For reasons I cannot fully explain, I’ve always had an implausible infatuation with terrible cars. I’m like the Statue of Liberty, only for crappy automobiles.
Give me your rusty
Your terrible and unloved
Your downright useless and badly made
And I will give them tender love and care
I’m sure that’s not how the poem goes, but you get the gist. The point is that as far back as I can remember, I’ve always loved abandoned, rusty, or otherwise decrepit cars. Every dent, scratch, and rust hole tells a story and is a defining moment in that car’s history. Like our own scars, the blemishes made it what it is today.
I can vividly recall approaching old Dacias and Oltcits (an ultimately terrible partnership between Citroën and the Romanian Communist government) in my native city of Craiova, Romania, with a sense of pity and intrigue. These machines were once the pride and joy of their owners; they were shiny beacons of accomplishment fresh off the showroom floor. Somehow they became forlorn and forgotten, nestled between Communist-era apartment towers or decaying in streetside parking lots. These cars likely ignited my lifelong automotive passion, so in a way, I feel I owe them my thanks.
Until recently, I worked at a car museum. Outside of the main building that housed the displays was an area called “The Side Yard.” It was generally the home of cars that were deemed unworthy of a spot inside, and it also seemed home to a colony of stray cats. Since I started working there in 2021, there was one particular car that lay dormant, seemingly never to see blacktop again: a 1975 Datsun 620 pickup truck.
This particular 620 had … seen better days. The orange paint had been covered in a dull, gray primer, while the interior had served as a nest and unfortunate “area of relief” for enough rats to clog a small town’s sewer system. Think of the most appetizing smell you can imagine, turn it 180 degrees, and make it worse. That’s what this truck smelled like. To really put a cherry on top of the proverbial sundae, someone had put a nice long gash in the side of the bed; it looked like a forklift accident or an unfortunate encounter with Wolverine.
I later tracked down the mother of a past owner. She told me her son bought this 620 and a few others to use as parts trucks for his own 620. After his untimely passing, in 2018 she donated all of them to the museum, where its brethren were sold and moved on to new homes. This one, however, was left behind, awaiting an adoption that never came. Instead it served as a laughing stock among the museum’s employees, an example of what we considered to be the epitome of automotive rock bottom. That all changed in November 2022.
It was a sunny, lazy day, without many visitors or really anything important to do. A friend of mine, docent Mike Ball, came in for his shift and as we talked I suggested that one of these days, I’d stick a battery in the Datsun just to see what would happen.
“Well let’s go then! Let’s do it right now,” Mike said.
After robbing a battery from another car and sourcing the Datsun’s keys, we sauntered off to the side yard for what I believed would be a fruitless endeavor.
Under the hood was a very intact L20B four-cylinder engine, without much rust but with plenty of cat hair and rat presents. With a fresh battery installed, the truck did not react in the slightest. There were no lights or sounds. Thankfully, no fires either. I put the four-speed manual transmission in neutral, held the clutch down, turned the key, and was pleasantly surprised by an engine that turned over and sounded relatively healthy, given the state of the truck.
It’s worth noting I had no previous experience working on cars. I was, and mostly still am, enticed by the design rather than the powertrain of my favorite automobiles. However, I saw the Datsun as an opportunity to learn more about automotive maintenance; maybe I would even get it roadworthy again. And even if I did somehow wreck it further, not only would it be a learning experience, nobody would care.
My first lesson was never to throw parts at your project vehicle. Rather than look up precisely what essential components needed checking (spark, fuel, etc.) I instead opted to replace anything that looked even remotely janky. In hindsight, those parts were very likely completely functional, but replacing them taught me their individual roles. I learned how to rebuild a carburetor and how even a pinhole-sized vacuum leak can have utterly detrimental effects on the way your engine runs—or if it runs at all.
Wiring was an entirely different can of worms, too. After finding a desiccated rat carcass under the dashboard, I quickly decided to distance myself as much as possible from the factory wiring and attempt to rewire whatever didn’t function. Through the use of YouTube, an Amazon power distribution block, and a race car switch panel, I was able to rewire the low beams and the high beams to two separate toggle switches, successfully marking my foray into being an amateur electrician. I look forward to finding out which one of the scrap wires I used becomes the first fire hazard.
The funnest part of this process—and I am being as sarcastic as one can be through the written word—came when it was time to tackle the brakes. Not only does the 620 use drum brakes all around, but given that this one sat for longer than Noah’s Ark after the flood, the shoes were all rusted to the drums. What ensued was a day-long battle between the brakes and numerous tools of various sizes and capacities for violence. I eventually triumphed and then changed the master cylinder and ran new brake lines to each wheel.
With a running engine, somewhat cooperative brakes, and a transmission that thanked me profusely for its new master and slave cylinder, the Datsun now resembled a real car, at least mechanically. I had yet to realize that tuning a carburetor was a more-than-necessary aspect of reviving any old heap, which in hindsight would explain the utterly horrendous way the engine ran. Regardless, it ran, whether it wanted to or not, and the truck moved at its own pace.
Words can’t properly describe the feeling of that first drive. I had driven the little Datsun under its own power around the side yard before this, but pulling it out onto the street was like freeing a caged bird. With each subsequent drive, the 620 showed me its willingness to get back out there after such a long hibernation, and I was more than happy to fulfill its wishes. I was continuing this truck’s story, after whatever circumstances had led to its abandonment at the museum.
