During the past two years, I’ve spent time here and there researching exactly what it takes to bring a 240Z up to mint condition. Being in the military, I’m usually strapped for time and a good stay-in-one-location place is hard to find. I may have come across my opportunity though: my parents are buying retirement property out in Texas and moving there this year. Since the car was my Dad’s to begin with, he has an intrinsic vested interest in it as well. His Texas ranch will make a perfect location to start and finish this massive undertaking. I expect I’ll be driving the car out there in about a year or so and we’ll start tearing it down.
You’d have a hard time doing a project like this without some cash. So, even though my 240Z project will make little to no physical progress over the next year, it will be making leaps and bounds financially. In doing my research, I’ve looked around on the internet to see what I could dig up of others that have done this before me. One of the more informative walk-throughs I’ve found is Refreshing a Classic Datsun 240Z: the total here is showing about $12-$13k. I also was able to find an email chain on a 240Z restoration cost estimate showing anywhere from $15k all the way up to $30k (if you pay someone else to do the entire thing).
Of course, that’s a lot to cough up at once. As alluded to above, I’ve gotten permission from the wife to open up a stock account (a savings account would work too), where starting in August we’ll be contributing a steady $300 per month until the project is finished. Without interest taken into consideration, that will give a total of ~$19,500 for the project. If you throw in, say, 7% interest over that same period of time, we’re looking at ~$23,500 for the project. Hopefully that will be adequate enough with my Dad and me trying to tackle most of the grunt work.
