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Datzen and the Art of Project Cars – LS-Powered 280Z!

Building a YouTube show is not unlike building a project car: they’re both seen by many, judged by all, and take more work to assemble than anyone can imagine. These things engulf people in the pursuit of perfection and creativity, as both machines are often a doppelgänger for the personalities behind them. Maybe that’s why folks have become endeared with Emily and Aaron Reeves’ Flyin’ Sparks Garage, a YouTube channel that’s dedicated to the seeds and soil of grassroots hot rodding. The show is produced in their home shop in Mabank, Texas – just an hour outside of Dallas – and their projects are centered on honest, low-buck swaps and upgrades on everything from 2005 Pontiac GTOs to 1978 Datsun 280Zs. The channel has a dedicated following, with over 3.2-million views since the channel’s launch in 2013, and recently the duo announced their upcoming Velocity Channel show, Live, Love, Wrench.

But for Emily and Aaron, this story goes back 18 years to a mechanical fail that left the “Datzen” on the back burner as Aaron and Emily grew up. The Datzen was there when the duo met in church; it was Aaron’s first car. As they dated and grew up together, however, it became something of an albatross.

“Didn’t you pay $50 a week for it?” Emily asked as our interview began. “Yeah. I couldn’t afford it, it was 1,500 bucks,” Aaron recalled. “This was 18 years ago and I made payments on it for about two months to pay for it. Originally the car was parked just because we were kids and didn’t have any money. It was a very old fuel injection system that I didn’t understand. I didn’t have the skills to deal with it, and as a young man, there are a lot of things you go through that build the pieces of your view of yourself. And this one did not do me any favors, this entire car.” The Datzen’s archaic fuel-injection wiring was ultimately failing, and they parked the car while moving on down life’s road while the two found their own careers in diesel repair and fashion modeling (we’ll let you guess who did what).

They continued building a few project cars, like Emily’s “Roxy” GTO, but the Datzen sat with no plan in sight. While it hit Aaron hard personally, it’s one of the most venerable and relatable stories out there – short of the ones that “should’ve never been sold.” That first project car, especially as a young adult, is one of the first things someone wholly owns, but that personal investment can really hurt when yet-to-be-had wisdom and experience is met with seemingly unsolvable hurdles.

Then in 2013, the Texas couple launched Flyin’ Sparks Garage on YouTube. It came out of a dream for sharing what they felt was the reality of spinning wrenches at the home shop. The cable TV car shows, to their credit, focused on dramatic “one-week” builds, dream team parts combinations, and a departure from what they felt was how folks really experienced their own projects.

“One of the coolest things is hearing people say, ‘Man, I watched some of these shows, and the car is built in a half-hour and I think, ‘I could never do that. When I go out, I have problems with every little thing!’” Emily explained. “We show the obstacles and overcoming them — and in doing it, having fun. This is part of hot rodding, and part of building stuff is overcoming problems. Nothing’s gonna be perfect.

“It’s very back country — just make it work — and that was a huge insecurity of ours, but we realized that the bulk of our audience likes it. ” Aaron continued, “It struck a chord with them, and it became more interesting than if we had given them lots of technical advice, so we were able to settle into that place and just what we do.”

In 2016, with for their 10th wedding anniversary approaching, they were looking for a way to pull all the tangents of their lives together to celebrate and began thinking about Datzen. There was roughly a year to rebuild it before the 2017 HOT ROD Power Tour, and they wanted it to be there because the Power Tour is where they spent their honeymoon ten years prior. If they were to make the 2017 Power Tour, they’d be committing to a complete re-think of the car. Though electrical issues had side-lined it, the car had also rotted while sitting in project purgatory.

First the original 2.8L L28E inline-six with its tiny manual gearbox were yanked out before the car was set back on the ground to have its floor pans punched out. New sheet metal was hammered and stitched into place by Emily while Aaron reinforced the chassis rails with box tubing.

A set of CX Racing coil-overs were installed to get the car into the weeds, while a Silvermine Motors Stage 4 big-brake kit clamp down on a custom four-lug set of American Racing’s 18-inch VF502, 8-inches-wide up front and 10 inches out back. To huddle over those big meats, a venerable set of pocket flares were bolted on.

This work was all done to pour a new foundation for an LS2-based build that packed CP pistons, a Comp cam, and the set of Patriot heads from her previous GTO project. To keep it from being “just another” LS swap, they decided to fabricate a set of 180-degree cross-over headers (for a unique engine note) and topped everything off with an eight-stack Inglese intake backed by FAST’s XFI fuel-injection. A T-56 six-speed was bolted up behind the combo, and a custom mount was fabricated to hold it while a set of mounts from Dirty Dingo suspended the engine block.

A friend of theirs, Aaron Sellers of Pac Fab, CNC milled a custom set of valve covers for the build.

And then it happened — Murphy and his maligned laws visited the Flyin’ Sparks Garage. A miscalculation in their custom pistons meant that it didn’t take much for the new CP bullets to tap the freshly-installed Patriot heads, bending valves in cylinder six and killing compression shortly after firing up the motor and getting it dialed-in. They had checked for valve clearance during the build, but the pistons were too tight to the combustion chamber and still made contact while running. This meant a last-millisecond long-block swap with a 5.3, giving Datzen a functional heart for their odyssey.

