Thread: I couldn't build it for $3 K either!

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That's really looking great Mike, and the way you did the door is pretty smart. We've all seen glass T's and such with sagging doors, you won't be having that problem.

What you might be able to do is give those radiator support rods a little kick to the outside with just a little bend to clear your aircleaner. I've seen some cars done that way and it looks fine.

Keep up the good work, it's coming along nicely.

Don

Thanks, Don.

That original hinge setup was not very confidence inspiring.

I might have give the "bent rod" idea a try. I do like the look of the helmet type of air cleaner a lot better than the open kind.

I've got some more to post tonight. I'm at work right now and can't post pics. Hope I don't run out of pictures before I run out of story. I got a little lax on taking them after a while.

The battery box was pretty simple. I already had a Speedway battery box laying around from another project.

The battery was the problem. Like Don, I didn't have a lot of room, although I did at least have a bed to hide things in. I looked at the little dry cells like Don used, but in the end I decided to go with a small 51R Optima Yellow Top that I could get locally. They're intended for Sport Compacts. It's only 5 1/16"Wx9 5/16"Lx8 15/16"H and has 650 cold cranking amps. It fits fine, but I recently read some bad stuff about this battery on the net. Seems they were discontinued due to high failure rate back in 06 and supposedly pulled from the shelves. Kind of strange because I just bought this one from Advance Auto in the last couple of months. Luckily the battery box just bolts in, so if this one fails and I can switch to another box and type of battery. Might wind up with one of Don's dry cells after all.

I cut the Speedway box down to fit the new battery and added a bracket to the rear of the frame. The other end of the box rests on the right hand bag mount.

Next up is the brake pedal and master cylinder setup. I don't have any pics of the pedal assembly going together, but I do have some of the finished installation.

The pivot tube is 1 3/8" and the bushings are the same ones I used in the 4-bar ends(from Speedway). The axle is just a 3/4" bolt welded to the frame. I'll put a self-locking nut on and a safety pin through the end during final assembly.

The curved pedal arm is 1/2" SCH 40 pipe that I bent by hand. I tacked a couple of pieces of large diameter pipe down to my table and used that to roll the pipe a little at a time. I drew the radius out on the table and just kept tweaking it till it was right. A 1/2" fine thread nut was welded to the end for a Ford pedal pad.

Some people are probably wondering why I put a power booster on a car this light. You have a point, a properly designed manual pedal setup would have worked just fine. I went this way so that I wouldn't need as much pedal ratio as a manual setup. Room in a T is at a premium to say the least. If you have a master cylinder that has a 1 5/16 stroke and you use a common 6 to 1 manual pedal ratio, you need to be able to move your foot 7 7/8" to stroke that MC all the way. Not being able to use all that stroke means that if one side of your MC fails you may not be able to move the piston far enough to activate the other side. If you could go with a 3 to 1 ratio, your foot only needs to move slightly less than 4" to use all the travel your MC can give. Being able to move that pedal 4" closer to the firewall or closer to the floor will go along way toward making the car more comfortable to drive. The downside is cutting the ratio by half means twice as much foot effort is needed. The booster will help cure that.

Of course all this assumes you can still stop the car with the fast ratio and NO vacuum at the booster, as if the booster had failed. Depending on that booster to be 100% reliable is foolish. I think you can still stop a LIGHT car with this setup and after it's running I will test my theory. I don't suggest anyone try this, it's just what I decided to try.

I hedged my bet though, because I added holes in the pushrod arm for 5 to 1, 4 to 1, and 3 to 1.

The booster in the picture is an 8" double diaphram unit that I am using on another project. The booster I'm going to use on this car is a 7" single diaphram. By building everything around the larger unit I have the option of upsizing, but I don't really think that will be neccessary. The 8" unit would be total overkill!

The long push rod is 3/4" DOM tubing. I turned a forged steel yoke down to just slip in and TIG welded it.

The shifter should have been a slam dunk, but like a lot of hotrod stuff, it wasn't. Of course, some of it was self inflicted.

I'm running a 700R4 and thought for a long time about running a full manual valve body. I wanted a real manual at the outset of the project, but nixed that idea because of the foot room versus three pedal issues.

TCI makes a manual valve body for the 700 that gives full engine braking in all gears. Not all manual VB's do. I thought of it as a clutchless 4 speed, the best of both worlds and the new VB would eliminate the TV cable to boot. I liked the idea of being able to force the trans into the gear I wanted and not what the governor thought I needed. Traction issues in normal driving could be delt with by using 2nd or 3rd to start, instead of low. The light weight of the car combined with the mutiplying effect of the torque convertor should have made this possible. I needed a good, positive shifter for this and picked up a B&M Megashifter. I had used one before and liked it.

