Resurrecting a Vintage Racer

[Graham08]

Hi everyone! I'm posting again after a long hiatus thanks to a gentle nudge from another member. A lot has happened since I last posted to GJ regularly, including relocating for a new job and building a new home in North Carolina.

This thread is about some work I've been doing on my buddy George's vintage supermodified race car. I've helped him with his modern sprint cars for quite a while and the whole time the coupe has been sitting in the corner of his shop. After I moved, we had a conversation about whether I might be interested in building a set of headers for the coupe if he brought it down to me from Ohio. I agreed, and have been working on the car for him in my spare time over the past couple years, in between work, building a new house, moving, and life in general.

The car is a cut-down 1934 Ford (I think) body on a home built chassis. George and his dad originally built it in 1967 and raced the car for a number of years. It was originally powered by a 292 Chevy six cylinder, and later the car was converted to a small block Chevy V8 and the chassis front-halfed at that point. George tells me they originally built the chassis by copying the photos of the Don Edmunds super that appeared in Hot Rod Magazine in the 1960s.

Here's what the car looked like when he dropped it off:







These photos were taken at the house we were renting after moving to NC.

George tells me the car has been a work in progress since it was originally built. He updated the rear suspension before bringing it down to me, but a lot of what's in the photos is just mocked up. The major change is to put the six cylinder back in since that's how a lot of people remember the car. He also has the last 292 that they raced under his bench, and he's starting the process of freshening that up.

So...the first order of business was to get the engine more permanently installed than the hose clamps that were holding it in when it got here.

At the back of the engine, this involved adding a couple crossmembers and some tabs to secure the engine plate. I think the rear engine plate is original to the car. I also took the opportunity to add a safety hoop around the torque tube.



Up front, I made some mounts from 1/4" aluminum plate to connect the engine to the chassis using the saddle mounting holes on the front of the block.



I had to add some uprights to the chassis on either side to accommodate the difference in length between the inline 6 and the V8:



Some high tech leveling devices (at one point these were part of my wife's grandfather's wine making operation):



My wife caught me doing the ol' "foot pedal between the knees" trick to weld on the bottom of the chassis:



After getting the engine secured, I had to halt progress for a bit while we moved into our new place. The coupe was the first car in the new garage, though:



More in a bit!

 

[zmotorsports]

Great to see your work again Graham.

I didn't realize that you had moved from Ohio. Congrats, I hope.

I would love to see some pictures of your current shop if you don't mind. I remember following along on your last shop build behind your home in Ohio and it was amazing, both the shop as well as the work conducted inside of the shop.

Did you build a new shop in addition to the new home? Details?

 

[Graham08]

Thank you!

Yes, it's a good move. We're just over three years into living here and I don't think we're moving back north by choice. It was a major step for me career-wise to do this and it's been all positive...with the exception of leaving family, friends, and my old shop behind.

I'll have to take some photos of the garage itself. For now, we just added a third bay (plus a bit) onto what was on the house plan. We have a 5 acre lot with the intent of having a detached shop eventually. Not sure exactly when that will be, though. I have most of the equipment from up north here, with the exception of my shear...hopefully I'll figure out a way to get it here soon.

Thanks for reading!

 

[zmotorsports]

Sounds awesome.

Glad it worked out for you but I bet it was hard to leave that shop behind. That sure was a nice shop. Well thought out and executed.

Sounds like you were in the moving phase of life about the same time my wife and I were.

 

[bctexas]

Cool project! Looking forward to following your progress.

I've been to vintage road races before - brats and beer on the hill at Road America while watching the Orange Elephants (McLaren Can-Am cars) play is a wonderful experience. A bit of Googling and I find that there are also vintage super modified races! Does your friend plan to give the old girl some exercise when you finish her up?

Happy Motoring!

 

[Graham08]

Cool project! Looking forward to following your progress.

I've been to vintage road races before - brats and beer on the hill at Road America while watching the Orange Elephants (McLaren Can-Am cars) play is a wonderful experience. A bit of Googling and I find that there are also vintage super modified races! Does your friend plan to give the old girl some exercise when you finish her up?

Happy Motoring!

Thanks! The plan is to do some vintage nights at the local dirt tracks. That's why some of the work I'm doing is not 100% period correct in the name of safety. More on that in a bit...

