History of a Datsun Roadster

1969-1985 - ?
 

1985-1986 - In 1985, when I was 16, the neighbor that lived behind me put an old car behind his garage covered with a tarp. Curious teenager that I was, I peered under the tarp. I was interested! An old convertible car was lurking there.

A few months later my father bought it for $600 and we started working on it. After much work on both our parts, and a year later, it was drivable. On my 17th birthday, my dad transferred the title to me. I still own it and it's been garaged all that time except for one year when I didn't have a garage.

At one point during this my dad also bought a bright yellow '68 1600 and some parts from a guy who lived in Youngstown (we lived near Akron, OH). I didn't work on that one much, and it never ran very well. My dad sold it a few years later.
 

1987-1988 - I drove my car for two summers and had a lot of fun with it, but since then it hasn't done much. Those were the summers after I graduated from high school and the first year of college - I didn't return home for summer after that first year. My parents stored the car in their garage for years.
 

1989-1993 - After college my wife got a job teaching English in Japan, so we moved there and lived near Nagoya for almost two years. It would have been a great time to learn about the Roadster, but I didn't know much Japanese, I was raising our new daughter (she was one when we moved there), and didn't really think about my old car.

While my parents were storing the car they had a neighbor who worked on cars do some work on it. Some of the work was ok, but some of it I greatly disagree with. They put in air shocks in the back and replaced the A arms in the front, which is fine, but they also painted the car a primer gray (it was a nice candy apple red) and RIVETed some small pieces of sheet metal on the car. One over a side lamp mounting hole on the left front fender, and another between the top, rear edge of the left fender and the area in front of the windshield. These THINGS look really bad and have to be removed and repaired, although since I'll eventually be replacing the left front fender, it won't be quite as bad.
 

1993-2000 - I moved back to the States in the fall of '92 and got a job near my parents. After a promotion and a transfer to Ann Arbor, my parents were getting tired of having this car sitting in their garage, so they shipped it up to me. I was living in a cabin on a lake with no garage at this time, so it just sat outside for a year until we bought a house with a nice 2 1/2 car garage.

It's been sitting my garage since then. I've started it up every now and then and driven it a few times, but it hasn't been in good tune since around '88, so it wasn't really that fun.

2000-present - I'm 31 now, and I've owned this car for more than half my life. It's the same age as me, as well. After trying to sell it for a long time, but not really putting much effort into it because I didn't really want to, I decided to actually fix it up again. I'll do a better job this time - I have a little money now.