They're still out there

For Christmas, my wife gave me a copy of the entertaining book The Cobra in the Barn: Great Stories of Automotive Archaeology. One of the points made several times in that book is that no matter how rare or unobtainable you think a car is, "they're still out there".

Cases in point on the F10 front, correspondent Mikko Hentta checks in from Finland with his formerly Canadian 1976 Hatchback. His web site, complete with a ton of other vintage Datsuns is here. He's wondering where he's going to source North American parts to get his restoration started.

eBay has seen two F10s sold from California in the last few months, no doubt on the heels of people seeing Laverne's car go for over $5,000. Nothing of that caliber has been showing up, but a funky green 1978 Sportwagon with fake wood paneling stickers on the side sold and a 1977 red Hatchback from Beverly Hills went for over $2,000 despite being a little on the rough side.

Greetings to the guys and gals from the Ratsun forum who've been stopping by. One of them, Len Robertson, sends links to two F10 threads on that site:

Len's F10

Portland-area F10

Len says, for the Portland-area car, "If you go to the last page, you will see the owner is loosing interest in his F10 project and is threatening to send it to the wreckers. On the offhand chance you may know someone in the Portland area who might save the car, I thought I would bring it to your attention."

Robot Head

From the Lost America photostream on Flickr:

Smogging

Unfortunately, in 2004 California repealed the law that let old cars roll off the smog testing regimen once they got to be 30 years old or so, ending with the 1975 model year ... just in time for me to acquire a pair of 1976 F10s that are increasingly hard to make pass.  Sigh. Just one more year and I would have lucked out ... as smog test guys are always happy to remind me.

So, what does an F10 have in the way of smog gear? Basically, not a lot, especially on the 49-state leaded gas car. There's an air pump to reduce HC, a PCV valve, a very basic carbon canister setup for evaporative emissions, and an EGR valve to lower NOX to something reasonable. The California car adds a 2-way catalytic converter to reduce HC and CO. As near as I can tell the cat must do next to nothing, as the HC and CO standards are the same and both cars blow the same numbers. Maybe it's gone bad.

When the Sportwagon arrived I trucked on over to the gas station a short distance away that I usually get cars smogged at, where it promptly failed for NOX (alarmingly high numbers across the board), the evaporative system, and of course the gas cap. I should have known the ancient Stant locking cap wouldn't hold for the pressure test; the hatchback had the same problem. A quick trip to Kragen and the old cap went into the trash, replaced with a cheap new non-locking cap.

The NOX and the evap issues were a bigger deal. I might have tackled the NOX myself, as the only system in play was EGR, but I had neither the time nor experience to mess with the fuel system. Also, I wasn't sure what it would take to get the car to pass and didn't want to get in an endless cycle of paying for a test, failing, tweaking, etc.

This kind of thing is why California has the Gold Shield shop program -- designated repair places that can basically keep working on your car until it passes.  Lozano Auto Service in Sunnyvale was recommended by a couple of people, and I dropped the Sportwagon off along with the service manual for what turned out to be a week's stay.

When it arrived, they did an initial smog test, and the numbers were even worse than at the first place:

Clearly, the EGR system was completely non-functional. According to the shop owner, they first checked the valve to make sure it wasn't sticking, something I'd already done. It's easy to just reach down underneath the valve and actuate it with your finger. Next up was vacum to the valve. That's supplied by a simple thermal switch that opens once the engine warms up. They pulled off the hoses and found that the switch was plugged with a small piece 0f red plastic "like off a can of WD-40." Oregon must have had nothing more than a simple visual inspection, if that. I wonder if the past owner's meticulous logbooks make any mention of that!

After removing the plastic, the thermal switch was found to be dead. One replacement later and we had a working EGR system again. And it still failed.

Head-scratching time. They removed the EGR valve and cleaned all passages to eliminate any restrictions. It still failed.

Finally, they did a top engine clean using Seafoam to try to knock the compression down a bit by removing carbon. The car passed! But only by the skin of its teeth.

