Hemi Gremmie! 1975 Gremlin with 426ci Hemi | Roadkill | MotorTrend

I was going to say the pigs are flying. Hell is frozen over, but we're not there yet. Yeah, don't get cocky. I mean, we're here, but we haven't done anything. No, and we can change our minds once again. We at the Hemi Guild have started and stopped this project so many times that it's been a plan of mine since I first bought it. It's a

1975

amc

gremlin

with a straight six that I bought to race and drive for only $700 a long time ago and the first time you saw it was in the episode where we had that whole disaster with the prius versus the

gremlin

and we ended up going off the road while we were smashing the prius with the gremlin and then I ended up running over the Prius with a tank it's an epic episode you have to watch it and then the gremlin was in episode 25 of Roadkill which really tells you how long have we had this, the

hemi

grammy, one of those cars.

I have to build because you have the name, you have the grimy and you have the

hemi

, which by the way is a genuine 426 gen 2 hemi, so there are two things that make us finally make this happen first. all we're going to use is this 426 hemi that I've had since 1997 when they first came out with the Mopar high performance crate engines. I tested it recently and it's like the weakest hemi ever, it has stock heads and a small camshaft. Nine to one compression produces about 530 horsepower, but really this is going to be more about profile than speed and the second thing that will really make this happen is that we abandon the fabbing suspension concept in the guild and continue forward. to leave it in a complete drag race style model, a chassis that was custom built by my friend sam strobe who made the entire chassis on my model, a hot rod, if you have seen it was long enough to fit in a model , but it's been shortened to the gremlin's wheelbase, which is 96 inches and what's funny is that when the ladder bar was shortened and the front fork was shortened it got really close, which looks super ridiculous, but that's what I'm going to do, this thing is a street monster, not a total drag car and I want it to look ridiculous and I want it to sit tall and that's why we have a non-dropped straight tube front axle thing and in the rear it has a nine-inch rear end with Panhard coil-over shocks. bar and of course these absurd ladder bars right now I have the 15 by 10 craters in the rear with the n5015's my protrac tires didn't show up in the front so that's something we'll have to work around a bit So , because this is just a straight frame, we're going to be able to take the gremlin, which is a unibody car, cut a bunch of stuff off of it, drop it in here and my hope is that we can make The body mounts are like those on a jeep cj7.

Many people will want to call this car a gasser because it has a solid front axle. It really isn't. Gassers are called that because there was a drag racing class in the nhra and other sanctioning bodies that started in the late 50's and it was like a step forward in modification from being a standard class car and that's why it was called gassers. and that's why gassers were the cars that ran on it and in the mid 60's when they saw the height of popularity was when people started putting solid front axles under the car to reduce weight and put them high and put the nose high to the weight transfer that was needed at the time, now fast forward to the 70's and guys started adopting that style. and applying it to muscle cars and they weren't really race cars, they were street imposters and they sat really high and were really gnarly and generally had crazy paint jobs, wild engine swaps and the magazines were everywhere.

The street monster was the This is a street phenomenon, not a gasser. I'm building this to be absurd, doing burnouts, taking road trips and being very run over. I don't really care that much how fast I am on the racetrack, which is strange to me. but this time we're going to use cosmetics, okay, it's on the chassis, unless you want the monster truck look. Now we're cutting into the floor of the car, unfortunately it's still too high off the ground so we're not going to do that. We'll be able to make body mounts like a jeep to mount the body to the frame, instead we're going to channel the body onto the frame, which means we're going to cut slots in the floor, drop them onto the frame and then solder them. to the floor, this is when we find out if we cut the slot in the right place, we only made about a foot and a half of the floor to go over the frame, oh yeah, oh yeah, like a glove nailed it, oh man, that's a lot . better yeah that needs to go down an inch or two so the top of the frame is even with the rocker this is going to look great yeah that looks good good job guys it was sweet nice cut they got it for Make sure the frame fits perfectly.

There are a couple of gaps in the body here and there, but nothing that couldn't be filled with welding. This is great. I think we can get rid of this. You don't need a wiper motor when you have a hemi. Just drive faster than the rain. It's going to be a great time to get rid of these ugly wheels and tires and put the krager ss and the protrac 235 60 on them. And the key is two and a half inches of setback, so what I'm trying to do there. is to move them out, see how this is too absorbed, this is also too short.

Part of the key to determining our stance in the car will be to put the tire highest there, which will lift the front of the car and then I can add some leaves to the leaf spring to lift the front of the car and find out if we have it as high as we need ooh, it's barely clear, yeah, if you can turn. that one and hit there a little scuff on the fender we'll fix it here we go taller tires yeah oh I like the rake I have to be honest it looks great it's a much better wheel you might be right the wheel definitely save It's because that shaft was too narrow.

How's that for hanging on the wall? It looks like a miniature bell. Oh, this is a great diet. You put. Look, I'll have to cut those straps. This is better than carbon fiber. Look how light it is. It's back, look at that, wow, that's a lot of hemi, that looks good, dude, yeah, I nailed it, that looks good, that's really cool, okay, I admit one embarrassing thing here is that they're not dominators, but what can you do with luck? i got carburetors yeah there you go that's what you get with the hemi grammy man it's perfect it's pretty good the stance yeah the engine is very happy with the hood cut out glad we got something of structure back here, hold that thing, look at that.