 

[Dumber than lumber]

Those sprint cars are so Bad ***. And then they fire the engines!
Oh WOW!

 

[dkmc]

That's a cool old super. Glad to see this thread here, no doubt you'll have it looking and working better than the day it was built....back in the day.

 

[Graham08]

Those sprint cars are so Bad ***. And then they fire the engines!
Oh WOW!

That's a cool old super. Glad to see this thread here, no doubt you'll have it looking and working better than the day it was built....back in the day.

Thanks!

Here's an overall view of the new garage right after we moved in. I've rearranged some stuff and upgraded lights and wiring, but you get the idea. It's a 24' x 36' 3 car garage, with a storage area that's not visible in this shot:



All leveled up and ready to go to work! This is after the lighting and wiring improvements were done in the garage.



The next thing on the list was to get the seat mounted in the car. This is one area where we're not being period correct for safety reasons. The seat we're using isn't the most modern, but it's a lot better than what would have been run in the 60's or 70's.

I didn't take a ton of shots in the process of doing this, but here is what I ended up with for mounting. I added two tubes across the main frame rails for the bottom of the seat, one below shoulder height, and one behind the driver's head to fully support the seat. Seat mounting is something we've gotten a lot smarter about in the last 10-15 years.



Originally there were two straps of 1/4" x 2" aluminum that spanned the rails that the seat bolted to. I guess it was like a suspension seat, but it would not have been pretty if the car ever hit something really hard.

Here's a more detailed view of the shoulder tube. It's pretty specific to the shape of the seat, but allows mounting it without a ton of spacers or loose parts. This is 1" x 0.095" DOM steel tube, bent on my JD2 bender.



And a better shot of the top tubes and mounting tabs. The very top tube is 3/4" x 0.095" wall. The tabs started out as pieces of 1-1/2" x 0.120" square tube that I cut out on my vertical band saw.



The shoulder harness mounting was a bit of a challenge since the bracing in the back of the cage is an "X" shape, where more modern sprint cars have an "A" shaped brace with tubes to attach the harness. I decided to bolt the shoulder harnesses in because there really wasn't a good place to use wrap-around style belts and keep them short. This is the bracket I made for the harness tabs before I welded it into the car:



And here it is in the car. I added the small tube above it to support the harness at the correct height for the holes in the seat.



The last detail on the seat mounting was to make some countersunk washers out of 2" aluminum bar to spread the force from the bolts over a large area of the seat (keeps them from pulling through in a crash) and keep from making hex-head imprints in the drivers body. With the seat cover on, you barely notice these are here:

 

[zmotorsports]

Very nice work.

 

[wasfast]

A very different rebuild but fun. Why did you not want to continue with a small block VS 6 cylinder inline?

 

[Graham08]

A very different rebuild but fun. Why did you not want to continue with a small block VS 6 cylinder inline?

That's George's call, but the inline 6 is what made the car really unique. Even now, we run into people at the track that ask if he's the same guy that used to have the coupe with the 6 in it. I guess you could hear the 6 over an entire field of V8's.

 

[bradpac]

Wow. I love these old race cars. They were all about getting there first, but some how still managed to have style. Glad to see it coming back to life with amazing attention to detail and quality of work.

 

[Bigblue&Goldie]

I love old race cars!

Do they have races for vintage sprint cars? We race some of the vintage off road stuff, and it's amazing how much fun it is.

 

[Robert Haas]

Subscribed

Your seat washers are just one of hundreds of items that take a serious amount of time to create yet are invisible to 95% of people that see your work.

I built a two piece dimple die that I used to put a proper relief into sheet aluminum for the exact same purpose.

 

[Graham08]

Wow. I love these old race cars. They were all about getting there first, but some how still managed to have style. Glad to see it coming back to life with amazing attention to detail and quality of work.

Thanks! The old cars have a lot more soul than newer mass produced stuff for sure.

I love old race cars!

Do they have races for vintage sprint cars? We race some of the vintage off road stuff, and it's amazing how much fun it is.

Most of the local tracks around George in Ohio have at least one vintage night a year. They're not really racing, but it's cool to see the old stuff moving under its own power.

Subscribed

Your seat washers are just one of hundreds of items that take a serious amount of time to create yet are invisible to 95% of people that see your work.

