Painted n Ready

Most of the last couple weeks has been dedicated to finishing out the cage modifications, sorting out driver egress and fixing previous repairs.

For this build I removed the upper NASCAR bar and added in a vertical and diagonal support to give better room for driver egress. I now have 23” of vertical space which is basically what I have in my AI Mustang. I plan to fit a hinged section of door panel to give full opening when the body is fitted

The chassis went out to blast and paint compliments of a good friend. The paint is a urethane white base with clear coat and should be durable enough without the cost and issues that powder coating brings

First order of business was to mock fit the engine, gearbox and headers to give a feel for where sheet metal needs to go in the cockpit

Here’s the engine and trans installed. Engine is kinda old school cool, its an SVO block 351 Clevor which is a 351W 4 bolt main block at 9.2” deck height with 10* cleveland heads. The block is dry sump only (cant fit a wet sump even if you wanted to) and the 10* angle milled heads have ROUSH cast into them.

Bore 4.040” (that was stock on these blocks).

3.480” stroke.

6.250” Crower Maxi Lite rods

Brad Miller Lifters and Crower 1.55 rockers.

Plan is to fit a Holley Hi Ram EFI if I can ever work out how to make the manifold fit on 9.2” deck height.

First of the sheet metal panels fabricated and fitted. It took a while to get my head around how I wanted the panels to fit, particularly with the new body in mind, once that was resolved the panels are pretty basic shapes. I have a cheap Harbor Freight 30” combination brake press/shear/rollls which is less than fantastic but does the job pretty well for this sort of work. Measure twice, cut once they say. I also have a cheap Harbour Freight bead roller which needs some massaging to get a decent job with but I’m happy with how this first bead came out.