Why such a big problem with such a simple system? I suspect a few things were at work. First and foremost, with no 3-way cat, a wimpy EGR system, and relatively high compression for 1976, NOX was probably never that low even factory new. Second, the Sportwagon was tuned for leaded gas, which is nominally more like mid-grade 89 octane unleaded than the cheap 87 I had in the tank. Higher octane, lower NOX since the combustion is cooler. Finally, I would be surprised if one can of Seafoam completely decarbonized the head.

Next time I'll make sure the tank is full of premium, or even racing gas if necessary, and hope for the best.

1976 Brochure

Courtesy of the Sportwagon's previous owner, who kept one of these perfectly preserved.

It's all mine, er, ours now

I haven't posted about this before because I didn't want to risk having the whole thing blow up in my face ... but the 1976 Sportwagon from Portland is now sitting in my driveway.

Bryan Thompson won the eBay auction, and I emailed congratulations to him within minutes, offering to buy the car if he didn't want it at some point. As it turned out, he only wanted it to take a vacation trip down the coast from Portland to San Diego and was planning to sell it when he got home. So we agreed that I would buy the car from him, with Bryan cutting his trip just a bit short to drop the Sportwagon off here in Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, Bryan had some work commitments come up, and I stepped in and arranged to have the car shipped directly to me. At about noon today, Rick Watkins (a uShip.com transporter) pulled up and rolled Laverne's car off the trailer.

I noticed a couple of things not readily apparent in the eBay photos; a little door ding on the passenger side and the rather nastily chewed up panel under the front bumper. Other than that, though, this is an incredibly clean car. Like in the hatchback, the radio is hopelessly broken, but everything else seems to be as advertised. It runs beautifully and looks very cool as a little red wagon.

Pictures will be coming later, and I've got some hard decisions to make about other cars, but this is a great day!

Bryan Thompson for the win!

Well, that beautfiully maintained one-owner 1976 Sportwagon that sold on eBay several weeks ago for $3,250 got turned around quickly by its new owner, another used car place in Portland. After offering it up in late July and not having the reserve met (highest bid of $4,250), the seller relisted it with a lower reserve price:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Datsun-Vintage-Nissan-F-10-Wagon-Rare-Datsun-F10-1-owner-GAS-CRISIS-TIME-WARP-survivor_W0QQcmdZViewItemQQcategoryZ6188QQihZ006QQitemZ160268019404QQrdZ1QQsspagenameZWDVW

It had been sitting at around $3,050 for several days until the final minute on Sunday when the snipers went to work. First, someone knocked in a bid for $5,000.01, then Nissan Design's Bryan Thompson bid $5,100.01 with just 30 seconds left, winning the auction at the wire. It figures it would be him ... how many sane people want Datsun F10s, anyway?

He told me via email that he's planning to take a leisurely drive down the coast from Portland with his new beauty. Congratulations, you lucky dog.

32 years ago this month

In July of 1976, as the Bicentennial was being celebrated around the country, I was a kid in junior high in Ewa Beach, Hawaii. I don't think I was reading car magazines at that point, and I definitely don't remember reading in Car and Driver or Road & Track about the new front-wheel drive Datsun, the F10. In fact, the first time I realized there was an F10 was when I saw the late "Queen Henry Charles" in the used car lot at Joe Gibson Ford in Greenville, Texas, in 1980.

Sitting in the Texas sun evidently caused a major outgassing of volatile organic compounds from the interior plastics, so I have an indelible memory of opening the door and sitting down in that red 1977 hatchback for the first time. The smell of the warm plastic is as clear in my mind as if it happened yesterday. Compared to the comparatively more primitive (and considerably oldleer and more worn) 1972 Toyota Corolla S5 I'd had previously, the F10 seemed nearly new and from a different era.

It's illuminating to read these contemporary reviews that point out that the F10 has "280Z handling for a B-210 price", or note that it's braking performance was on par with the all-new Porsche 924 tested in the same issues. Everybody was slow back then, and the F10 was, relatively speaking, not a terrible performer for the day.

And of course I had to laugh at the complaints about the shifter; Queen Henry Charles was definitely a "bag of gears" that you had to shift by precise lever placement and prayers to the appropriate deities. Tanya tried driving it once and gave up after a couple of miles in disgust. I thought I just had an extra-sloppy linkage, but evidently they all were like that to at least some extent. (Arnelle doesn't seem as bad as I remember Henry being, though.)