No more strutting around town

The struts on the Pulsar were completely shot; this was evident on the drive home after purchasing the car.  Today I replaced the rear struts.

The job wasn't hard at all.  After removing the rear wheel, brake line stay, and the upper and lower mounting bolts, the strut was easily removed.  

After removing the struts I dismantled the upper mount and removed the spring.  The springs on the rear weren't under a lot of tension and were easily removed.

I scrubbed all the parts with degreaser before assembling the new struts from Monroe.

Assembling the new stack was pretty straightforward.  I used new bellows, bumpers, and pillow mounts in the reassembly.

The new struts went back into the car as easily as they came out.  Now the rear end of the car won't strut about quite like it did on that drive home!

 

Let there be sound!

The Pulsar had the remnants of a high-end sound system in it when we purchased the car.  Large gauge power wire was routed from the firewall into the back of the car, along with a few line-level signal wires.

In addition to some interesting wiring, the speakers both front and rear were non-functional.  The rear speakers had completely deteriorated while some less than adequate wiring techniques caused the front to be non-functional.

The surrounds on the tiny rears had disentegrated

The front speaker wires were simply taped together

To get the tunes going again, I spliced a new radio harness as well as correcting the wiring issues to the speakers.  I also installed new JVC 6x9 speakers in the rear and Rockford Fosgate 5 1/4 speakers in the front, using Boom Mat sound speaker baffles on all speakers.

The reverse indicators are back up

With the interior out of the Pulsar I was able to catch a glimpse of the back up light assemblies.  I noticed that the lower mounting posts had broken, so once again the plastic welder saves the day!

Parts is parts!

There were some parts that I had trouble finding for the 280z, but that was a popular car with essentially the same chassis for almost 10 years so only the model year specific parts are difficult to locate.  The N13 Pulsar NX, however, was only made for four years, with the SE only being available for two of those four.  There are some parts we need for our Pulsar that I thought would be impossible to find.  Something hit me while I was on my search for a couple of interior parts: the Pulsar had few parts of its own; it actually used parts from several bins.  Two examples of this include the T-Top lock release button and the glove box lock.

After looking at several photos, I noticed that the T-Top lock release button was shared with the Z31 300zx.  After finding one on eBay all I had to do was paint it to match.

The glove box latch was a bit more challenging, but after scouring many images of glove boxes from various Nissan models of the late 80's and early 90's, I found that the latch from an early 90's Nissan Micra was a perfect fit.  After finding one on eBay I slipped it through the hole in the glove box lid with a click.

The point here and the lesson I learned is don't rely solely on the part numbers for a specific model of car; sometimes it is just the color that differs.  Manufacturers cut costs by reusing parts between models and sometimes it is a matter of finding which parts were shared when you can't find that specific part for your vehicle.