They were able to slam it together in the days leading up to the tour, but like any project, there were teething issues. “I was at Texas Motor speedway doing a job, so I couldn’t leave until the races were done. Aaron picked me up at the speedway, left Roxy there, and we headed out,” Emily recalled. “The build was messed up, like the alternator wasn’t charging. So we ended up stopping the car in a parking lot. I jumped in Roxy and got another alternator. I had to go to South Dallas to the only 24-hour Auto Zone!” With a healthy 14 volts coursing through Datzen’s wired veins, they were able to cannonball it 18 hours to Kansas City, MS for the start of last year’s Power Tour.

Aaron continued, “I’ll never forget when we actually rolled in to the hotel, I think it was like 10:30 at night, and we finally made it to a place where we could rest — albeit it was a few hours until we got up and went to the next venue — but I mean it was a year of dreaming and then a couple months of just complete thrashing and we rolled in there, set our chairs out, had a few beers and it was just like, ‘Okay, we’ve made it to this point. Anything that goes wrong beyond now is manageable, we can make it to the next venue.’ And that was huge.”

American Racing drilled a custom bolt pattern into their VF-502s for this project, and you can now find a Datsun fitment in the catalog. The stance is locked-in with 18x8s up front, and 18x10s in the rear.

Indeed, it made it the next stop in Newton, IA; then it made it to Davenport, IL, and to every day of the 2017 Tour with the worries behind it. Slowly, the stress of that last minute thrash burned away like fuel in their tank as they made their way to Bowling Green, KY. In fact, one of the few worries left was just over how people would react to a Datsun at Power Tour. Our arms are open to imports, but the event is largely dominated by Detroit-bleeding hot rodders, and the duo weren’t sure what to expect. “People freaking loved it! Everybody had a story. Either they had a Datsun or they had a car that always got beat by a Datsun,” Emily said. “We all have opinions about different people’s style and how they mod stuff, but when it comes down to it, we’re just all gearheads and that was the coolest feeling — to feel so appreciated for our hard work.”

Building a YouTube channel has grown from hobbies to full-time gigs for many, but what’s been beautiful about this era of programming is it allows many niches of the automotive culture to find a home. With their humble roots, Aaron and Emily chose to focus on their channel on attainable, home-built projects. “It doesn’t make sense to only promote $8,000 superchargers,” Aaron mentioned. “Because what Emily and I want is for you to go and work on your stuff and enjoy it, and have adventures. So it only makes sense to direct people in a way that they can afford and enjoy it.” In essence, it was a response to the shows didn’t have the garage-built hot rod in mind, where money is socked over months and years to grab a carefully-selected list of parts that aren’t just set by dreams of horsepower, but also a realistic budget.

This git-er-done attitude eventually caught the Velocity Channel’s attention with Live, Laugh, Wrench, Emily and Aaron’s upcoming TV show. While they might’ve had to change shops, the home-grown philosophy of the Flyin’ Sparks Garage back in Texas is kept as they tackle new builds and carry their persistent spirit. “Rod Rutledge is a friend of ours who died on a motorcycle, but we met years earlier on Power Tour. He basically taught me how to not worry about life. Just roll with the punches, it doesn’t have to be right,” Aaron explained. “Enjoy the process of life and don’t be so uptight about it. It’s changed me, if you met me 10 years ago you would not want to hang out with me because I was just so worried about all the details and what people think. He taught me that even if everything’s going wrong, laugh and just have fun.”

Emily went on to explain it a little further, recalling the first time she built an engine with Aaron. Back then as teenagers, they were rebuilding the engine of her family’s F-150. Aaron had her building the other half of its V8 to learn, working through each step together in torquing down the heads and valvetrain. As the parts on the table dwindled, she could tell things were about to wrap up and nervously asked Aaron to check her work. “And he was like, ‘No, you need to feel the feeling. If you mess something up, you need to feel that feeling,’” she recited. “‘And if you did it all right, you need to feel that feeling. If I check your work, you won’t have any feelings. You know when this engine cranks up and it runs great, you will own that.’ I didn’t know any other girls who were doing that.”

Really, it’s that infectious persistence that’s at the heart of Datzen, and everything they’ve built on screen. Regular viewers of their show will remember that Datzen was named in spirit of The Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig’s introspective look at the human condition from the perch of a Honda CB77. “It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top,” he once wrote.

“Say a girl wants to get into cars ,and she doesn’t really know where to start — her power steering’s making a crazy noise. She could go get a basic tool kit, research online, and she can have the most amazing experience overcoming something,” Emily reinforced. “But if people have too much judgment about the results or about having to ask people for help, someone could totally be debilitated. I know it’s not always easy, but you have to look at the big picture and think that there’s a goal here and it’s going to feel really cool on the other side of it. There might be a lot of mountains to climb to get to the peak of that one that I’m looking at… but it’s worth it.”

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