Great, another V8 FC drift car build thread :/

StephenSheppard · 11-12-2012, 05:26 AM

Build threads are not really my thing since they consume a bunch of time and stuff like that (Which I never seem to have enough of). But I said I would so here it is for those who may or may not care.

Quick recap of the last few years.

Had some FBs with 12As and 13Bs

Didn't really like FC chassis for whatever reason. I honestly can't even remember why since I love this chassis now.

Bought an NA FC to daily drive. 89 GTU.

Did that for a bit, fixed minor stuff on it, made a proper road car out of it and all that.

Got into drifting. Decided the FC was better for drifting than a FB, not for any fault of the FB but for the "off the shelf availability of parts". Coilovers are cheap and fenders and that sort of stuff.

Built a decent drift/street car based off my NA S5 engine. Racing Beat road race exhaust, streetported, and a bunch of other stuff. Made approx 200hp at the flywheel probably. Nothing spectacular. Faster than a RX-8, so whatever amount of power that takes. Other stuff like the T2 rear end and delrin bushings throughout the car from MMR. BC Racing coilovers, knuckles, the usual stuff that ends up in these cars.

I used the car for a bit of advertising for my company that is now closed due to lack of customer participation shall we say (Rotary Related). Still got to build dozens of cool cars and stuff. Had a lot of fun, made some money. Nothing crazy though.

Had fun drifting it this season. It does quite well. here's a vid of the car through most of the events I attended in 2012. Some events aren't in the video, but who cares.

http://vimeo.com/51454673

Anyways

The car was good enough to have some fun and link most of the tracks no matter how big the entries and all that were. Mostly it would be on 205s in the rear and would almost have to be brand new tires to have the compromise between off throttle grip and being able to break the tires lose. Sometimes very frustrating to drive.

Driving the car like this was a "one shot deal". you run the perfect line and do everything correctly and you look good and have fun. If you don't then you fail miserably and there's no coming back from a decent sized mistake, due to the fact the car just didn't make enough power.

I drove my buddies SBC FC somewhere at the beginning of the year. At the time I drove it, it was not well setup and the engine had some issues. It still had more power than was necessary and I enjoyed the five or so laps I took in it. So easy to drive and gave you the freedom to roam around outside the line with no issues such as not having enough power to connect the next transition.

I then bought a 13BT, street ported it and painted it, bought a BNR turbo Stage 4 S5 jam), a bunch of supporting equipment. Spent maybe 3000 bucks in a couple weeks. Was all ready to make at least 300whp. It was going to be awesome.

Then that nagging feeling came back, about driving my buddies SBC FC..........oh that feeling.........the devil possibly, lol.

So I sold all my recently purchased 13BT stuff to a friend who is putting together a FC drift car locally here. I still get to finish that up with him, and drive it and all that, so I feel I've won on both accounts.

I wanted to make a purchase to lock myself into the swap. So i sold my S5 drivetrain to another friend locally so he could put it in his AE86, since the 4AGE sucks. We swapped it in, super easy to do btw. Using a GSL-SE transmission it fits quite well. Here's a vid of that car........just has coilovers and factory steering capability. Not bad for the shakedown of this thing. Also my Buddies SBC FC is in this video as well. He has no front end because he's lazy and didn't want to reassemble it before the event.

http://vimeo.com/51958204

So after I sold that stuff to my buddy with the AE86 I bought the Granny speed shop small block Chevy mount kit (Locked in). You can mount LT engine's as well with this kit. Actually he just came out with adapters for the mounts to use the same kit to mount LS engines as well.

Now your mostly caught up.

No I don't care if someone doesn't like V8s in RX chassis, don't even bother arguing I'll just ignore you. I'm doing it for me and only me. Just about the only kind of engine I have not owned in any of my previous cars is a V8. I have gone back and forth with myself on this for over a year now. Then I finally decided "Fuck it I want it!" .......that is all. I may or may not have said 'Merica!

I'll add some pics and what not pretty quick here of the actual build.

StephenSheppard · 11-12-2012, 06:09 AM

Here's the granny's kit.

