Datsun 120Y/140Y auto wanted.

[Grumpy Northener]

So very nearly there John - but alas it's a manual
http://www.carandclassic.co.uk/car/C599120#

[JPB]

There must have been something special about these turquoise ones; I know of five surviving Sunny Coupés locally and all but one are that colour. The other is metallic bottle green, is gorgeous and is still with the woman who bought it, new, from the dealership in 1978.

[rich.]

im sure you could make this fit
http://www.leboncoin.fr/voitures/611831304.htm?ca=18_s

[JPB]

I like these! But there's no space under the back of a Minor - without cutting away most of the floor and the rear seat pan - to fit the transmission units, the pulleys, the axle tube, the driveshafts and the diff. Hindsight is a wonderful thing; I should have sold the Dolomite and kept my £50 345GL, which went on to serve two further keepers before a falling gable end in the gales eventually claimed its bonded screen, also scratching the roof and bonnet a little and rendering the car unviable for repair. Their belts -especially if you use the better, reinforced ones - are noisy, especially with the seats folded down and the shelf out of the car and some maintenance tasks are footery in the extreme, such as injecting ATF into the bellows with a syringe, moving the pairs of pulleys apart to tension the belts and making the clutch work properly so that it engages later when the choke is in use, a right old fanny on of a job involving following miles of small diameter vacuum tubes around the car.
Hmm, on second thoughts the Dolly was the right choice on the day!

I've had work back from one of the Yahoo.jp members I've been in contact with, keeping me in the loop about suitable donor cars one of which, still in Japan as it happens, is a ready-converted Minor and thae cunning Japanese drive on the correct side of the road so it would be a working car straight off the boat BUT.. the point was to make use of an existing shell that's known to be totally free of rust, historic repairs and collision damage so buying a complete, working car would be a crazy thing to do. I've enquired and asked for pictures to be sent.

[rich.]

i was thinking about this at 3am this morning.... have you thought about doing an electric conversion? i remember pc did a story on a chap did this to an mgf...

[JPB]

At 3 o' clock this morning, I was having the recurring dream about Anna, the K10 and the large tub of olive oil, guess which of us thought of the thing that's the more likely to happen?

So anyway, it appears that the Japanese characters for "comes with fitted Datsun 140Y engine and automatic gearbox" are only one stroke away from the characters for "comes without fitted Datsun 140Y engine and automatic gearbox!"
Another dead end, and the shell wasn't complete as someone had thought about fitting a pedal box but hadn't found a donor car. Not only that, but their approach had been less than logical and would have left the car with a place without a hole for the new master cylinder and pedal box.

Sod this for a game of soldiers, I've made a bid on a totally different engine & box combo on the bay of E. Oh, and some grinder discs, some hacksaw blades and a box of pencils for the carbon arc torch as I went to get some out to fix my rain water tank and discovered that I'd used my last pack on the cab of the neighbour's Thames Trader when - after a few pints in the Shaft & Shovel one night last year - I'd made the mistake of telling him that I'd repaired the cab of my own Trader which had been in a far worse state at the time.

[TerryG]

Chevrolet LS6?

[JPB]

Funnily enough, no.

[TerryG]

Come on John, If a job's worth doing, it's worth over-doing.

Knowing your fetish for the unusual Have you found a spare Daimler v8 or how about a Coventry Climax?

[tractorman]

Or a written off Golf with DSG?