I built a two piece dimple die that I used to put a proper relief into sheet aluminum for the exact same purpose.

Thanks! Yes, there is way too much time in a lot of this stuff. Stay tuned, there is more of this kind of stuff as I get the thread caught up to real time.

 

[steve410]

There's a vintage open wheel club in the Northwest:

http://goldenwheelsautoracingpathfinders.com/

 

[iagsxr]

I love those old Supermodifieds.

Glad to see you're taking seat/belt mounting seriously. Yes we have gotten much smarter about it in the last fifteen years.

 

[Graham08]

There's a vintage open wheel club in the Northwest:

http://goldenwheelsautoracingpathfinders.com/

Nice! I'll have to check that out. There's a lot of supermodified history up in the PNW.

I love those old Supermodifieds.

Glad to see you're taking seat/belt mounting seriously. Yes we have gotten much smarter about it in the last fifteen years.

Thanks! Is that a midget in your avatar?


After the seat was mounted permanently, I could move on with a few more details. First was not real exciting, but necessary, and that's a floor pan. This one is 0.090" thick aluminum. The only challenge here was that the car isn't 100% square, so it took a bit of trimming to make it fit properly.



Next was getting the steering in place. This particular steering gear was never in the car while it ran the 6 cylinder, so I got to improvise a little bit. I had a buddy sit in the car to get the height and angle somewhat figured out, and then I started with the left hand side. This is similar to a modern sprint car, where the clamp is made out of 2-1/4" OD x 0.120" wall tube so it's a slip fit onto the steering gear. I welded the bungs on it, then split it on my vertical band saw before making up the riser tubes from 1" round.



The right side is a little more straightforward because the gear just slides into it. I had to set this in a bit from the right frame rail since the gear is a bit narrower than the car. Fortunately when it's centered, the output is in the correct location.



Next up was getting the top of the gear secured...more on that in a bit...

 

[Bears Fan]

Just found your thread and read through the whole thing, WOW! Love the old car and your fabrication skills are impressive, I'm subscribing to see what comes next, this is better than steaming something on Netflix's

I always love to see a great weld, and you have some skills

Can you imagine the first time George does a lap in this when its finished on vintage night at the race track, the adrenaline will be flowing with a mile wide smile.

Keep us posted on the night he gets to run it, I'm in Northeast Indiana and would love to see it making a lap or two

 

[zmotorsports]

I always love to see a great weld, and you have some skills

^^Agreed.

 

[iagsxr]

Thanks! Is that a midget in your avatar?

Yeah, we run with Badger in Wisconsin and Illinois. My business keeps me too busy to do as much racing as I'd like though.

 

[dkmc]

That's a mean looking rig. I like the semi-enclosed cockpit!
You should start a thread with pics of it.

Yeah, we run with Badger in Wisconsin and Illinois. My business keeps me too busy to do as much racing as I'd like though.

 

[APEowner]

This is a really cool build. Is there someplace to run this when it's done?

 

[Graham08]

Yeah, we run with Badger in Wisconsin and Illinois. My business keeps me too busy to do as much racing as I'd like though.

Very cool! What engine are you running? Badger went to a stock block/head/crank rule a couple years ago, correct? Seems like a good way to bring the cost of a midget engine back to reality without forcing everyone to some form of a crate engine.

This is a really cool build. Is there someplace to run this when it's done?

Thanks! There are some vintage nights at George's local tracks where the cars are able to put on an exhibition. It's not competitive racing, but much better than a static display.

Here is the other part of the steering mounting. A modern sprint car uses a flat aluminum bracket that bolts to a tube in the frame. I'm doing something similar, but homemade.

Part 1 is a clamp that goes on a chassis tube. I made this out of a piece of aluminum I had left over from another project. First I squared it up, then put a coat of blue Dykem on it for layout. I did the holes in the milling machine:





Then I used the vertical band saw and belt sander to get it to its final shape:



Then split it in half on the vertical band saw:



My vertical band saw is one of my favorite and most used pieces of equipment. If I had it to do all over again, I would have bought it much earlier on in the process of acquiring equipment. Here's a pic of it after I finished building a new stand for it:



I'm convinced you can make almost anything with a welder, drill press, band saw, and belt sander.

And part two of the upper steering bracket is a plate that bolts to the clamp I just made, and captures the top of the gear. First was layout on some 3/16" x 3" aluminum flat.



