datsun 1600 os giken twin-cam
os giken's 1600 with twin cam head running for the first time. listen to it drop a gear overtake that truck!
Project 510 – Speedhunters.com
Here is the fourth Speedhunters article to be posted, this one is about my own project car. Many of you who have been following this blog since the start would be familiar with this particular automobile, but this article really takes it back to how it all started for me, plus there are some images that I’ve never posted before. Hope you all like it.
I grew up loving cars from as early as I can remember, even my wallpaper in my childhood bedroom was race-car themed. From an young age I religiously read a magazine called “Street Machine” which featured mainly Australian domestic muscle cars & hot rods. Back in 1997 at the age of 12, a neighbour of mine handed me down a few of his “Fast Fours & Rotaries” magazines. I hadn’t paid much attention to smaller cars until then, when one particular issue caught my attention – the “Datsun 1600 Shootout” issue. It featured a handful of Datsun 1600s with varying engine transplants and pitted them against each other to find out which reined supreme. To give you an idea of how far developed the scene was back then, the first SR20DET equipped Datto wasn’t quite finished in time for the shoot. Compare that to nowadays where most Datsun builds are expected to start with an SR transplant.
Once I got a bit older and approached the age where I was eligible for a learners permit, I started to pester my dad to let me get a Datsun as my first car. We looked at a few but they were mainly rust-buckets, so we forgot about it for a while. I ended up becoming interested in more modern cars after learning to drive in my sisters SR20DE Nissan Pulsar and obtained one of my own as my first car, but the passion for Datsuns never left my bloodstream. The shell you see above was bought a year or so after I sold that first car, and a wrecked CA18DET 180SX was also purchased and stripped for it’s engine & gearbox. Sadly the project was put in the ‘too hard basket’ after sitting around for about a year and the shell was sold off. On the bright side, the large boxes full of parts that came with the shell were retained, which would come in handy in the future because I was certain I would own another one.