Tires, rust check and an oil change

01 May 2017

The tires the car came with were junk. They were cracking and bald on the inside. I put the car up on jack stands and took the wheels off to get some new rubber on them. I checked the DOT code and found out the existing tires were made in 2004 - 13 years old! Choices were pretty slim for replacement tires. The stock wheels on the 300zx are a pretty odd size nowadays. I ended up going with some Falken Azenis RT-615K tires. They supposedly perform great, but have a very short life span, which is perfect this car (plan on getting new wheels in a year or 2).

In the meantime, I decided to take stock of the rust on the car. I’m just going to throw it all into the GitHub issue on it for now. It’s not bad, but not perfect either. The short version is that I need to take the rear bumper cover off sometime this summer and go wild with a grinder, wheel brush, and a welder. The good news is that the worst of it isn’t visible and hence my shitty fixes won’t be visible either.

While the car was up, I also finally got around to doing an oil change. I kinda went on autopilot here and accidentally put on a filter for my Ford Escape, which was lying right beside me, rather than the 300zx. I realized my mistake when I saw the OEM Nissan filter in a box, after I had already put oil back in the car… Anyways, long story short, I ended up having to chuck a gallon of Mobil 1 and an Escape oil filter in the trash (not literally, they’re queued up for a dump run). I think the lesson here is that I need a better organization scheme for parts than “putting shit in random boxes.”

Finally, I decided to tackle a problem that has been bugging me - the tail lights weren’t flush with the car. The lights are still out of the car though, so I’ll cover it in another post once they’re back in.