Can the '56 Chevy Field Car Run 11s at Samoa Drag Strip? | Roadkill Garage

This is the episode where we finally perfect my '56 Chevy known as the country car, at least I hope so. The plan here is to fix it up and go on a road trip to a race track, but let me give you the background on this. really a project car from two different Motor Trend shows, Hot Rod Garage and

roadkill

garage

. I guess initially Hot Rod Garage had this '56 Chevy and they perfected the chassis, but the car was trash, so rusty and stuff in an episode of

roadkill

garage

. Dich and I pulled the chassis out from under his car and put my body on top, then we lifted it up and now he has a 500 horsepower Chevy 350.

I built it in an episode of roadkill, it is the so-called Co 350 that occurred during the pandemic, it has a 6-speed t-56 magnum and a 9-inch ford with 488 speeds. We've now taken him to the race track several times and the fastest he ran was in one episode. from a hit-and-run where we

drag

ged it behind a Finegan super stretch truck to read the

drag

strip

here in California and it went 1138 at 120 mph but the thing was the clutch would go off every time I moved it, you could actually hear it on The engine RPM simply increased when things were shifted well.

I fixed it with a McLoud clutch, the thing grips tight now and in the wrecking garage we took it back to the racetrack to try and perfect the traction, unfortunately the throwout bearing fell apart almost immediately and I never got around to figuring out my new clutch. I can see the drip coming straight out of the center of the hood. Yeah, well, we know what it is. Yes, yes, more liquid is coming out. Now it's not the purge hose, it's an ear vomit. This car is done, that's what we're going to fix here in this episode, we're going to tear it apart and the plan is to drive it from here at Hot Rod Ranch in Loke California to the Samoa race track and if we do If that happens, too will fulfill the purpose of a previous roadkill episode in which I visited every operating racetrack in Califor, California.

The first thing we need to do is lift it into the air, start the transmission and figure out what went wrong. we're going to take the hood off so there's light while we work on the transmission, take it off Steve, I think I need to take the shifter off and then we'll lift it up and pull the transmission. it's going to be the lap of luxury I guess that's it yeah you don't have to turn it down to the lock tabs did they work yeah they don't work no are you serious yeah oh this was our clue in the racetrack that maybe it was the thrown up bearing, there's brake fluid dripping right here from the bellhousing, you hold it, yeah, okay, why doesn't it slide into the transmission?

That's the question, that's what I'm wondering too, you know what it is because the unit is also in the shop. long, it's bottoming out on the transmission, that's all you get, are you sure? I don't think that makes any sense, okay, let me pick it up and take it out. You can see from witness Mark that it just moves right there, yeah, okay. I'm going to have to shorten this dry CH by an inch, yeah, that's not good, okay, it's got enough support that I think we can take it apart, okay, I think I can put the strap through it now, okay , there we go, now the shifter is under the floor that is outside, we are looking at the throwout bearing that is here now.

I'm going to have to remove a hose to clean the transmission. Okay, I'm going down with the Trans, take her out. hence what we are dealing with here is a hydraulic bearing, it is not like the old school stuff that has a fork that is connected to the clutch pedal and that slides the bearing forward mechanically, remember what this does is depress the fingers of the clutch pressure plate so you can engage and disengage the disc. What this does is it's a hydraulic cylinder, so when you push the clutch it pumps fluid in there and it works, but we're worried about it working, right?

See the little piece of ring sticking out there, junk, so clearly, what happened there is that the thing overextended itself when it tried to come back, it bent a little O-ring on itself so it wouldn't retract, so that thing turned into garbage as a result. of us hyperextended it with the clutch pedal, okay, we are finishing removing the bell and the clutch to clean everything because it is all covered in brake fluid, look at this clutch disc. I called my guy at McLoud and told him what was going on. I continued with the other clutch and he gave me this one that has ceramic discs instead of a conventional friction material, although you can see it still has a spring loaded hub, the thing about this is that it will seize up the hotter it gets, while than an organic material or a typical friction material that looks like something that will slide when it gets hot, okay, let's clean this up and we can put it back together, that saves us some money.

Now we're going to borrow a clutch alignment tool and put it all back together. Look together, this steering wheel that I bought for this car is aluminum and the thing is that the aluminum steering wheel is lighter, a steel steering wheel that is heavier has more energy stored for launch on the race track, while this one no, so he does it. It's more of a soft trigger on launch, but the engine doesn't have to accelerate as much mass and therefore literally makes more horsepower because it doesn't have that parasitic law. Well, the next thing we need to do is ring the bell.

Come back and I'll show you how we're going to take some measurements to set up that hydraulic bearing. Now let's fix the bearing situation. Now both the old and the new are one piece called HYDX. from the American American drivetrain, that's the kit we used to install this six-speed transmission. You can see how this old one is hyperextended versus the new one. Look how it's a lot thicker than this one, so I'm going to install a new one. now let me show you what we have to do here, first of all, the problem is that you have to have a little bit of clearance between the face of the release bearing and the fingers of the clutch; in other words, when it's installed, this is going to be over the snout or the input shaft, the transmission is going to go right here and you don't want to ride it to the toes like that because it's going to be spinning all the time and it's going to wear out very quickly.