Got Hemi above the hood line, above the fender line, man, that's a cartoon, look at the organization right there, yeah, when the project is that big, it doesn't fit in a regular pizza box, yeah, there are a lot of really big things that need This happened, remember last episode we were working on the front suspension, we had that transverse leaf spring that was collapsing well, now it actually bent all of its brackets on the front axle from being towed to Lucky and backwards, the entire direction will have to change. which is on the same list, the headers will have to be done wiring, driveshaft plumbing, oh just install the intake manifold and all the links and all the plumbing, it's going to be big, I have to change the transmission to a different one that Gear Star sent, which is a completely manual valve body and everything else is just little things, tunnel ram time, let's install the base for real.

I like this part to look good. This manifold we are installing is an early 70's wind. and you could get a cover for these that would take dominators, but I'm running a pair of 4150's, the smaller magnesium carburetor would be great. One of the things about these hemi manifolds and also the Ford Windsors is that the angle of the manifold settles. like this, but the bolts are straight up and down, you have to tighten them very, very carefully and you have to go around and around and around and around in circles just when you think they're all tight, go around again, okay, we've got the leaf springs were simulated here and we actually have weight on the spring by breaking it at the bottom of the frame, everything is held on jack stands up to the axle and everything, so the ride height is not 100 accurate right now, but you can see that it is too high, so we have been able to determine how much the crossbow will flatten and where we want to mount the top of the crossbow so that our ride height is correct.

Okay, Matt just simulated these stabilizers. that they hang the leaf spring and we have all the weight on the car and the stance is actually very good, so I think instead of measuring, thinking, calculating and squaring more, we will just weld it because that is always the best answer. So he goes to zap and then we have to start worrying about the shocks, the steering, the steering box, the steering column and all that. Now that the leaf springs are hung, we have the axle centered like this on the vehicle just by taking a bunch of measurements. and now we're setting the wheel angle, so if you're staring at the side of the car like that, this is the kingpin, you want it to be angled back like this, that's the wheel, it's like you have a shopping cart and one of the front wheels are wobbly all over the place, it doesn't have enough lead, if you put them back just the right amount it will go straight, so it's the same with the front end alignment, like this which I think we're trying to look at about eight degrees, unfortunately there's no real flat point to measure with a digital angle finder, so this is going to be a little tricky to look at.

These guys did them in record time, like it happened in one day. If no one made them. I put a hemi in a grammy so those guys made them but we're going to have the glory of installing them is what this is uh hope you helped well can you tell where I helped that's a really nice header uh yeah, the one you're holding up, that's the one Andrew made, this is the one I made, well, you can tell, yeah, cool, almost matches the blueprint, look fire, that's a big puzzle piece done, yeah, that was big, I'll start wiring , I'm excited for my complete. manual valve body something is going to explode the muscle truck is great with full manual the guild will be better that's it I hear it I hear clunking noises please work this is the right trans because there are two yeah okay up , here we go.

The muzzle is in now we have to tilt this side it has to be okay, we are stopped, it's really going to happen, it's really going to happen eventually, oh, the next failure, the muzzle prevents it from moving forward, it's either hitting those bolts or it's bottoming out the one on the snout or the other well, back out, the torque reverser is hitting the bolts that hold the flex plate to the back of the crankshaft, now wow, pouring atf on me, awesome, we got the transmission all the way up and sitting against the back of the bell. housing and unfortunately the converter wouldn't slide forward because it's hitting the bolts on the back of the crankshaft so now we're working out that there you have to assemble the Android floor uh corner of each flex plate bolt removed a lip of the converter and we think. we have our clearance now here we go again up there we go good, that puts the bolts in once we square it the converter spins freely and we have about an eighth or three sixteenths of forward pull we did it cranking, that's Bad Fuel, you got fuel in the jets yeah okay hook it up I'll turn it on and watch the oil pressure okay this is going to be did you hook up the distributor?

I did it, it should work, go after it, turn on the water pump, hey. run buddy run it's loud wow it's a bumpy road it actually drives pretty well it shouldn't be any worse it's a little jerky it's very jeepy how's the handling? What are you doing? It's not made for curves, man, oh my God, I want to live. to do more burnouts, okay, I thought, that's a corner, why is he accelerating? What if it's cool? It definitely isn't. It is passable. Oh, this is the old ridge route. Yeah, wow, this is a mountain right here.

I'm surprised how manageable it actually is. It's a pretty good car to be built in about 10 and a half days with a bunch of bad parts that shouldn't work together, so I really wanted three things about this car, which looked amazing, which we managed to, yeah, be pretty manageable, which I think I've already proven it is, oh yes, and two hellish burnouts, we haven't proven that yet, sir, that's what we haven't proven yet, but we will and what's the priority here after all , the smoke hit him, oh my God, it serves its third purpose.