I opted for the clutch slave cylinder mounting thing for a 4 speed transmission from an older Chevy (60-70s?). The older transmissions had mechanical linkage (Clutch cable I guess). Granny's makes a kit to bolt up a factory Mazda slave cylinder and gives you the clutch release fork and all that as well. The matching 3/4" bore Wilwood master cylinder to go with it was ordered as well. the only thing I'm lacking is the clutch hose. I'll just put AN fittings in the master and slave and get a stainless hose made. Simple stuff.

I bought the bellhousing from a old guy in DFW that builds 60's era drag rails. Made a friend as well. I'm sure his knowledge will come in handy should I need advice. He's been building SBC and BBCs his whole life. Super nice guy as well. It showed up painted orange. It's aluminium so i will media blast it and leave it natural. Looks like this: a.k.a. pumpkin head.

The granny's kit comes with new hardware and stuff, but I absolutely despise black oxide hardware, and I dislike zinc coated steel bolts. So I spent like $90 on a bunch of stainless hardware to replace it all, I got a few extra pieces of hardware as well for other stuff. Got to start out baller then crumble to peasant status as time goes on. It's not all in this one photo but you get the idea. Bolt Depot plug.

Some pics of the Granny's driveshaft. Grant does good work I like it more than I thought I would. I need to aquire the front yoke still from a Camaro or something similar. Not a big deal no hurry, I have yet to buy the gearbox anyways.

Sephitrask · 11-12-2012, 06:29 AM

The fab work on that kit looks very good, looks like a pretty nice kit

StephenSheppard · 11-12-2012, 06:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sephitrask

The fab work on that kit looks very good, looks like a pretty nice kit

It's quite good. I'm pretty happy with what they send you. And I'm pretty picky about stuff like that usually. I'd recommend it to anyone honestly.

StephenSheppard · 11-12-2012, 07:01 AM

Here's the radiator and fan setup from my 13B that I will recycle for the V8 swap. It holds the temps down on a 13B at 7000rpm+ on 105 degree days for hours on end.......it should be more than enough for the 350. It's one of the last ISC FB radiators modified to fit the FC chassis after I took it out of one of my FBs. Buick Century fan is a pretty serious fan. It cut the fan cycles in half or less (Temp controlled switch via a relay), in comparison to a regular 16" fan. Also the radiator is a double pass which gives the coolant some time to slow down and dissipate heat. I had no such luck with Koyos and stuff like most people run. Also a 22psi cap helps

It's going to need to move forward in the chassis quite a bit judging by Josh my buddies car. Approx. 6-8" forward. It's too tall to stand up right. It would stick about 2-3 inches out of the bottom of the car.

Here's what's hiding under the front bumper. An old repair from a collision with an immovable object while street drifting. That was dumb. I don't street drift anymore because of that lol. I threw this together to get the car drivable at the time.

NOM NOM. That frame rail was way worse. I straightened it with a 12lb sledge hammer a bit lol. I use the term straightened very loosely.

Just terrible.

Out comes the sawzall and the cut off wheel. On a side note my old HF sawzall pulled itself apart and caught on fire while cutting the passenger side frame rail lol. It only made it about 1/2 way through and then destroyed itself. Pretty cool.

Just a little bit of the bent part left. I can work with this now.

What it should look like.

StephenSheppard · 11-12-2012, 07:11 AM

The other day I was sanding and cleaning and got bored with that. So I wandered off and started building this pass thru deal for the starter and alternator cables. It will mount on the inside of the firewall where the factory engine harness passes through the grommet hole. More on that later as the car progresses.

Btw you can buy those at VTE Warehouse, just Google them. They have lots of useful stuff.

Normally I wouldn't share that but like I said the company is closed so full disclosure.

Also my website is purely informational now and has a ton of cool stuff on it. Still in progress as there is so much stuff to upload yet. If you need to know part numbers for factory connectors and stuff for some of the Fc stuff you can find them here at the bottom of the page, the links under parts lists. Then look through the PDFs for what you need. Some of the connectors don't have links to purchasing locations due to the volume needed to buy them, but the part numbers are provided so you can Google them should you be lucky enough to find a few loose items out there in the interwebz.

http://www.rotaryrelated.com/FC%20Race%20harness.html

StephenSheppard · 11-12-2012, 06:32 AM

I have a standard bore (4.00") small block 350 with rods, pistons, and crank I bought for $150.