I have about 150,000 of free space between my fingers and this causes hickeys. Now, the way we're going to measure is: I'm going to put a ruler here and I'm going to use a dial caliper on the end of the stick to measure. from these fingers to this face, now remember the transmission bolts to this face, so let me show you what we're going to measure on the transmission, that surface on the bellhousing that I just showed you is this one right here, so I'm going to put the bearing over the bearing retainer here on the transmission and now I need to measure from this surface to this surface and then I take that measurement here, the rest of this and it will tell me the distance from here to that clutch finger and to adjust it I have little spacers that will go right behind it here and once again I'm aiming for 150,000 we have it set up with these shims now so the throttle to toe clearance is 150,000 it's actually 155 and that's what they recommend is 150 so we think we're good, we're ready to put it back together ding stopped, okay, carry on okay, if you come back that way maybe you can bow, wait. wait, wait, ah yeah damn, what I'm installing here is the pressure line to the master cylinder throwout bearing on the firewall, okay there you go, that was a little scary, now you can push it in, Yes, you can, David, put a couple of rags under there to absorb the oil, okay, the stick is in the hole, go ahead, wait, I think that's going to go in right there.

Can we cushion it? No, we need it like this. Yeah, well, this is entertaining. Remember the problem where the disk is. The shafts seemed to have bottomed out in the transmission and I thought it was too long, well we got to investigating, like looking at witness marks and measuring depths and splines and stuff like that, turns out I bent this Yol, it's twisted from the

strip

throws drag. I'm actually a little proud of this, to tell you the truth, it's twisted. I think what we are going to have to do is put the driveshaft back in as it will probably survive to travel on the highway and we will be somewhere on our journey.

Let's figure out how to get some chrome yolk or something here, got it, yeah, the driveshaft is in, let's change the oil and refill the transmission, some other little trinkets and we'll be good to go. To hit the road the next thing I have to do is bleed the waste bearing, the bearing itself comes pre-bled and of course bleeding means getting all the air out of the hydraulic system and all I have to do is get in there and press. Press the pedal halfway a bunch of times and it will push the air out of this line.

Everything is back in order and it's time to test it. Let's test the clutch and make sure it works properly in case it doesn't. I'm going to lift the car off the ground a little bit so it doesn't go through the wall if something's wrong turning okay that works it seems to work yeah I was able to shut it off with the brakes so that's okay just a few. More to do and we'll be out, but here we go, it feels like the clutch is dragging a little now, okay, as a reminder, the best pass with this car was at the California drag stripes reading, it was 1138 a 120, later the car ran at 121.

Here we are 23 feet above sea level so you think the air would be really good and it would be fast, but it's humid and water grains can slow you down because the water in the air It doesn't burn, honestly, I just care about getting it. all the way down the track, clean, come on, that's how it warms up the Slicks a little bit right there, okay, I don't know how to hook it up with this new clutch, we'll see if I can do it, it's moving pretty good. a little tricky off the line, but what's our time going to be 11:54 okay, that's not bad, okay, grandma changed but we made it all the way down, yeah, this one, it got down to about 12:34, so I think we're running out of time.

Talk to David a little and see what he wants to do. How do you lose fourth gear? I hate not having a rev limiter, how do you lose fourth, how do you lose fourth, man that sounds pretty tough now, well okay Rand 1175, it wasn't as good as its first run on the clue. I'm not sure why David would have a better idea than me. I didn't really see anything obvious there. My mile per hour decreased as I turned. I got out of line that time. Hey, but you know what the country car is running on the Samoan race track and stuff.

It was our goal and man we fought for it and the ignition seems to be working well. I've been very excited just making pass after pass, the clutch seems to be dragging a little, that's my excuse for why I'm missing gears, it's not disengaging at all. I'm going to have to switch back to grandma. It's working more or less as I expected. I think I'm halfway there. I'm so excited to have made a pass in Samoa and the car is running clean, it's all I needed. Wow, what a week, problem 11.7. I can tell from the heading that my mile per hour is slowing down, it's making less horsepower, it's hot and, uh, the temperature is rising here and the humidity will stay for making as much power as when I was running in the desert, the ignition just cut out, that's weird, I still do it and it just died and I think I broke something in the back, well what do you think?

Well, you have a pretty strong one. headwind, you're fighting for one thing and it got stuck on the line, it probably wanted another 500 RPM, it's weird, I launched it at 3800, it's all clutch release, yeah, so what's my best time of the day? 11:54 okay, I mean, that's not bad 1138 11:54 the ignition is still skipping a beat, something's still happening, well, well, I mean, we pretty much removed everything but the battery, so that's okay , I call it well, Steve, I beat up the country car. I had never done it before and it gave me back