The celebrations were cut short when I left my position at the museum, which put the Datsun in limbo. Thankfully, management was kind enough to let me procure the truck for the low sum of nothing, but the paperwork was another story altogether. Given that it had lain dormant likely for longer than I had been alive, the California DMV had scrubbed any and all records of it from their system.
What ensued was a month or two of back-and-forth between my friend Mike, the museum’s sales manager, his DMV contact, and the ever-so-pleasant folks at the Department of Motor Vehicles. It was not a cheap affair, but the fact that it even happened at all is nothing short of a miracle. I’d like to think the JDM gods were smiling down upon me at that moment and decided that following my troublesome journey in reviving the Datsun, I, in fact, deserved to legally own it.
Since it was a 1975 model, no smog check was needed, so I was free to pollute the air as I pleased. With my name on the title and the Datsun now back in the DMV system, another issue arose: Where do I keep this thing? I live in an apartment complex and I can’t imagine that management would have loved seeing a truck in such a decrepit state bringing down the value of their property. I needed a temporary solution.
Enter Kevin, my best friend since high school and the owner of a house with a backyard. Thanks to my other friend Steve’s truck and trailer, the Datsun found its new temporary home in Kevin’s backyard, where it would permanently ruin the lawn and likely poison anything that lived below it in the dirt. To this day, grass will not grow in the spot where the Datsun was parked …
Over the next two or three months, the Datsun began resembling a truck more and more each day. I learned the art of tuning the Weber carburetor, tidied up some of the wiring, replaced the instrument cluster with a functional one, and met one of my new favorite people in the universe: Mike of West Coast 620. Mike lives 20 minutes away from me and his bread and butter is buying and parting out Datsun 620s. He has been an invaluable resource and I can’t guarantee I would have been able to acquire all of the parts to put the Datsun properly back on the road without him.
He managed to source me a red bench seat out of some kind of ’70s mini truck that, with some persuasion and questionable mounting, provided me a non-rat-infested seating surface. After the interior received a dash mat and an intact bezel, it was deemed good enough for my tastes, and I turned my attention to the exterior.
The Datsun’s ugly gray primer over its original orange paint had to go. A regular person would have taken it somewhere to have the truck sanded down to bare metal, primed again, and then painted with actual car paint. That regular person was not me, however.
Instead I embarked on a week-long journey of stripping as much of the primer as I could with the help of about five cans of oven cleaner, gloves, and microfiber towels. The end result was questionable at best, with enough uneven surfaces to resemble a badly paved driveway. It would do for my purposes, though, and thus began the repaint of the Datsun.
I decided to recreate the orange paint underneath to the best of my abilities and settled on five or six cans of Nissan Burnt Orange forklift spray paint purchased from eBay. After all was said and done, it looked rough and terrible, but that’s kind of the look I was going for. Perfect is boring, and I wanted the Datsun to wear its scars as tremendous conversation starters—and as reminders that trucks are meant to be used.
At some stage I should address the Datsun’s elephant in the room, or rather its elephant-sized gash in the side of the bed. While my attempts at Bondo left quite a bit to be desired, I did at least patch up the hole and made the bed usable. My long-term plan is to have my parts guy Mike cut an appropriately sized chunk from one of his truck beds, complete with the fuel door, and have welded on. Until then, however, it’ll stay as more of a birth mark, or perhaps a sign of its rough past life. Hell, isn’t that the point of patina preservation anyway?
Now, with all this work accomplished, it had been two months beyond when I promised I’d get my project out of Kevin’s backyard, and despite most of my brain telling me it was a bad idea, I decided this truck, which I had never driven any real distance, would make it to my apartment 10 minutes away, in the dark. What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing, it turns out! The Datsun made it home in one piece, with no issues whatsoever.
It has now been nearly a year since the 620 made that drive home, and just over three years since I began reviving it. I have since purchased myriad items that serve no functional purpose other than being damn cool for my ’70s truck cosplay. They include a 1975 map of California, a 1970s Superbuster radar detector, and a Radio Shack 8-track case full of tapes.
It now also wears an OEM rear bumper, hubcaps, and sun visors, the dealer-optional tray under the glovebox, period-correct aftermarket steps and cab handles, and plenty of other nonsense I’m certainly forgetting about. The pièce de résistance, however, has to be the NOS Kraco 8-track player that still had its Montgomery Ward sticker on the factory plastic wrap.
All in all, I’ve spent just over $4000 on this Datsun 620 since 2022, and I don’t regret a single penny. I’ve learned that this hobby has less to do with the money poured into our cars than it does the enjoyment we get out of them. Reviving this 620 has been one of my defining moments as an automotive enthusiast. When you’re an enthusiast, every car has a soul, a personality, an attitude. The way you need to turn the key before your car starts, or the way you need to lift the door for it to close properly—all those things that would seem like flaws to regular folks are quirks that define our cars and make them unique.
My Datsun was left for dead. Abandoned among the refuse of the museum for its soul to wither away and for nature to take it back. I suppose you could say that in a way, I stopped its seemingly pre-determined destiny from taking place and instead gave it another chance to live and feel the pavement below its tiny little 14-inch wheels. There’s an indescribable joy in hearing an abandoned car struggle back to life that not everyone can understand, and that’s OK. But for those of us who get it, who know what it’s like to pull something from the claws of death, it’s pure ecstasy.