Skip to main content

Replies sorted oldest to newest

Just reshaping the scuttle to make the Speedster windshield fit would have taken dozens of hours, and now it's a cinch to replace it with the Fibersteel Plexiglass screen.

Do that, then cut a hole in the hood and East Coast Bruce-ify the fuel filler and you're in the End Zone.

You must then wear a fine white linen suit to the PCA brunch and never, ever remove your OG Wayfarers but only look over the tops of them as you tell them your name: Sonny Lawless. 

I like it, but I have been a sucker for bastard cars my entire life. I used to auto-cross a vintage formula Atlantic open wheel race car powered by a tricked out 300hp Corvair engine mounted mid-ship. This car took FTD at all the events entered. Off topic, maybe?  I like the grass roots engineering it takes to build a car like the 911 above. Anyone can buy a factory built ride and be just like everyone else. I'm a rebel Dottie!fki vintage formula atlantic race car

Attachments

Images (1)
  • fki vintage formula atlantic race car
edsnova posted:

Just reshaping the scuttle to make the Speedster windshield fit would have taken dozens of hours, and now it's a cinch to replace it with the Fibersteel Plexiglass screen.

Do that, then cut a hole in the hood and East Coast Bruce-ify the fuel filler and you're in the End Zone.

You must then wear a fine white linen suit to the PCA brunch and never, ever remove your OG Wayfarers but only look over the tops of them as you tell them your name: Sonny Lawless. 

It's comments like this that nicely summarize why I check this site eleventy-zillion times daily. 

"Sonny Lawless". Brilliant.

That car was so fast, the power to weight ratio with me in it was 3.6lbs/HP. Oh I love the smell of leaded 110 octane race fuel in the morning! The Corvair engine can be built to develop some good power. The heads needed to be totally reworked with a intake runner for each cylinder and a Chevy 750cfm Quadrajet carb in the center tuned to perfection. Many don't like the quadrajet carb but it is infinitely tunable if you know what you are doing.

corvair 6 into one heads 2corvair 6 into one heads 3

 

Attachments

Images (2)
  • corvair 6 into one heads 2
  • corvair 6 into one heads 3
Last edited by Jimmy V.
Stan Galat posted:
IaM-Ray posted:

With all the effort it could have been a nice Targa 911. 

I’ve never been a Targa fan, but I really like this. 

After flipping (refurbishing) several 356s in the 70's, I used the proceeds to get my first 911...a '68 911S Targa. sc00008b2dPainted it black and pissed off the purists in the PCA by adding the rear Porsche lense and ducktail. 20160213_134327~2_resizedIn the 80's I got a '79 911SC Targa, adding the whale-tail for no other reason than to aggravate the purists in my regional PCA club. Jim CarmelThen I blacked out the trim and wheels and slammed it. sc00012947When Ginny & I got married, we sold the Targa and got an '82 SC Coupe. I did not make any friends in the PCA club by giving the Coupe the 'Weisach' look. sc00011efc

Subsequently, I ended my 25-year PCA membership. 

Attachments

Images (5)
  • 20160213_134327~2_resized
  • sc00008b2d
  • Jim Carmel
  • sc00012947
  • sc00011efc

Jimmy wrote: "Many don't like the Quadrajet carb but it is infinitely tunable if you know what you are doing."

I used to think they were boat anchors and HATED them, until I mentioned that hatred at a car club meeting down south.  Lowell Roarer was in our club as a retired production engineer for GM Chevy production lines for 38 years.  He had an encyclopedia of part number cross references in his head for just about anything GM made between 1950 and 2000 - he was truly amazing.  He also still had his first car, a 1954 Chevy sedan, two-tone turquoise and cream.

He invited me out to his shop in Coffin Point on St. Helena island, SC, for a tutorial lesson on Quads.  We rebuilt two, side-by-each (one was Canadian - keep reading) and did a bench set-up during the rebuild.  Once on the car, we tweaked them both by bending actuator wires here and there to tune them in.  It was quite a process and overall, with the rebuild, only took a couple of hours.  

They both purred, but Lowell decided to take his Canadian-built 1969 Pontiac Parisienne out for a test drive.  We get out on SC 21(it's a very straight road the length of St. Helena Island for miles) and he winds it up to about 100, just about the time I see a local police car sitting off on a side road.  Sure enough, the cruiser takes off after us, lights flashing and siren blaring.  

Lowell pulls off at the next side road and the cruiser pulls in behind us.  The cop walks up and Lowell says "Hey, Floyd....  Just testing out a carburetor rebuild - seems to be runnin' pretty good!"

"I mighta known it was YOU!" said Floyd.  Turns out Floyd (not his real name) was in the same car club and often got help from Lowell when working on his Buick Wildcat.

It's good to have friends in the right places.  And at the right times.

edsnova posted:

The small primary/big, BIG, ACTUALLY HUGE secondary setup on the quadrajets was really right for a street engine between five and seven liters. We were dumb to pull them off for Holley 650s, let alone those ridiculous 850 double pumpers too many of us thought were the hot way home back then. 

