The story of my car:
how it ended up in MY driveway...
I first saw the car on ebay one Thursday in June of 2003. The auction was going to end on the following Saturday and the price was right. I watched the auction very closely until the last minute and placed my bid. Needless to say I won the auction, otherwise this would be a rather pointless story. We went to pick up the car in Austin, Tx a week later. The seller, as it turned out, had left the car in a schlotzky's parking lot unatended as he continued life in Dallas. We cleaned up the car at one of those self serve car wash places and drove it back to Houston with a broken U-joint, a sloppy shifter, and an engine which, I later found out, had an intake valve rocker arm missing. This caused horrible performance and similarly bad gas mileage. We drove it back to Houston, and my dad decided he would drive it most of the way back. (what was I going to say, I was only 16) I had to drop off my friend (Chris, the MR2 guy) so I took a different way home from the freeway than my dad did. I came to a light a few blocks from my house and was absolutely shocked to see a 280z just sitting there! I couldn't believe that the little car in the next lane was my Z!
The summer passed and I drove the car around the neighborhood a little, but I simply was not satisfied with its performance. It was running on 5 cylinders, and polluting quite noticeably, so I made an executive decision to pick up an engine from Tennessee. Looking back now, I could have bought a similar engine from any of the 3 Z junkyards in Houston, but I didn't know that at the time, so off to Tennessee I went. I completed my first engine swap, and found that 6 cylinders are much faster than 5 :) . The Tennessee engine, however, was apparently at the end of its life. One rainy night, while on the freeway, the engine stopped spinning. Think about this for a second. The street is wet, my tires are crap, the engine is stopped, and the car is still going forward. Did I mention I forgot to kick in the clutch? One can easily deduce that I no longer had traction on the rear tires, and I came to a VERY dramatic stop. The death of the Tennessee engine came by way of a loose rod nut, and a thrown rod.
The Video