What is the Lake Report?
The Lake Report is my blog where I detail work on my project car Mizumi, a 1986 Nissan 300ZX. みずうみ (mizūmi) means “lake” in Japanese.
I’ve been interested in cars ever since I purchased my first car at 16 in the South Hills of Pittsburgh. Eva was a 1993 BMW 325i with a five-speed transmission and an uncomfortable 190,000 miles.
Eva broke down a lot. Keeping her on the road taught me what I now know is a lifelong love of wrenching. She was my first time working on a car: simple stuff like fabricating a cold-air intake and changing valve-cover seals, and harder jobs like ripping out the dash to swap a heater core. Eva found her way to the gas station in the sky when state inspection described her frame as “crispy” from rust. I, as a minor, wasn’t allowed to keep her. I, as an adult, get it.
Eva also indirectly got me a job. In 2021, I leveraged that experience into a sophomore-year co-op at BMW in Upstate South Carolina — first real paychecks, dirt-cheap rent, and a piggy bank that started filling up.
It emptied fast when I found Mizumi. On a weekend trip to NC State, I scrolled the Raleigh-area Craigslist and found a 1986 Nissan 300ZX listed at $4,000. In the Z community, that’s a “chuki 2+0 N/A analog dash” — early body, two seats, no turbo, analog gauges. I had always wanted a Z31. Now I had a meeting set up to buy one.
This Z was the exact spec I was looking for, too. The N/A engine was perfect because I had always been planning an engine swap. It was the regular two-seater, and had the best feature of all: T-tops. I convinced my roommates — who at this point I had known for maybe two months — that I absolutely needed to see this car. They agreed to the side quest, and off we went to meet the previous owner.
When I went to purchase the car, I arrived at a house with several large dump trucks in the yard. To me, this was naturally a good sign, as Eva’s previous owner ALSO had dump trucks in the yard. Upon looking at the car, I saw that it had essentially no rust. This was the moment that I decided I was going to purchase this car, unless something crazy happened on the test drive. A rust-free car from the ’80s is hard enough to come by on its own, let alone one in the exact spec you want.
This Z was a royal blue color, which was not a factory option. There was some minor paint damage around the car, almost certainly from a shoddy paint job. Nonetheless, the car started right up and ran, and only had one minor fault: the brakes. The pedal was soft, and it was clear that something was not all there in the front brakes. The car stopped safely, but in retrospect needed the front calipers rebuilt. I offered the previous owner $3,200, and became the owner of Mizumi.
I started to drive Mizumi from the previous owner’s house and immediately noticed several issues. First, the tires were old. They were significantly underinflated, and would need reinflated within a mile or two unless I wanted to destroy them. Second, the previous owner had installed 5% tint on all the windows except for the front windshield. This was almost certainly not legal, and gave the impression of standing at the front of a movie theater and staring directly into the projector. Your eyes would adjust to daylight out of the front, and as a result, you could not see basically anything out of any of the other windows.
Third, and most pressingly, Mizumi overheated within 10 miles of leaving the previous owner and broke down.
At this point, I’d like you to imagine being one of my roommates. You’ve just met this Pitt student a couple of months ago before moving in with him sight unseen, several hundred miles away from home, at your first real adult job. He, on a road trip three hours from your temporary home, convinces you to meet an unknown man from Craigslist to buy an old car. You are assured that this is all normal. Then, the car your new roommate has bought immediately breaks down and leaves you all stuck for hours waiting for a tow truck. Frankly, I’m beyond grateful they did not leave me behind.
Mizumi never ran again in South or North Carolina after that. I towed the car to a Nissan dealership in Cary, NC before paying a silly sum for new tires and brakes. I traveled back to Cary to try and make the road trip to SC, but once I collected the keys, the car just refused to start in the dealership parking lot. At that point I decided to have it shipped home to Pennsylvania.
I did eventually get Mizumi running somewhat better once I returned to PA, but I discovered a nasty truth about my overheating issues. I had a significant head-gasket leak in cylinder 3 that was burning all of my coolant. I took stock of the situation, and decided my long-term plan of an engine swap had become the main plan. I removed the engine from the car, and it’s been a work in progress ever since.
In the Lake Report, I’ll bring you up to speed on how the engine swap is going.