Then some hole drilling on the mill. I roughed the big hole with a hole saw, then finished it off with a boring head to get the diameter correct.



Then off to the band saw and belt sander to get the final shape.



Test fitting on the steering gear. The series of small holes in the flat plate is a provision for tilt steering.



The last step was to add a tube to the chassis to clamp to. I put some bends in it to make it less of a knee-knocker getting in and out of the car, but I also needed to leave enough room to put a firewall in later.

 

[turbowoodworker]

Wow, what a great thread. Thanks for sharing the details. Subscribed for sure!

 

[Keyblazer]

Awesome!
Subscribed!

 

[BassProCamaro97]

This is awesome. Thanks for sharing the project.

~Jim~

 

[Boosted1]

Nice work on the Super Mod.

 

[joncrane]

Graham
You mentioned that the frame is out of square.
My question is why did you not square up the frame before doing the fabulous restoration?

I tried fixing a tube frame dune buggy that was 2 1/2" out of square diagonally and it never did run correctly. I work on T's and A's and that is now the first thing checked when I do the tear down. An old dune buggy or sprint car has been through a lot in its life and almost always was "racked" somewhere along the line.

 

[Graham08]

Graham
You mentioned that the frame is out of square.
My question is why did you not square up the frame before doing the fabulous restoration?

I tried fixing a tube frame dune buggy that was 2 1/2" out of square diagonally and it never did run correctly. I work on T's and A's and that is now the first thing checked when I do the tear down. An old dune buggy or sprint car has been through a lot in its life and almost always was "racked" somewhere along the line.

That's a good question. Honestly it hadn't occurred to me to try to correct it because I had assumed the car probably wasn't completely straight and square from the day it was built. It has a bit of a banana shape in top view (1/4" or so) that I think is likely from when the front half was put on it. I did a bunch of measuring when I put the engine in, and averaged the error between the rails for the engine and driveline before I settled on a final position for it.

The main thing with a sprint car type suspension and driveline is to make sure the torque tube can be aligned with the crankshaft while keeping the ball free to spin/slide. There's enough adjustment in everything else that it can be made to work well even if things are pretty far off.

 

[Trapps]

The right tools, in the right garage, used with amazing skills plus some creativity and a super cool project, BAM, thread full of WIN!

 

[cranejon]

Thank you for the answer.
Car is beautiful. Looking forward to seeing the report of it racing at a vintage sprint car event.
Great!
Jon

 

[Bighead38]

This is to cool.

 

[Graham08]

The right tools, in the right garage, used with amazing skills plus some creativity and a super cool project, BAM, thread full of WIN!

Thank you! You are way too kind.

This is to cool.

Thanks!

The next step after mounting the steering gear was to connect the Pitman arm to the left spindle so the wheels would steer...plus, I needed to nail down the location of the drag link for header clearance. Something changed in the combination of parts that are being used...probably a much longer Pitman arm than before...which led to the drag link running uphill at a pretty decent angle toward the front of the car. This setup isn't good for bump steer in the first place, and having the drag link really non-parallel with the front radius rods only aggravates it.

So...to remedy the geometry, I set out to make a "combo" steering arm to lower the drag link attachment at the axle end. This makes it so the drag link and tie rod connect to the same component instead of having two separate parts. The spindles are based on 1960's Ford Econoline parts and have four lugs for mounting steering arms, brake caliper brackets, etc. The original parts connected the drag link using the upper set of holes and the tie rod using the bottom set. I couldn't just swap the two pieces top for bottom because a chassis diagonal would be in the way of the tie rod, so I got to make another new part. Pictures should make this a little more obvious...

I started by scribing my layout in Dykem on a piece of 1" x 6" 6061-T6 aluminum flat.



Next I used my mill to drill the holes for the tie rod and drag link. I added a second hole for the drag link to give an option to slow the steering down a bit.



After that, I cut a notch for clearance around the spindle kingpin boss with a hole saw, and tuned it up with the boring head.



Last steps in the milling machine were to drill the holes that attach this part to the spindle, and mill the straight section of the arm's profile.





From there, it was off to the vertical band saw to rough the outer profile:



And then I tuned it up with my belt sander, Dynafile, and sanding drums in the die grinder.