I had already started installing the shifter when I started finding info that suggested running a manual VB in a 700 constantly on the street might not be a good idea. Seems the 700 has some weak spots that get aggravated by the constant high pressure shifts that the man. VB forces. One guy had 3 transmissions fail in the same place(one of the clutch baskets kept blowing apart). All the weak spots can be fixed, all it take$ i$ lot$ of $.

I'm not planning on running super high HP in this car(maybe 300, more like 270 real world). I really didn't want to spend cubic dollars on the trans just to make it a manual. In a car this light, a stock late model 700 should handle my HP levels with little more than a good heavy duty rebuild and a TransGo shift kit. Soooo, the manual VB idea got tossed.

I pressed on with the installation of the B&M shifter though. I had to move it over toward the pass. side of the car to keep it from rubbing on my leg and I fabbed up a new narrow cover. It felt pretty good for the driver and fell right into your hand. The trouble was the passenger was going to be miserable after a awhile since the edge of the cover would be rubbing on their leg all the time. I'm lucky enough to have a wife that likes to do the things I do even if she's not into cars, so I try to make things as easy on her as possible. The more I looked at it, the less I liked it. Besides the passenger issues, it stuck out like a sore thumb. I just wasn't feelin' it.

It sure came out a lot easier than it went in. Yep, I ripped it all out and ordered a Lokar Nostalgia shifter and a trans. mounted E-brake handle

Shifter part deux.

I thought that the Lokar stuff would speed this part up. Boy, was I wrong.

I wanted to mount the shifter as far forward as I could which turned out to be in the second set of holes from the top. What they don't tell you, anywhere except the instructions that come with the shifter, is that you need an extra linkage kit to make everything work like it's supposed to when the shifter is mounted that far forward. Be nice if they mentioned that somewhere on their website(I didn't find it). The linkage that comes with the shifter gets "cammed over" when the trans is in low and kind of gets stuck there. Might not be a issue with a 3 speed auto but that extra position in a 4 speed trans just pushes the trans selector lever over too far.

The other thing I noticed was all the flex in the shifter unit itself. With a 23" stick, it just felt mushy and vague. It was very difficult to locate any specific gear as the shifter detents just skipped over their positions. I tried carefully aligning and tightening everything up really tight, but it didn't do any good. The flex in the shifter body just didn't let anything work like it was designed to.

The new kit adds a bellcrank at the rear of the trans that is supposed to put the linkage at a better angle. The new stuff had so much side to side slop, that it really didn't help much at all, it just added more unnecessary motion to what was already there. I wound up using the rods and hardware and making my own bellcrank with a long pivot that eliminated side motion. I also made a new lever for the trans that changed the angle and kept it from getting over centered.

The best "improvement" I made was to weld a couple of plates to the front and back of the shifter that tied the left and right sides together. The thing works great now! Smooth and positive. No trouble finding a gear and good enough to actually manually shift through the gears. The detents in the trans and shifter fall in together and where they should.

I don't know, maybe I just got a bad one. Or maybe I should have used a Genie. I've used Lokar's cables and gas pedals before with no problems, but this was my first shifter and I have to say I wasn't impressed. Your mileage may vary though. In hindsight I probably shoud have just returned it and tried a Genie. Sometimes I just get stubborn. The good news is that the e-brake setup does appear to work as it should.

I have to say that the new shifter looks a lot better in this car than the B&M unit and doesn't use up any valuable space. The brake handle takes care of the emergency brake issue. All thats left is to run the cables.

I made a little trim piece to go over the E-brake handle just to make it look finished. It's made of wood and will eventually be glassed in place. I'm going to do a little "body work" on the trans hump first to smooth it out and make it look better.

I was thinking about a Lokar sifter in my truck. When I have tried them at displays at shows I thought that they were mushy too and didn't like the feel. It looks like you have created a modification that should be incorporated into the production model.

Tom

Maybe I should patent it!

I had intended to use a "store bought" chrome gas pedal that I had laying around, but there was not enough room between the steering column brace and firewall. Not only that, but the cable was going to go through the radiator rod bracket.

So I built one out of some scrap suff I had laying around the saw. I try not to throw anything away! Even little pieces can sometimes be used. The spoon part of the pedal was the hole saw slug that was left when I made the lower steering column clamp! The base was made from a scrap of 2" X 3" X .120 tubing. The rest is 1/2" rod(overkill, yes, but on hand).

I did weld a washer to the rod where the pedal drops down to keep everything located side to side and not bind up.

