Bluebird

Hi I'm Johnny Knoxville and this is a Nissan Bluebird.

I sold my Civic. I wanted a boxy 4 door saloon as a daily, because why not?

So I looked around for a while and found this:






A 1987 Nissan Bluebird 1.8 SLX. Automatic, so very slow, but it is truly a great cruiser. Never owned an auto before. The bonus of it being so slow is that the 5 now feels like a supercar, so that's nice.

I got it back from the New Forest and gave it a wash:








Don't let these photos fool you, while it cleans up ok there are quite a few areas where the paint has completely flaked off, the boot, tailgate, parts of the roof and A pillars.

However, rust wise, my word it is clean:






The arches and sills are absolutely mint apart from one tiny little surface mark on the front left wing, which can be easily fixed. It's never had a rust advisory on MOT, 75k miles from new, and had an old lady driving it 1-2k miles a year for the last 15 years, clearly garaged.

The interior is sensational, literally everything is blue, it's the most 80s thing I've ever seen:





Anyway, one thing I knew was that the rad was old and very very dead, so it needed a new one:



Now try and find me an automatic Bluebird rad with the auto box cooler on the bottom. Lol, good luck. I gave up, realised the inlet and outlet were identical to an MX-5 radiator, and made and welded in some new radiator mounts so it would fit:







Now I'm no fabricator so I was really happy with how this came out haha, it sits lovely on the new mounts, it's perfect.

Aaaaanyway I went to bleed the coolant and then I had some pretty major issues, it was just bleeding air, and more air, and more air. It was just constant, it would not bleed. I turned the engine off and got a 2 foot fountain of coolant shoot out the top of the new rad. I decided there was an issue.

Exhaust gas leaking into coolant due to bad headgasket? Stuck thermostat? Cavitating water pump? These are the ideas we cam up with, but I've played half measures with cooling systems before and it never goes well.

So, off came the head:



Old headgasket was a bit gross but not absolutely horrendous, but still probably needed doing:



New water pump on:



Every car has THE guy, you know there's always one guy on the Facebook page who knows every part number, has every part. Anyway turns out for Bluebirds that man lives just 10 miles up the road from me! And his prices were unreal! I got headgasket, cambelt, water pump, water pump gasket, thermostat gasket, front crank seal, various other seals I can't even identify the use of, valve stem seals, cam cover gasket, intake manifold gasket, exhaust manifold gasket. £60. £60! And they all appear to be legit Nissan parts too, unbelievably good value!


Anyway despite having the manual, I'm having a load of issues timing the head back up to the crank, hand cranking keeps resulting in valve touch, sadly these are interference engines. We'll get there, and then this engine should be happy for quite some time hopefully.

So yeah, the daily which is not quite a daily right now, not the best start but when it works I do love this car, just something a bit different to the norm. I've also bought some mk2 Golf coilovers which can be converted to fit. Set of old Japanese wheels, coilovers, should look pretty cool when done!