570Z pictures

In primer

This project had it's ups and downs and was set aside for a number of years before I finally finished it. I moved to my new (to me) house before I finally got fed up and got started on the thing again. Here's a shot of the Land Rocket in primer shortly after getting the thing road-worthy again for the trip to the new house.

Fresh paint

Taken at the "new" house. I shot multiple coats of lacquer and chose a Porsche color called Gaurds Red. Gaurds Red is a very nice deep red with quite a bit of orange in it. The paint job still needs a final cutting polishing here and trim / detail work.

She's done!

After a number of weeks of tinkering, I finally got the Land Rocket done! It's a good thing she goes as good as she looks....

Rear quarter shot

The flares are items straight out of the Nissan racing catalog. The whale tail is from Jim Cook's outfit. I had a local outfit weld me up a true dual exhaust setup all the way out back with two small turbo mufflers taking the place of the original singlular muffler. I filled the stock single exhaust outlet on the rear lower valance which created a rather nice rolled pan look....

Another rear quarter shot

I scuffed up the chrome bumpers as well as I could, epoxy primed them and top-coated them with the red paint. The black rub-strips surrounding the bumpers are from a boating supply place and are a glue-on (self adhesive) affair.

Interior shot

This Z car was originally semi-dark blue metallic and I did a complete color change (engine bay, door jambs, etc.). The interior was very stock looking as I used Steward Warner gauges compatible with the V-8 installation in the stock instrument holes in the dash. I used a B&M cable operated shifter which I cut down in height because it was too tall.

The front end

As you may have noticed in the first picture on this page, I originally completely filled the headlight buckets with solid covers and faired the entire buckets into the fenders themselves. I then fabricated some adjustable brackets wich accepted normal (for that time) small square GM-style headlights which I mounted behind the grill. This worked fairly well in that I used the air-dam mounted Cibie driving lights wired to my high-beam stalk as high beams. Unfortunately, I had several "discussions" with law enforcement about this setup and rather than press the issue, I took the solid headlight covers off, put transparent fairings on but left the square headlights behind the grill for "effect".

Engine bay

During the V-8 transplant, just about everything that could come out of the engine bay came out and I stripped, epoxy primed and topcoated the sheet metal red. As you can see, there's plenty of room in a Z car engine bay for a small block Chev. I had a local outfit custom fabricate a 4-row radiator using the top, bottom caps and siderails from the original (6 cyl) radiator. Twin thermostatically controlled electric fans kept coolant temps in check, as I never saw the temps rise past 190 degrees even in heavy traffic on a hot day....

Another engine bay shot

Everything fits under the hood, although the alternator adjusting bracket was *very close* to the underside of the hood. Good thing I used solid motor mounts! I kept the alternator on the starboard side of the engine bay because that's where all the wiring is on a stock Z. If one were to move the alternator over to the port side and re-wire the harness, there'd be plenty of room for an A/C compressor as well.
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Last update: September 16, 1998