I am still trying to decide how to approach the engine right now. I may build this one or I may end up buying a crate engine. It's pretty hard to decide honestly. there are so many awesome crate engines out there with basically any amount of power you can imagine. I'm trying to be realistic as far as money goes. I'm not rich I just play a rich guy on TV

That being said I looked into the factory rod to stroke ratio, to get familiar with the engine. Turns out it's got a 5.7" rod with a 3.48" stroke which comes out to 1.64:1 RL/S ratio which isn't great. Also turns out that you can buy off the shelf 6" rods and pistons with a raised wrist pin to fix this issue. That gets you 1.72:1 RL/S ratio. Much closer to the 1.75:1 ideal. Actually endurance engines run way higher rod to stroke ratio numbers but I'm just talking about stuff that anyone can buy quite easily. That will lower the amount of wear on the cylinder walls and produce more torque. Not that it needs more torque

Next was compression ratio. I looked up the casting number for my block and it's a 86 truck engine. 4 bolt main, 1 piece rear main, which is why I bought it. that and the fact it hadn't been bored over yet or had any machine work done to it. I'll be looking at probably 10:1 comp or a bit higher to get some efficiency out of this old monster of an engine.

Or I could just buy a crate engine, but where's the fun in that? I don't know yet, the engine goes on the back burner for now. I need to get the chassis stuff all finished up and straightened out first. The engine is the easy part really. I could also buy a running engine that someone's selling. They don't cost a whole lot so it's not really a big deal.

So with the 13B out of the way it was time to get to work on the engine bay which needed a ton of attention. I drilled as many of the holes and did as much of the prep work as possible that I knew would need to be done before repainting or any of that took place.

What I started with after a year of rough housing around with this thing. BTW most of that damage was not me it came like that but I never repaired it. I just drove it a lot lol.

josh18_2k · 11-16-2012, 10:02 PM

why did you even keep that sheetmetal crossmember? i cut that crap out, mounted the radiator at 45*

StephenSheppard · 11-18-2012, 06:50 AM

The top radiator support is just there for a locating / referencing point mostly. I may or may not cut it out. Rememeber I'm building all this stuff with no engine in the car, so you sorta need to know where some things are at least lol. If I keep it I will of course make it less flimsy.

Cost of this? I don't have a clue. I always go to far and I always spend too much. I'm not much of a budget building kind of person. Mine won't be cheap, someone else could make a running car pretty quickly if the car was already painted, hadn't been wrecked in the front end, etc. To give you an idea I have a $220 battery (AGM) in like a $150 battery box, or whatever it costs with all the parts lol. You get the point I think.

Even though this car is probably destined to be totalled I still don't have the ability to let myself slap it together and not care what the outcome looks like.

StephenSheppard · 11-19-2012, 09:12 AM

I'm not sure what the deal was, but photobucket was being weird for a day or so and not letting me upload anything.

Anyways here's a couple terrible pics of the little sub harness I made from the diagram up there^. I did however decide to add an additional connector that the 12V for the and start signal would be terminated in. makes the harness easier to take apart, install, and troubleshoot. Should a problem arise.

In these next two pics there are no pop-in ziptie holders or anything since I still have to paint the engine bay. Also the red pass thrus remember are mounted to the backside of the firewall not the front like the picture. Just kind of put it there for explanation's sake is all.

I borrowed a little flux core wire feed welder to start tacking stuff together for the front end. Don't judge me :P lol

All that will be finish welded. It all unbolts from the front of the car. At the tow hook position and the swaybar position. Obviously not finished yet but I needed to get that put together so I could start mocking up the radiator mounting stuffs.

Basically there's a piece of 1" angle iron bolted to the swaybar bracket holes, then the square tube comes up and meets it there. I finish weldign this thing off the car. I'll try to remember to weigh it for those thinking it's super heavy or whatever. The point of this is two fold: First it should be strong enough to make up for me cutting the cross tube out of the front there, and 2nd it holds the back of the splitter up and a panel in place to keep stuff from bouncing up into the engine bay. Anti-intrusion guard if you will.

Lastly there's how the radiator will be approx. Basically it has to stay behind the blue tape marks (Measured off of Big Josh's car in the pictures above) and under the radiator support. To be sure it clears the main pulley on the engine and the hood at the top / front. It will be a bit lower and more angled of course. it's just leaning on the bumper for the picture since I had yet to make something to actually hold it up.

