there was a frantic last-minute polish and paint of a set of Enkei Compe wheels just before the annual Canby Datsun show. I think the paint was still drying on the way to the show!


I also went through a lot of trouble to “upgrade” the stock roadster brakes with a combination of Volvo 245 calipers and Altima vented rotors. There were a few mis-steps along the way, but I was lucky to get help from another local Datsun enthusiast, Mike Klotz, who came up with an elegant solution to make all of the pieces work together. The brakes work great and I doubt they will ever suffer from fade.


Finally, who doesn’t shop for car bits at the local home center? A roll of lawn edging material was re-purposed as an air dam for Scraps. It turned out much better than I expected, even if the number of mounting screws is a bit over the top.

More to come, on a more regular basis in 2012, I hope!

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