sgiandubh

Some forum snooping and poking around under the hood and I found a melted fuseable link wire. I'll have to do a permanent fix, but splicing it back together brought back the wipers, fan and radio. Still not charging...

Fresh oil and a new battery and it was time to drive it further than 20 feet! I took a crappy cell phone video of the drive... but won't let me link to it for some reason. Summary of the shake down cruise is as follows. Wipers, radio, heater fan don't work. Alternator isn't charging. Left turn signal has a bulb out. A bunch of warning lights stay on all the time. Tires are REALLY dry rotted and totally sketch to drive on. Engine runs smooth and pulls strong. Trans is a bit clunky (main point of reference is my wife's IS250, all my other rigs are sticks, so I'm assuming its normal) but shifts and pulls fine. Even with the issues I couldn't resist driving it the 5ish miles to school. I wasn't prepared for nearly 4k at 70mph!! The engine felt totally smooth even spinning that fast. 60 felt more comfortable - or maybe it was just my mental block to cruising at 4 grand.

Ha! Its totally not an optical illusion. For whatever reason they redid the parking spots like that and the inside two are completely unusable for anything normal car sized. Works out good for me to use the space for my projects though. The van is mine too so I can move it if I need.

Good comments. Is the oil pump driven off the distributor in these motors? I didn't think to go that route, would have been a better approach than cranking. Yep, I will change the oil pronto. It seemed to manage temp ok, but ran slightly hotter than I'd like. I'll try your trick with the cap off to check the tstat. Thanks!

Amazingly, the gas in the tank didn't smell varnished. Which was good considering that I broke my transfer pump trying to get it to work. Even more amazingly, it fired on the second crank! I had to shut it down instantly though, because as soon as it fired it raced. After a bit of trouble shooting I found that the the throttle linkage along the intake manifold was frozen. A little WD40 and it ran and idled! At this point I was pretty excited so my picture taking fell off, but I drove it on the trailer and got it home without incident. And gave it a much needed bath...

Thanks @]2eDeYe! I'm stoked. First Datsun, so should be a fun learning curve. First order of business was getting the motor lubed back up after sitting for so long. So, I pulled the valve cover and drizzled some oil over the rockers and timing chain and put a cap full into each cylinder. Cranked it over 10 seconds at a time for 3 or 4 tries but the oil pressure gauge didn't move. I was getting oil up at the rockers from the pump so, I figured was good enough.

I've had my eye on this car since I was a kid. It was my grandmother's car, and some of my earliest memories of her are riding in the back of it while she drove us to the pool. My grandfather bought it for her new in the fall of '77. The original title shows that it was first registered 10/08/77. It was never driven out of the Seattle area and has 76k miles. It's been sitting in her carport for the past 8-10 years, but much to my delight, I have been able to recently purchase it from the estate. There seem to be very few 810s left, and a similarly small number of tech threads on how to keep these cars on the road. The intent of this thread is to contribute to that knowledge base and document the journey back to daily status for a pretty well preserved example of the car.