It's a Q-Jet Love In.

I suppose if you were the head engineer in charge of all QuadraJet set-up for the General back in the day, you could make 'em run like a scalded dog by "bending actuator wires here and there to tune them in."

The rest of us got bumpkis. Nobody (and I mean NOBODY) I knew could make 'em run very well at all. A "rebuild" in the (locally respected independent) shop I worked in as a helmet-haired 17 y/o consisted in removing, disassembling, dunking in carb dip, pressure washing the body, and reassembling with a kit from NAPA. Even that was a stretch, since there were about 4x the amount of parts and gaskets than the average 650 Holley and about a jillion tiny passages.

Even the far simpler Holley was a stretch for 99% of "gear heads" back in the day (we all ran 'em right out of the box, just like everybody else). That was their beauty-- hick-town wanna'be Don Garlits' could bolt 'em on and go fast(er).

Bending wires to tune 'em?

Right. 

Last edited by Stan Galat

I did my share of quads and holleys back in the day, but like Stan, I never felt like I really knew what was going on in those buggers. In the last 15 years I've become very fond of adding fuel injection rather than fiddling with carbs. With my trusty wideband O2 sensor and a 16 x 16 fuel table I can set up the engine for any temperature, load or RPM. Of course I'm a computer geek so go figure...

Mike

mppickett posted:

I did my share of quads and holleys back in the day, but like Stan, I never felt like I really knew what was going on in those buggers. In the last 15 years I've become very fond of adding fuel injection rather than fiddling with carbs. With my trusty wideband O2 sensor and a 16 x 16 fuel table I can set up the engine for any temperature, load or RPM. Of course I'm a computer geek so go figure...

Mike

I've actually gotten to the point that I'm not embarrassing myself around a set of Dellortos. I've got the wideband too, and a decent set of carbs and some basic knowledge makes setup at least possible. I'm continually amazed how well they work, since they are basically a controlled fuel leak.

I've given up on analog on the spark side, however. Until a few years ago, I thought that "going electronic" meant a points replacement module, but a proper spark table is an amazing thing-- being able to tailor the advance curve is more than complex enough for my thick skull. I know deep down that EFI is just more of the same-- a nice, controllable, repeatable way to optimize an engine under almost any situation. But my knuckles drag on the ground when I walk, I speak in grunts, and I've got no small amount of hair on my back, so I'm committed (or should be committed for) keeping the retro flag flying.

If I were still interested in muscle cars, I'm pretty sure I'd just do what everybody else is doing and drop an LS in it and go restomod.

I can guarantee I won't be bending arms and such on a Q-Jet.

I happened to befriend an old GM engineer who taught me how the Quadrajet carb worked and how to tune them. Once I understood what the carb was about I was amazed. The Quadrajet carb has variable main jets in the front two barrels. The tuning needles that sit in the center of the jets are stepped in different diameters to change the jet size as the throttle plates are opened and the needles are lifted up and out of the center of the jet. Many different needles are available for different applications or you can custom grind your own. The two back barrel's can be adjusted to open at the appropriate engine load by adjusting the spring tension of the top butterfly plate, this is much easier than changing springs in a vacuum secondary Holley carb. The reason many people called them junk is an ignorance of what they had in their hand. I also liked that the Quadrajet was a spread bore carb, it made it drivable when tuned and still give great performance. Most Qjet carbs were detuned to a lever when leaving the factory. A guy with some knowledge could unleash 20-30 additional HP on almost any stock GM V8 the day the car was brought home.Class over.

Quadrajet

Attachments

Images (1)
  • Quadrajet
Last edited by Jimmy V.

A thousand years ago as an Apprentice I had to do 1500 hours in the carburetor/fuel injection ovh shop. Got to work on lots of weird carbs and lots of std production stuff too. When the Qjets first came out I was pretty excited about them. At that time I was in love with Carter AFB's but when I saw that set of secondaries in the Qjet I was hot on it. They had a dismal beginning and developed fuel leaking problems with two tiny "freeze plugs" on the bottom of the main body structure. Not All of them but enough that GM sent out a service bulletin to look at them. The fix was to remove them and install a new set using epoxy. That solved, I got to play with them while using a dyno and learn more about them with the help of a local GM engineer. They are highly tunable and a good performer once tuned but I did feel that they very crude mechanically. As mentioned here, bend this and that, squeeze this and that to bend it and constant re-checking after a bend. Compared to a Holly they were ugly too ! But I thought Holly's were Uugly   (and that's spelled with 2 "U's" because that's how ugly I thought they were) compared to an AFB.  A holly 4 bbl off an International Harvester truck with a vacuum governor attached must have weighed 15 lbs. The entire thing was made of pot metal not aluminum. It looked as though you might need your 1/2" ratchet and sockets to work on them. They all worked fairly well once they were set up right but not well enough that we still use them. Of all the carbs I have worked on I take pleasure in working on Webers, Dellortos, and AFBs. I believe all of them were initially designed by or copied from a Weber

Marvel-Scheblare carbs used on 700CID  V-12  SOHC American La France engines were made of cast brass, had a 4" throat in them and a 1" diameter brass accelerator pump plunger. It was lighter than the Holly !..............Bruce

edsnova posted:

The AFBs were very cool. x2 on a tunnel ram. 

