Gut that pig

Our first day of work on the beast. Chris drug her home on a rollback earlier in the week. We were warned about the vermin that have setup shop in the interior, so he set off an insect bomb in the cab last night. Believe it or not it also got washed before we started.


So I get over to the Rat's Nest (what we are affectionately calling project headquarters) around noon and join Chris in dismantling anything that is not absolutely required to make this thing go. Seats? Gone. Carpet, headliner, trim? Toast. Dash, glass, A/C? Deep sixed. Engine? No, we'll keep that puny piece of crap for now. Three hours fly by and it's a far cry from it's showroom self. Now you can pick the rear end up by yourself and the whole car is raised up because it doesn't have enough weight to compress the springs. We're gettin' there but she needs a little bit more of that Weight Watcher's magic. What do you think all of this weighed?

Now there's plenty of room for us to weld the cage in and install the racing seat. We'll mount a few key gauges as well as the control panel switches to the firewall where the dash used to be. We need to drop the car down quite a bit to get the CG closer to the track so those springs have a date with the torch. Passenger door is getting welded closed. Believe it or not that parking brake actually works!

Wait a minute, does it even run??? Good question. Maybe we should have checked that before we gutted her. Did we mention that she hasn't run for over 5 years? Well let's find out. Turns over? Check. Oil pressure? Check. Spark? Check. FIRE IN THE HOLE!!! Flip the key and she fired right up! I kid you not. To be honest, she won't run on her own, you got to feed her gas from the top (fuel pump is shot), but that's still impressive. We're probably going to get rid of the stock fuel tank anyway in favor of a five gallon fuel cell and we may even replace the carb with a Holley unit too (Jeff's got one laying around his garage somewhere...). This dog's got a whole lotta fight in her. Checkered flag here we come!

It looks like we're going to drag her over to Russ's place this week (he's got a bigger garage for us to destroy). We'll complete the final weight reductions and then get started on the roll cage. We also have to see what we can do about getting the engine to run on it's own (small detail for a racecar).

Perhaps our biggest challenge though is to figure out the theme/paint scheme. Maybe we can get d-con to sponsor the car.....