The "dogleg" in the top is to clear the radiator rod bracket. It all looks a little crude, but puts the pedal in a comfortable spot and solves the space problems. It also has plenty of travel. Got to make sure all 3 carbs will open all the way!

I'll go ahead and confess now that this car will have cruise control. Must be the "street rodder" in me coming out! Actually I like cruise. In a cramped car like this, it will make longer trips a lot easier. I intend to use this car for car shows and cruises. And I don't believe in trailering a car. Drive it or leave it home! Just my dos centavos!

The Rostra unit doesn't need any vacuum and has enough adjustments that you can add one to almost any apllication. I have one on the 46 and it's been trouble free.

The cruise unit will mount on a brace that ties the cowl bar to the door post. The cable mounts to a bracket on the steering column brace. A sliding cable end, like the kind used on trans kick-down cables, allows the pedal to operate normally and snaps on a stud welded to the top of the pedal.

The VDO speed transmitter(for the speedo) will supply a speed signal and if I hide the control switches, no one would even know the car has cruise. Everything is hidden behind the dash.

In the pictures you can also see how the brake pedal looks with the floor insert in and the pad screwed on.

Here are a couple of pictures of the driveshaft loops and the rear suspension. I don't have any build shots(sorry).

The loops are made from 1/2" X 2" flat bar, heated and rolled around a 4" pipe. I could have used something a little lighter, but this was laying around. Two loops are probably overkill, but since a thin fiberglass sheet is all seperates my butt from the driveshaft area, I wasn't taking chances. A broken u-joint or tube could leave you with an industrial strength case of hemorrhoids!

The rear suspension is pretty straightforward. Just 4-bars and a panhard bar. The rear is a S10 2WD. Those skinny rear bars are going to be replaced with heavier 4130 chrome moly pieces later on. I have the material on hand, just got to get around to doing it.

The bags are the smallest ones I could get( Firestone 7076). They have an 800 lb rating at 100 PSI. It looks like 30-45 PSI is all it's going to take to support the rear of the car with passengers. The air line in the pic is temporary and it leaks. I keep short peices of 3" tubing between the bump stops and the rearend, since thats the travel I set it up around. The shocks are the lower stops and keep the bags from over-extending. The upper bag mounts do need some gussets for added strength.

I will have an on-board air compressor to keep things inflated. I'm not going to use an air tank though. I'm not interested in perfoming suspension gymnastics , just keep it at ride hieght.

Looks really good Mike. I like the mods to the Lokar shifter and your gas pedal setup. I built my own too, and like it better than the Lokar pedal my Son bought.

Funny story about air bags. On another forum that is famous for flaming people for not having "traditional rods", they have jumped on people who use air bags on non fendered cars......."IT AIN"T TRADITIONAL!!!!!" Well, the other day I was reading a 1957 Rod and Custom magazine and right on the cover is a section that reads "replace your old fashioned suspension with air bags." The article inside goes into how to install airbags on all kinds of cars, and that was in 1957.

I laugh when I see some of these "traditional police" say things like that. They wouldn't know tradition if it bit them in the behind. All they know is what they THINK is traditional.

Keep up the great work, looks fantastic.

Don

Originally Posted by DennyW

So, did you scan a copy of the cover to show them ?? I would of !!!

I only lurk there, don't post, but all I would get is an argument anyways. Some of them are just sitting by the computer waiting for the chance to pounce on someone. (I won't mention any forum name here) Places like that really make me appreciate good old CHR.
Don

Originally Posted by Itoldyouso

(I won't mention any forum name here) Places like that really make me appreciate good old CHR.
Don

Sounds kinda HOKEY to me.


But then, the alliance discounts can be handy from time to time.

Originally Posted by Itoldyouso

All they know is what they THINK is traditional.

I know the site and rarely post there. Lots of good info, but much too strident in their judgement of all things traditional for me.

The older rodders I've had the pleasure to speak with tell a different story of how it really was.

In my opinion, FWIW, is that it's the 21st century. The time they claim to recreate doesn't exist anymore and hasn't for a long time, so building a truly traditional rod is virtually impossible. To ignore the progress made,especially in safety, since that time is contrary to what hot rodding is and was about. True tradiional hot rodding is about taking what you have and modifying it to make it better(even if that means using new technology ). Many of the so-called "traditional" rodders of today are more like the restorers of the sixties. They hoard old parts and dole them out grudgingly to those they feel are "worthy" and heavily criticize(attack) those that stray from the "accepted" path.

Thanks for the kind words, by the way.

Mike

Or like the rodders of the "DAY"....we build what can't be done or what isn't available......rodding is not buying and displaying somebody else's wares, it's inovation and adaptation....make it work and look good.