I wasn't going to say what Stan said but, yeah. We knew nothing and mostly didn't want to learn. I took the Q-jet off my 350 and bolted on a Holley 600 for like $300 and gained exactly nothing, running it right out of the box. 

It looked a little "racey-er" I guess. . . .

Pffffft.

It was the "Holley" sticker on your rear quarter-window that made it faster, Ed. Plus, the instant street cred. Nobody could see it, of course, there under your Moroso open element air cleaner.

"Yeah, it a Holley 600 vacuum secondary. More driveable (cheap) than a double pumper".

The only guy I knew that ran a tunnel ram had 750 double pumpers on it, which he needed because the intake runners were about 12" long. The only reason to run one on the street was because you REALLY wanted a blower, but were a kid from a small town in the corn belt, and dad wasn't springing for go-fast parts for the Chevelle. As a complete aside: I had a friend who bought an 871 blower once. No manifold. No carb adapter. Just a blower. We all stood around looking at it and spitting Skoal juice on the ground, and offering really deep thoughts like, "man, that's gonna' be sooooo fast".

We were young once, and even dumber than we are now (which in my case, is really saying something).

Some dude near my town had a pale yellow small-block '66 Nova with an honest to goodness 6-71 huffer on it and dual carbs on top of that and a full tub with like 15-inch slicks on the back and frickin' actual wheelie bars behind those and you just knew he actually needed them.

I saw that car rolling on the Post Road one Friday night about 11 pm in the mid summer of 1983 from the passenger side of the bench seat in my buddy Mark's '70 Monte, which he had expropriated from his dad and was by then fully rattle-can primered in rust-red and sported a 350/2 barrel and a TH350 shifted on the column. 

The kid in the Nova never looked at us and he wasn't really showing off. But the whine from that blower as he pulled away, just cruisin', mind you.

It haunts my dreams. 

Last edited by edsnova

I think most towns had one, Ed. In my town, there was a '69 Camaro, painted Hugger Orange. He cruised Main St. in Peoria on Saturday nights in the summer of 1982. The car had a 671 on a big block, was tubbed out with 15" Weld wheels, wheelie bars, the whole sheebang. I watched him pull the front wheels at a stoplight, just west of Steak n Shake. I nearly soiled myself.

On the rear spoiler he had lettering, "Adios Mother".

We were just white-trash wanna'-be boy-racers and never even knew his name. We all knew his car, however, and all of us had the sense not to ever try to run him.

Ottawa, Canada had some history back in the late '60's on Bank Street.  A donut shop existed in the Billings Bridge Shopping Center on Riverside drive. The local bylaws were crazy good those days and we routinely ran totally uncertified drag races in the very long semi undeveloped but paved shopping center lot. Donut shop on the right, Woolworths ( again ) on the left and a few prospects  but a very long "parking lot" awaiting further development. It was used to the extent that finally guys brought cars in on trailers to race on Saturday night. Casual betting was acceptable and expected by the higher end participants. 

The beauty of it was back then, that the Ottawa Cops were powerless to stop the activity. A noise complaint was required by the owner of the property to get the Cops to intervene but the owner back then was a Corporation in Toronto oblivious to the activity.

Best car near that bracket I ever had was a '68 Dodge Super Bee. A buddy, Johnny Walsh had a '67 Caprice with a 427. He won a $10 bet doing 70 mph in first gear one time. There was a Lebanese guy called Simon and he had some built up 55 Chevy and would do a "crank down Bank" which means to go from the same shopping center straight up Bank Street to Parliament hill and back. We called him second gear Charlie. 

Back in those late '60's, three or four car loads of guys would race from the Wakefield Inn ( a dance bar / live band Saturday night hangout ) back to that donut shop around 2 in the morning. There was a little town near Wakefield called St. Cecile de Masham and some of those girls would come over to the Wakefield Inn on a bus.....with an overnight bag and pretty clear intentions. No pickup and drive home ?....no problemo. they'd spend the night at the Inn. They were a happy bunch and after a couple of quarts they'd be light on the feet and " entertaining" to say the least. They seemed to fall in love easily.  Cars were normally parked at the back of the lot. We normally made it home around 4. 

One time I got a disturbing call from Dave McLean ( drinking partner w/  '57 Red and white Chev that night) around 10 am Sunday morning. He said there's one in the back seat still asleep. We put a couple of bucks together for gas and got her back up home pronto no questions asked, having agreed she wasn't that good looking after all . We then discovered that the Wakefield Inn had live music on Sundays afternoons too....

later that summer we were "racing" from the Wakefield Inn back down to that donut shop after a Saturday night and a buddy, Jimmy H. lost control of his Oldsmobile, wrecked, became ejected and lost one leg to an oncoming car. We never went back. Sorry for the drivel.

Post Content
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×
×