I'll be trying to get the radiator mount stuff sorted today. But I need to run to the junkyard and measure some Camaro intakes and such to see what I have for clearance between the top of the engine and hood. Luckily we just put my factory hood on Josh's car a couple days ago so I have measurements from his for maximum height and all that.

I've decided this thing is going to be fuel injected. Now to decide which intake to use. The TPI one, or LT style, or Holley aftermarket, or Edelbrock aftermarket one. They reallly all come out about teh same in cost in the end, So it's more a matter of powerband and fitment really.

Here's a pretty cool page I found of some pretty decent testing on a 383 SBC:

http://xtremecarzone.com.au/index.php?showtopic=386

Raksj04 · 11-19-2012, 09:55 AM

I hope you tirmed the bolts down. Those could give you some nasty punctor wounds if you don't.

StephenSheppard · 11-21-2012, 09:30 AM

LOL everyone is always worried about that. I'm not sure who is actually tall enough for their head to touch the outer skin of the roof and still have the ability to fit in the car. Don't worry it's taken care of already man.

Also a bit of this happened the other day. There was a bit a cracking and popping but the radiator support is back to it's original height on that side now.

StephenSheppard · 12-11-2012, 11:35 AM

Haven't updated in awhile due to breaking my hand with a drill. yep a drill. It was super fun........

Basically my hand met a drill body that was spinning really fast and broke some of those little bones behind the knuckles. Hurt like hell was swollen up pretty good as well. Also i started a new job and that's borrowing a lot of my time lately.

I'll get back on this pretty quick though, my hand is nearly operational now.

StephenSheppard · 02-25-2013, 12:58 AM

Soooooooooooooo........

Ya I forgot to update this thread.......like a lot.

Let me try to figure out how this was going.

I started mocking up the radiator brackets. These were unfinished parts of course I was just trying to get some sort of direction on what I liked. Turns out I didn't like any of it lol. Here's some pics anyways.

I messed with that for a couple days and couldn't get any kind of setup that was stable enough or would keep vibrations down to something I felt was appropriate for an aluminium jam bouncing around in the front of the car.

So I ignored the problem hoping it would go away or whatever lol, and moved on to finishing up the x-brace for the bottom of the front of the car.

I painted it and all that on my FB hood cause why not right? Later that turned out to be a waste of time and I had it powdercoated black with a bunch of other stuff.

Then I moved on to cut and notch the outside of the frame rails where that annoying little tab of metal sticks out that everyone beats in with a hammer to gain tire clearance.

I welded in some steel. Kind of bootleg but whatever.

I can't really remember what I did next so I'm guessing, but anyways at some point I modified the pedal assembly for the new Wilwood clutch master cylinder that comes with the Granny's Speed Shop SBC kit.

Basically I figured the alignment of the MC bolts and welded on tubing to support the firewall at the new hole locations. Copying the factory setup seemed like the thing to do. I just used a slightly larger size of tubing since it's not critical or anything.

StephenSheppard · 02-25-2013, 01:05 AM

The next pic in the camera was this, but it jumps past some other stuff. I guess I forgot to take some pics, get over it I guess.

You can see the radiator bracket changed quite a bit. Still had the bent rod passing through the diagonal square tubes at this point. That was again revised. I have heard you never dead head pipe into a frame rail......so I did that first thing as my approach to extending the frame rails lol......oops. Well I did leave some other stuff welded less so it can crush. We will come back to that. Added the mount tabs for the radiator bracket to the round frame extensions. The radiator is just hanging there in the pic trapped not actually mounted in any way.

Got this stuff powdercoated.

