If you probably cant tell, I am very bored at work today. Because of this, I decided to post up the build I did about 2 years ago on a 240sx. I did this with my friend Victor back down in DC.
If you have ever been to the DC Metro area or any of the drift events down there, you will know that there is a glut of modified 240’s down there. After I completed the single swap on the RX-7 back when it was rotary, I got bored over the winter and decided to do a quick budget build on a ’89 240sx shell I found for dirt cheap.
I ended up buying the coupe shell you see below for $300 which basically came with a crappy suspension, and no motor or trans. The good part was that it was already a manual car and most of the stuff that was missing, I really didn’t need.
I bought the shell and Vic and I picked it up one night. Unfortunately for 2 days we had nowhere to put it. My friend Ramy let us park it in his culdesac until garage space could be freed up. Unfortunately, this culdesac was in a very rich neighborhood in Northern Virginia. One of Ramy’s neighbors had the car towed because he ‘thought it was a car bomb’ (I wanted to smack this fool, it had a car cover on it). So, a day later, Vic and I pic the car up from the tow yard and take it back to the garage.
After getting it back there, it is time to start stripping the sucker down and getting rid of all the crap that I don’t need. The next weekend it was time to prep the engine bay and get rid of some of the rust near the frame rail and supports. We stripped down the paint in the bay and used a ton of degreaser to get it spic and span. After that, I primed it with some flat black high temp primer and Vic welded up the rust spots.
During this time, I also found a non-running SOHC hatch for sale for $400. I ended up trading the hatch for a Silvia front end conversion, a set of KYB’s and Eibachs, and the dial wheels on the hatch.
Just for giggles, I decided to spray the car with a rattle can panda job.
Next, it was time for the interior.
I got rid of all of the carpeting and the grimy back seats and started to clean out the sound deadening material. After that was done, I used some semi gloss pimer on the bare metal.
I was putting a NA DOHC motor in the car so I went to a junk yard and got the proper gauge cluster for it. We ended up installing the motor (that I got for $100) and hooking it up. We got the car running and all and put in some cleaned up S13 seating. I ended up selling the car for about $2500 about a month later after I realized that I still owned the FD.
Here are some extra shots of the “240 Shop”
