Our story begins with a facebook marketplace ad, as any sufficiently sketchy Lemons story should. This post was advertising a 1988 Nissan 240 SX (a proper fun ride in its' own right) but clearly picturing a 280. After some friendly back and forth the owner confirmed this, and we set a date: April 28, 2022.

Love at first sight:

We took a 20 minute drive, and crawled all over the car. Clearly rust in the passenger footwell. Some rust in the drivers footwell. Otherwise, very little rust for a vehicle of this age. Engine compartment showed no major leaks. "This might just be a car", we thought to ourselves, and negotiated a cash transaction on the spot.

Lemons teams are not generally known for the quality decision making. So, of course, we embarked on a 45 minute drive home with tires half as old as either of us, and no real knowledge of the actual mechanical condition of the vehicle.

she drove, at highway speeds, the entire way, magnificently

"hhheeeyyyYYYY This might just be a *race*car!", we thought to ourselves.

While the previous owner may not have known cars all that well, this one was well taken care of. The interior and dash were in surprisingly good condition

It’s all gotta go

Sadly for the lovely interior, racecars are not valued for their interiors. Knowing of the passionate Z-car enthusiast community, we decided to sell everything we removed to someone focused on restoration, not, as we are, on detonation.

While this felt good for moral car nerd reasons, it meant we could not remove the interior with the traditional hack-and-slash approach to Lemons engineering. We methodically removed trim pieces, seats, carpet, more carpet, other trim pieces, small thingamajigs that hold other thingamajigs onto the car.

While I’m being somewhat mindful of morality, I’d like to point out that our Lemons team proudly uses the labor of underage children (our own) in our work:

We were able to remove most of the cosmetic interior in about 4 hours one sunny Colorado afternoon. Still ahead: deeper into the guts of the interior!