11-12-2012, 05:26 AM	#1
StephenSheppard Rotary Fan in Training Join Date: Nov 2012 iTrader: (0) Posts: 58 Rep Power: 12	Great, another V8 FC drift car build thread :/ Build threads are not really my thing since they consume a bunch of time and stuff like that (Which I never seem to have enough of). But I said I would so here it is for those who may or may not care. Quick recap of the last few years. Had some FBs with 12As and 13Bs Didn't really like FC chassis for whatever reason. I honestly can't even remember why since I love this chassis now. Bought an NA FC to daily drive. 89 GTU. Did that for a bit, fixed minor stuff on it, made a proper road car out of it and all that. Got into drifting. Decided the FC was better for drifting than a FB, not for any fault of the FB but for the "off the shelf availability of parts". Coilovers are cheap and fenders and that sort of stuff. Built a decent drift/street car based off my NA S5 engine. Racing Beat road race exhaust, streetported, and a bunch of other stuff. Made approx 200hp at the flywheel probably. Nothing spectacular. Faster than a RX-8, so whatever amount of power that takes. Other stuff like the T2 rear end and delrin bushings throughout the car from MMR. BC Racing coilovers, knuckles, the usual stuff that ends up in these cars. I used the car for a bit of advertising for my company that is now closed due to lack of customer participation shall we say (Rotary Related). Still got to build dozens of cool cars and stuff. Had a lot of fun, made some money. Nothing crazy though. Had fun drifting it this season. It does quite well. here's a vid of the car through most of the events I attended in 2012. Some events aren't in the video, but who cares. http://vimeo.com/51454673 Anyways The car was good enough to have some fun and link most of the tracks no matter how big the entries and all that were. Mostly it would be on 205s in the rear and would almost have to be brand new tires to have the compromise between off throttle grip and being able to break the tires lose. Sometimes very frustrating to drive. Driving the car like this was a "one shot deal". you run the perfect line and do everything correctly and you look good and have fun. If you don't then you fail miserably and there's no coming back from a decent sized mistake, due to the fact the car just didn't make enough power. I drove my buddies SBC FC somewhere at the beginning of the year. At the time I drove it, it was not well setup and the engine had some issues. It still had more power than was necessary and I enjoyed the five or so laps I took in it. So easy to drive and gave you the freedom to roam around outside the line with no issues such as not having enough power to connect the next transition. I then bought a 13BT, street ported it and painted it, bought a BNR turbo Stage 4 S5 jam), a bunch of supporting equipment. Spent maybe 3000 bucks in a couple weeks. Was all ready to make at least 300whp. It was going to be awesome. Then that nagging feeling came back, about driving my buddies SBC FC..........oh that feeling.........the devil possibly, lol. So I sold all my recently purchased 13BT stuff to a friend who is putting together a FC drift car locally here. I still get to finish that up with him, and drive it and all that, so I feel I've won on both accounts. I wanted to make a purchase to lock myself into the swap. So i sold my S5 drivetrain to another friend locally so he could put it in his AE86, since the 4AGE sucks. We swapped it in, super easy to do btw. Using a GSL-SE transmission it fits quite well. Here's a vid of that car........just has coilovers and factory steering capability. Not bad for the shakedown of this thing. Also my Buddies SBC FC is in this video as well. He has no front end because he's lazy and didn't want to reassemble it before the event. http://vimeo.com/51958204 So after I sold that stuff to my buddy with the AE86 I bought the Granny speed shop small block Chevy mount kit (Locked in). You can mount LT engine's as well with this kit. Actually he just came out with adapters for the mounts to use the same kit to mount LS engines as well. Now your mostly caught up. No I don't care if someone doesn't like V8s in RX chassis, don't even bother arguing I'll just ignore you. I'm doing it for me and only me. Just about the only kind of engine I have not owned in any of my previous cars is a V8. I have gone back and forth with myself on this for over a year now. Then I finally decided "Fuck it I want it!" .......that is all. I may or may not have said 'Merica! I'll add some pics and what not pretty quick here of the actual build.

11-12-2012, 06:09 AM	#2
StephenSheppard Rotary Fan in Training Join Date: Nov 2012 iTrader: (0) Posts: 58 Rep Power: 12	Here's the granny's kit. I opted for the clutch slave cylinder mounting thing for a 4 speed transmission from an older Chevy (60-70s?). The older transmissions had mechanical linkage (Clutch cable I guess). Granny's makes a kit to bolt up a factory Mazda slave cylinder and gives you the clutch release fork and all that as well. The matching 3/4" bore Wilwood master cylinder to go with it was ordered as well. the only thing I'm lacking is the clutch hose. I'll just put AN fittings in the master and slave and get a stainless hose made. Simple stuff. I bought the bellhousing from a old guy in DFW that builds 60's era drag rails. Made a friend as well. I'm sure his knowledge will come in handy should I need advice. He's been building SBC and BBCs his whole life. Super nice guy as well. It showed up painted orange. It's aluminium so i will media blast it and leave it natural. Looks like this: a.k.a. pumpkin head. The granny's kit comes with new hardware and stuff, but I absolutely despise black oxide hardware, and I dislike zinc coated steel bolts. So I spent like $90 on a bunch of stainless hardware to replace it all, I got a few extra pieces of hardware as well for other stuff. Got to start out baller then crumble to peasant status as time goes on. It's not all in this one photo but you get the idea. Bolt Depot plug. Some pics of the Granny's driveshaft. Grant does good work I like it more than I thought I would. I need to aquire the front yoke still from a Camaro or something similar. Not a big deal no hurry, I have yet to buy the gearbox anyways. Last edited by StephenSheppard; 11-12-2012 at 06:13 AM..

