my dad and i ran down to the local speedshop in riverside on saturday to pick up an ass load of parts. the big item was hooker 6901 headers, as after some research on a ford message board, i was informed these would fit with very little trouble. my only other option had been doug thorleys at around 400 dollars, and these came in somewhere around 160. not bad at all!
after getting back, as you can see we dumped in the donor motor along with the headers. as you can also see, the night before we ran out to the dock in bloomington, and picked up my ford 8" rear end, v8 front end, motor mounts and transmission mount.
if you look at the following picture, you can see the #5 header tube (front most driver side) hit the shock tower a little bit. my feeling had been to bend the tube in a tad, but my dad decided that we should fix it (the shock tower) with our friend the BFH (big effin hammer).
to recap my big spending here goes:
floor shifter, 120 dollars
stainless throttle cable, 30 dollars
chrome dipstick, 9 dollars
two chrome breather caps, 10 dollars?
fuel pump, 20 or so dollars?
aluminum shift handle for the b&m (original is plastic), 26 dollars
throttle brackets for carb, 20 dollars or so
copper header collector gaskets, 10 dollars?
flex plate, 65 dollars (original was missing some teeth)
pimp looking gas pedal to use with our throttle cable, 35 dollars
everyone gets a horrible picture taken of themselves once in a while, here is one of my dad:
now based on a first adventure that we had experienced with flying in the motor and transmission, we made a decision that we wanted to make the radiator top support removable for ease of engine installation/deinstallation. this is where having a dad who welds comes in REAL handy.
dad cutting out the radiator hole, as well as the top support.
now as you can see from the following picture, this came out pretty slick looking:
my dad also welded in some angle and flat bar to create a bottom support area for the radiator we will be putting in (while he was doing this, i ran inside and purchased a 19x24 inch aluminum crossflow radiator for 180 dollars).
so as you can see from this picture, when it comes time to fly all of the motor and tranny in, it's going to be a straight shot, rather than a ton of angle and scraping:
while we were doing this, my best friend cassy was getting busy vacuuming out the car, where we had removed the seats to make this very easy:
now we turned our attention to the front end/steering. i pulled the steering column rod out, as well as box, but when comparing the new box, the rod we had from the 64 comet appeared to be an inch shorter. to make a long story short, we pulled apart both steering boxes, bearings were lost, bearings were found, and we swapped out the rods.
after getting this put together, we installed the front end essentially, steering box, pitman arm, etc...
my dad had to drill out new holes on the passenger side for all of this, as the v8 has three holes on a slightly different pattern than the straight six had (two holes).
it's hard to get pictures of yourself doing stuff, but i removed the spindles with cassy's help, as well as lower control arms:
here is a picture of the six cylinder spindles compared to the v8 spindles:
i forgot to mention but this was the start of monday.
next we began tearing apart the rear end. i had not wanted to do this, but i'm glad my dad talked me into it.
we cleaned out all the gunk, which you can see an abundance of in this picture:
here is a picture of the third member/pumpkin:
axles and pumpkin:
my dad loves to clean things, so this is us lifting the rear end up so we could spray from the tube down and clean it out:
we took off a for a couple of hours, and picked up:
new brake lines, 20 dollars
new brakes (drums, shoes, spring kit, wheel cylinders), 130 dollars
new pumpkin gasket, 3-4 dollars?
we took the "long way" home, and stopped to check out our donor mustang. i am glad we did, as upon checking, the front end of the mustang is disc. hello free front end disc conversion!
we also stopped and pressure washed a few parts (bellhousing for our transmission, motor mounts, trans mount, etc...)
when we got back we wire wheeled and cleaned the rear end off completely:
after this we gave the rear end a shot of primer and then medium gray:
after this we got sick of the cold and rain so we moved inside, and cleaned the third member surface:
after a quick permatex job on the gasket, we reinstalled the pumpkin:
we did some routine cleaning of some parts and then called it quits and now i am back to work. a gargantuan amount of work done in around two days. i am exhausted!
i am missing pictures of it, but we also picked up some steel for a few other things we will be doing, but that is coming later. i am hoping to have this running by feb 10th. if you see records up for sale, that is why.
next weekend i can go out is the first weekend of feb, and that looks like it will be finishing the rear end, installing the front end and rear end, and getting the motor/tranny flown in. oh happy day! from there it will be hooking everything up and then hopefully firing my baby up.