The finishing touch was to use an 1/8" corner rounding bit in my trim router to put a nice radius on all the edges. I had heard this works really well on aluminum, but I had never tried it before. It actually does a great job!



Finished part after tapping the rest of the holes and a little love with some Emery cloth:





On the car!



First attempt at a drag link was straight. I wasn't happy with the amount of steering available before the steering arm came in contact with it.



Attempt #2 was this bent model.



I wasn't thrilled about having to do this. Ideally this should be a straight link to be the lightest and stiffest it can be, but sometimes you have to do what's necessary to make things work. I went from 1-1/8" x 0.058" wall 4130 for the straight one to 1-1/4" x 0.095" 4130 on the bent version to regain some of the lost strength from the bend.

The tire comes into contact with the drag link at a pretty extreme steer angle...hopefully it only ever gets here in the pits. Clearance between the steering arm and drag link is much improved, though.



Now I could get started on the headers that were the reason for the trip in the first place.

 

[Bigblue&Goldie]

Awesome job on the arm! How did the boring head due on the interrupted cut?

 

[Graham08]

Awesome job on the arm! How did the boring head due on the interrupted cut?

Thanks! The boring head does that without issue. I'm only taking light cuts to clean up the rough finish left by the hole saw.

 

[Robert Haas]

Love watching the old girl coming back to life.

 

[Graham08]

Now for the thing that originally started the conversation between George and I about working on this thing...headers!

Exhaust headers are one of my favorite parts about building a race car. I was thinking about it, and with maybe one exception, I've made at least one set of pipes for every race car I've ever worked on.

This engine setup is unique because the Algon mechanical fuel injection has its own bolt pattern for the exhaust that is different than the standard inline 6 Chevy pattern. The reason for this is that in its stock form, the later Chevy 6 (194-292) shares bolts between intake and exhaust and uses pinch clamps to secure both items. The Algon injection uses all of the original fasteners, then is drilled and tapped to allow installing the exhaust where it passes through the casting.

All that said, I couldn't just call Summit and order a set of header flanges. I had thought about getting the injection measured with a Romer arm at work and having flanges either lasered or water jet, but the time involved doing that would have been about equal to making them using old school methods, which is what I did. Plus, this injection is a very rare piece. A brief internet search only turned up one other Algon injection for an inline 6, and that was for a Pontiac...so the likelihood of needing another set is pretty low.

I started out measuring the ports with a scale and radius gauges to figure out the dimensions I would need for the flanges. I added 1/16" all the way around to account for the wall thickness of the tube. I cut the corners out using a hole saw in the mill, which eliminated probably 80% of the material in each port. Here's what I started with:



The material here is 1/4" x 3" cold rolled steel flat stock. After the hole saw did its thing, I used a Dynafile and die grinder to finish the port shapes.

I didn't measure any of the bolt locations, and just left the stock a bit oversize. The next step was to insert transfer screws in the tapped holes in the injection, line up the flange with its respective port, and tap with a hammer to transfer the hole locations with the transfer screws. Then I drilled the 1/4" bolt holes in the drill press, which got me to here:



The last step was to trim the flanges down to the correct size and finish the edges. Here's the finished product bolted up:

 

[Graham08]

The next step in the header building process was to make the transitions from the rectangular ports to round tubes. I have made press tooling to do this on the last couple sets of pipes that I've done, and it really works well for forming the transition.

I didn't have a corner rounding end mill in the correct radius for these ports, and between the expense of getting one and not being sure that my mill would swing a cutter that size without fighting tons of chatter, I opted to use a technique called "Kellering" to make the port corner radii on the tool. This is the process of using a smaller ball end mill and a series of cuts to approximate the radius, much like a CNC machine does with its tool paths.

A little trig never hurt anyone!



Partway through the process.



I had to make two tools since the end ports on this engine are taller than the center ports. They're all the same width, so I was able to do two corners on both tools at the same time and split the bar in half later. This is a bit tedious...be careful not to miss a step! Which I did on the second one...so I got to put some metal back on with the TIG welder and do it again.

All four corners done on one tool.



Then it was over to the lathe to cut a 20 degree taper down to a small enough diameter to fit in my 1-5/8" header tubes.

This was after a bit of polishing with the belt sander.



First test piece is a keeper!



On the head.



Rear three ports in place.