11-12-2012, 06:29 AM	#3
Sephitrask BOILED PEANUTS!!! Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: Jacksonville, Fl iTrader: (0) Posts: 257 Rep Power: 15	The fab work on that kit looks very good, looks like a pretty nice kit __________________ www.rotarycarclub.com *"The way a Rotary engine makes power is ferocious, much like having a chainsaw under your right foot."*

11-16-2012, 10:02 PM	#8
josh18_2k Rotary Fanatic Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: Gresham, OR iTrader: (0) Posts: 473 Rep Power: 17	why did you even keep that sheetmetal crossmember? i cut that crap out, mounted the radiator at 45* __________________

11-12-2012, 07:01 AM	#5
StephenSheppard Rotary Fan in Training Join Date: Nov 2012 iTrader: (0) Posts: 58 Rep Power: 12	Here's the radiator and fan setup from my 13B that I will recycle for the V8 swap. It holds the temps down on a 13B at 7000rpm+ on 105 degree days for hours on end.......it should be more than enough for the 350. It's one of the last ISC FB radiators modified to fit the FC chassis after I took it out of one of my FBs. Buick Century fan is a pretty serious fan. It cut the fan cycles in half or less (Temp controlled switch via a relay), in comparison to a regular 16" fan. Also the radiator is a double pass which gives the coolant some time to slow down and dissipate heat. I had no such luck with Koyos and stuff like most people run. Also a 22psi cap helps It's going to need to move forward in the chassis quite a bit judging by Josh my buddies car. Approx. 6-8" forward. It's too tall to stand up right. It would stick about 2-3 inches out of the bottom of the car. Here's what's hiding under the front bumper. An old repair from a collision with an immovable object while street drifting. That was dumb. I don't street drift anymore because of that lol. I threw this together to get the car drivable at the time. NOM NOM. That frame rail was way worse. I straightened it with a 12lb sledge hammer a bit lol. I use the term straightened very loosely. Just terrible. Out comes the sawzall and the cut off wheel. On a side note my old HF sawzall pulled itself apart and caught on fire while cutting the passenger side frame rail lol. It only made it about 1/2 way through and then destroyed itself. Pretty cool. Just a little bit of the bent part left. I can work with this now. What it should look like.

11-12-2012, 07:11 AM	#6
StephenSheppard Rotary Fan in Training Join Date: Nov 2012 iTrader: (0) Posts: 58 Rep Power: 12	The other day I was sanding and cleaning and got bored with that. So I wandered off and started building this pass thru deal for the starter and alternator cables. It will mount on the inside of the firewall where the factory engine harness passes through the grommet hole. More on that later as the car progresses. Btw you can buy those at VTE Warehouse, just Google them. They have lots of useful stuff. Normally I wouldn't share that but like I said the company is closed so full disclosure. Also my website is purely informational now and has a ton of cool stuff on it. Still in progress as there is so much stuff to upload yet. If you need to know part numbers for factory connectors and stuff for some of the Fc stuff you can find them here at the bottom of the page, the links under parts lists. Then look through the PDFs for what you need. Some of the connectors don't have links to purchasing locations due to the volume needed to buy them, but the part numbers are provided so you can Google them should you be lucky enough to find a few loose items out there in the interwebz. http://www.rotaryrelated.com/FC%20Race%20harness.html

