Fun with Fire-up

Especially when it comes to scorching all of Chris' eye brows off. The car sounds like a fried turd in this clip but has since been tuned and tweeked so it flashes with the twist of the key and sounds solid. http://s35.photobucket.com/albums/d166/kittyempire3/Wagon%20Shots%20-%20Graham%20Jones/?action=view&current=alteredstart-up.mp4

It's Alive!!

We transplanted El Chupacabra to Chris' shop the other day for the final segment of the build. Here we will do the finishing body work, hang the remaining panels, primer and paint followed by re-assembly. Sounds simple enough when you say it like that but in reality it's another monstrous shift to try to get us to the track as soon as humanly possible.

 Yesterday we finished up some loose end wiring and secured a couple of fuel fountains then fired her up. It was really gratifying to hear it run even though it was through stinky gas. Fire-up went reasonably smooth since this is basically a "broken in" motor with new heads on it. We pretty much hate the under car headers but until we can find time to build some fender wells we'll have to live with it. She even decided to lash out and burn Chris' eye lashes and eye brows with a bellowing back-fire in the form of a fire ball to the face. Don't wake up the baby Dragon!!

Videos to follow.

In The Hole

Well we managed to finally get our our big block pushbutton 727 transmission from our friend and Wagons of Steel South team driver Mark Maez. Mark is a professional transmission builder out of Tacoma and usually builds strange and exotic transmissions but being a Mopar nut like us, he really knows the ins and outs of our beloved 727s. This is a seriously critical piece to our puzzle and not something that needs to get skimped on. While motors and diffs will inevitably explode and be used to keep boats from floating away, we hope that this unit will last a long time. Not that transmissions don't grenade on a regular basis but it's good to know that this one is starting with beefy new parts and should laugh in the face of our mild black-up mill. Mark also sold us a bitchin' high stall converter that is again designed for a way higher output motor but should work good with our lower HP 440 for starters.You're the man Mark!!!

Now that the "Super-Trans" is in the house we wasted no time mating it to our mule 440 and hanging it from the picker. We also went ahead and bolted our motor plate in place to see where it would line up for some custom brackets. The beefy aluminum motor plate is clearly engineered to accommodate dropping an RB engine into any application of vehicle so there was some pretty aggressive trimming to eliminate the "snow plow" affect.

We considered setting the engine back farther but without considerable fire wall mods we would only gain less than an inch so we opted to go with the factory mounting location...for now. Using some 1/4" angle iron, we welded brackets for the plate on the top of the front frame and bolted the plate to it. There was also some calculating for bolt-ons on the plate itself for things like the alternator and coil which will be fastened directly to plate. Then we hacked it up to fit our needs. It's pretty exiting for us to see a complete power train sitting in it's new home since the humble 318 Poly vacated the premises two years ago. The final outcome looks pretty outstanding I think and really brings a lot of elements together for the project.

 Just over a month remains until the first test & tune at Thunder Mtn. Will we make it? I do my best not to bet against my own horse so I say "Hell Yah!!"