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79' resto mod commenced


Guest CTeal280

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Guest CTeal280

Hi all, my name is Corbin. I have been a lurking member on hybrid for awhile now. I wish to say that this site has been so helpful to me, so many people have contributed to my efforts and they don't even know it. Thank you for providing such a wealth of knowledge. This place has been my number 1 go-to site since I was about half-way done restoring my 76'. That project took 4 years to complete, and pretty much my entire high school career. I finally was able to drive it my senior year. Unfortunately, I don't have many pics of that restoration on the internet, YET. But, I have a ton on a disk and will be adding them to my gallery whenever I can.:icon14: (unless it would be better off in a thread of it's own)...But once again thank you.

 

So, as my first post, to make it up to everyone for not sharing my first project, I thought I would share the next one :wink:. This 79', my dad picked up for $500 from SC. It's a California car, with a VERY minimal amount of rust, I mean virtually rust free! Had a bad feeling about it while it was just sitting in the driveway, waiting to be wrenched on; but now that my brother and I have torn into it, we see that it truly is in great shape. There is a little surface rust under the fenders, and in the windscreen tray; but all-in-all, it is going to be a easy build compared to my earlier endeavor and it will be done much sooner as well. So follow along, I would love to hear from everyone as the transformation takes place.

 

(You guys didn't think I would make build thread without pictures did you?):)

Apparently, the engine has been out and painted (not documented, just the technicians name scratched on the valve cover and a phone number). The seats are out of a Starion, they should look sweet in there with some new carpet. And the last pic is a little sneak-peak of what our intentions are. More to come, will keep ya'll updated on the progress.

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Guest CTeal280

Thanks! The rear bumper treatment evolved from a simple shave, to what it is now thru the constant fear of being ***holed. A lot of people around here like to drive like that, right up on my a**:fmad:. The bumper bolts up to a 1/8" steel plate that's welded to a set of brackets. But the rest of the car is at the other drivers mercy.

Yes, the intake is made of steel. It would be nice to make it out of aluminum, but since we have only a mig welder, steel will work (for now:wink:). We just happened to have a 3/8" plate laying around, which is the same thickness as the mounting flange on the exhaust header. That should make bolting them both to the head a whole hell of a lot easier than using a stock intake - like I use on my car; the washers need to be in the right orientation because they are stepped to make up for the difference in the flanges, a royal PITA. We used a oxy-acetylene torch to cut them out and a hole-saw for the ports. The runners and plenum are exhaust tubing. It's pretty simple but should yield a good performance gain over the stock manifold. I will be making one for my own car soon, this one is a sort of guinea pig, test platform. It is *loosely* based on the one that RTz designed; I should hope he doesn't think I'm copy-catting his outstanding work :redface:...

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Guest CTeal280

Injector bosses will be mounted a little upstream from the ports; the injector reliefs in the head will no longer have any function. The bungs themselves are some DOM tubing. They're not really that complicated, more like a PITA, but it does require a certain amount of precision to make. At least it makes it easier to run o-ring style injectors. I also should have mentioned earlier that the flanges are 4 individual flanges, like an N-42 intake. We opted to do it like that just to save material. Will have to wait for future pics to get a good explanation.

Pictures below show the inside of the plenum and about as close to trumpet stacks as we can get.

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Guest CTeal280

Well, I'll post some pics of the intake as soon as it is finally finished; that should help better than me trying to explain, I'm not the best "giver of descriptions". But at the moment the intake is on hold, we were waiting on the header to arrive, which it finally did, but by the time it showed up, the day was pretty much shot, so.

 

Speaking of shot, the other day, a friend comes over, and happens to look down the timing cover. What does he point out, the front of the head gasket is hanging inside the cover, not between them. So, the cover comes off, but it's not that simple. It seems that 'technician Lopez', in his infinite wisdom, did not remove the last timing cover bolt, the one behind the oil pump. Instead of just pulling the pump, he (or they...) yanked on the cover until it came off and split it wiiiiide open!:shock: So I think they sealed it up with RTV. I don't know how the thing never leaked like a sieve, but it's a good thing to have spare parts! So now my spare engine is down a timing cover and the oil pump too, why not. I also discovered that the forward part of the frame rails under the floorboard are collapsed. I suppose they were jacking the car up at that point, but I don't know how they managed that one either. Maybe it fell on the frame...Dukes-of-Hazzarding perhaps...:confused2 And that just adds to the other numerous things that were jerry-rigged, like the push button start, the switch that ran to the coil that nobody knew about and had it been turned off we would have been scratching our heads going "WTF", various wires that are held together by wire nuts.....:hs:

 

So, the car is structurally sound, but there were some nimrods working on it. I've asked myself this question before but never under these circumstances "what the hell happened here?"....

 

At least things can only get better from now on. Made a patch panel for the lower part of the pass. fender and another big one for the front of the hood, because it was mangled and covered in ALOT of bondo. Collision repair sucks! Wish we could have found a decent hood at a JY.

I will post some pics tomorrow, I don't have the camera right now.

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