11-12-2012, 06:32 AM	#7
StephenSheppard Rotary Fan in Training Join Date: Nov 2012 iTrader: (0) Posts: 58 Rep Power: 12	I have a standard bore (4.00") small block 350 with rods, pistons, and crank I bought for $150. I am still trying to decide how to approach the engine right now. I may build this one or I may end up buying a crate engine. It's pretty hard to decide honestly. there are so many awesome crate engines out there with basically any amount of power you can imagine. I'm trying to be realistic as far as money goes. I'm not rich I just play a rich guy on TV That being said I looked into the factory rod to stroke ratio, to get familiar with the engine. Turns out it's got a 5.7" rod with a 3.48" stroke which comes out to 1.64:1 RL/S ratio which isn't great. Also turns out that you can buy off the shelf 6" rods and pistons with a raised wrist pin to fix this issue. That gets you 1.72:1 RL/S ratio. Much closer to the 1.75:1 ideal. Actually endurance engines run way higher rod to stroke ratio numbers but I'm just talking about stuff that anyone can buy quite easily. That will lower the amount of wear on the cylinder walls and produce more torque. Not that it needs more torque Next was compression ratio. I looked up the casting number for my block and it's a 86 truck engine. 4 bolt main, 1 piece rear main, which is why I bought it. that and the fact it hadn't been bored over yet or had any machine work done to it. I'll be looking at probably 10:1 comp or a bit higher to get some efficiency out of this old monster of an engine. Or I could just buy a crate engine, but where's the fun in that? I don't know yet, the engine goes on the back burner for now. I need to get the chassis stuff all finished up and straightened out first. The engine is the easy part really. I could also buy a running engine that someone's selling. They don't cost a whole lot so it's not really a big deal. So with the 13B out of the way it was time to get to work on the engine bay which needed a ton of attention. I drilled as many of the holes and did as much of the prep work as possible that I knew would need to be done before repainting or any of that took place. What I started with after a year of rough housing around with this thing. BTW most of that damage was not me it came like that but I never repaired it. I just drove it a lot lol.

11-18-2012, 06:50 AM	#9
StephenSheppard Rotary Fan in Training Join Date: Nov 2012 iTrader: (0) Posts: 58 Rep Power: 12	The top radiator support is just there for a locating / referencing point mostly. I may or may not cut it out. Rememeber I'm building all this stuff with no engine in the car, so you sorta need to know where some things are at least lol. If I keep it I will of course make it less flimsy. Cost of this? I don't have a clue. I always go to far and I always spend too much. I'm not much of a budget building kind of person. Mine won't be cheap, someone else could make a running car pretty quickly if the car was already painted, hadn't been wrecked in the front end, etc. To give you an idea I have a $220 battery (AGM) in like a $150 battery box, or whatever it costs with all the parts lol. You get the point I think. Even though this car is probably destined to be totalled I still don't have the ability to let myself slap it together and not care what the outcome looks like.

11-19-2012, 09:12 AM	#10
StephenSheppard Rotary Fan in Training Join Date: Nov 2012 iTrader: (0) Posts: 58 Rep Power: 12	I'm not sure what the deal was, but photobucket was being weird for a day or so and not letting me upload anything. Anyways here's a couple terrible pics of the little sub harness I made from the diagram up there^. I did however decide to add an additional connector that the 12V for the and start signal would be terminated in. makes the harness easier to take apart, install, and troubleshoot. Should a problem arise. In these next two pics there are no pop-in ziptie holders or anything since I still have to paint the engine bay. Also the red pass thrus remember are mounted to the backside of the firewall not the front like the picture. Just kind of put it there for explanation's sake is all. I borrowed a little flux core wire feed welder to start tacking stuff together for the front end. Don't judge me :P lol All that will be finish welded. It all unbolts from the front of the car. At the tow hook position and the swaybar position. Obviously not finished yet but I needed to get that put together so I could start mocking up the radiator mounting stuffs. Basically there's a piece of 1" angle iron bolted to the swaybar bracket holes, then the square tube comes up and meets it there. I finish weldign this thing off the car. I'll try to remember to weigh it for those thinking it's super heavy or whatever. The point of this is two fold: First it should be strong enough to make up for me cutting the cross tube out of the front there, and 2nd it holds the back of the splitter up and a panel in place to keep stuff from bouncing up into the engine bay. Anti-intrusion guard if you will. Lastly there's how the radiator will be approx. Basically it has to stay behind the blue tape marks (Measured off of Big Josh's car in the pictures above) and under the radiator support. To be sure it clears the main pulley on the engine and the hood at the top / front. It will be a bit lower and more angled of course. it's just leaning on the bumper for the picture since I had yet to make something to actually hold it up. I'll be trying to get the radiator mount stuff sorted today. But I need to run to the junkyard and measure some Camaro intakes and such to see what I have for clearance between the top of the engine and hood. Luckily we just put my factory hood on Josh's car a couple days ago so I have measurements from his for maximum height and all that. I've decided this thing is going to be fuel injected. Now to decide which intake to use. The TPI one, or LT style, or Holley aftermarket, or Edelbrock aftermarket one. They reallly all come out about teh same in cost in the end, So it's more a matter of powerband and fitment really. Here's a pretty cool page I found of some pretty decent testing on a 383 SBC: http://xtremecarzone.com.au/index.php?showtopic=386

11-19-2012, 09:55 AM	#11
Raksj04 I have Ultra power in me. Join Date: Sep 2011 iTrader: (2) Posts: 457 Rep Power: 14	I hope you tirmed the bolts down. Those could give you some nasty punctor wounds if you don't.

11-21-2012, 09:30 AM	#12
StephenSheppard Rotary Fan in Training Join Date: Nov 2012 iTrader: (0) Posts: 58 Rep Power: 12	LOL everyone is always worried about that. I'm not sure who is actually tall enough for their head to touch the outer skin of the roof and still have the ability to fit in the car. Don't worry it's taken care of already man. Also a bit of this happened the other day. There was a bit a cracking and popping but the radiator support is back to it's original height on that side now.

12-11-2012, 11:35 AM	#13
StephenSheppard Rotary Fan in Training Join Date: Nov 2012 iTrader: (0) Posts: 58 Rep Power: 12	Haven't updated in awhile due to breaking my hand with a drill. yep a drill. It was super fun........ Basically my hand met a drill body that was spinning really fast and broke some of those little bones behind the knuckles. Hurt like hell was swollen up pretty good as well. Also i started a new job and that's borrowing a lot of my time lately. I'll get back on this pretty quick though, my hand is nearly operational now.

02-25-2013, 12:58 AM	#14
StephenSheppard Rotary Fan in Training Join Date: Nov 2012 iTrader: (0) Posts: 58 Rep Power: 12	Soooooooooooooo........ Ya I forgot to update this thread.......like a lot. Let me try to figure out how this was going. I started mocking up the radiator brackets. These were unfinished parts of course I was just trying to get some sort of direction on what I liked. Turns out I didn't like any of it lol. Here's some pics anyways. I messed with that for a couple days and couldn't get any kind of setup that was stable enough or would keep vibrations down to something I felt was appropriate for an aluminium jam bouncing around in the front of the car. So I ignored the problem hoping it would go away or whatever lol, and moved on to finishing up the x-brace for the bottom of the front of the car. I painted it and all that on my FB hood cause why not right? Later that turned out to be a waste of time and I had it powdercoated black with a bunch of other stuff. Then I moved on to cut and notch the outside of the frame rails where that annoying little tab of metal sticks out that everyone beats in with a hammer to gain tire clearance. I welded in some steel. Kind of bootleg but whatever. I can't really remember what I did next so I'm guessing, but anyways at some point I modified the pedal assembly for the new Wilwood clutch master cylinder that comes with the Granny's Speed Shop SBC kit. Basically I figured the alignment of the MC bolts and welded on tubing to support the firewall at the new hole locations. Copying the factory setup seemed like the thing to do. I just used a slightly larger size of tubing since it's not critical or anything.

02-25-2013, 01:05 AM	#15
StephenSheppard Rotary Fan in Training Join Date: Nov 2012 iTrader: (0) Posts: 58 Rep Power: 12	The next pic in the camera was this, but it jumps past some other stuff. I guess I forgot to take some pics, get over it I guess. You can see the radiator bracket changed quite a bit. Still had the bent rod passing through the diagonal square tubes at this point. That was again revised. I have heard you never dead head pipe into a frame rail......so I did that first thing as my approach to extending the frame rails lol......oops. Well I did leave some other stuff welded less so it can crush. We will come back to that. Added the mount tabs for the radiator bracket to the round frame extensions. The radiator is just hanging there in the pic trapped not actually mounted in any way. Got this stuff powdercoated.