Cheap Upgrades on Our Best Cars! | Roadkill Garage | MotorTrend

ready for the vice president to come to life my door panel is vibrating how do you like the new seat belts much better? I think that sounds pretty good, ready to find a driving course, okay, are you ready? I have my stopwatch. I'm gonna hit it when you get to the first quad oh this is tight yeah you ready man I hit every clod. Do you want to set them the same way and try again? Let me get some new rocks to replace the ones you destroyed. Freiburg, did you notice the genius of the rocks, yes, but they disintegrate?

I don't know why they don't use rocks for normal autocross, they use the stupid cones, yeah, and then you drag the cones under the car for a mile, stuck in it. It would never happen with a clod of dirt what was my moment oh man I forgot to time you maybe I didn't I don't know I was a little excited well the clods are too close together to be like a normal slalom the thing is I I'm thinking it's okay because it makes me put in a lot more steering angle, so it makes the car pitch more.

The downside is that the car goes slower, so the inertia doesn't make the car launch as much, but I think it will give us a good ab test on our suspension change. What worries me is that we're not going to really make it faster, but I'm sure we'll make the thing turn better and we'll definitely have less body roll with this stuff here. So I've used the Hotchkiss full performance kit in the past and loved it, but it's probably about half the price. Basically we are going to rebuild the front suspension with regular old parts, although I tried my

best

and got the moog instead of the off brand stuff we are going to replace the upper control arms with polyurethane bushings instead of rubber because they have less deflection, Next we're going to install beefier torsion bars the torsion bar is the spring on one of these mopars, the bigger the diameter the bigger The original diameter rating on this thing is .880 and the ones we're putting in are 0.980.

The following generic front and rear sway bars, I really like the qa1 replacement strut rods, they are really great and in the end I didn't go completely

cheap

. On the shocks they are QA1 which is really good but they are single adjustable instead of double adjustable. Steve is going to start pushing the upper control arm bushings in, so I'm going to start assembling the front suspension. Look at the difference here between the original strut rod and this new one they eliminate this bushing right here. See, this bushing is captured at the front of the K member of the car and goes into the control arm this way, it's trying to prevent the control arm from moving back and forth. back like this, but those rubber bushings will allow for some of that.

It also needs to allow the control arm to move up and down like this, which it does but with joints, so the qa1 deal has a heim joint on this end so it can move. much more freely up and down without binding, but it can't move back and forth, what you want to do is have it hang here loosely and then the control arm and strut rod have to go in at about the same time at two different angles, which is sometimes a little tricky like that, okay, new torsion crust, believe it or not, there are right and left torsion bars, if you look at the end, it actually has an l in the number piece, so all I'm going to do is go underneath and slide this back, put the boot on and then slide it into the hex on the lower control arm.

Steve, yeah, can you crawl around to the back and hit the end of the torsion bar while I line up this hexagon? go boom home again i hit one 604 wow we mastered so much better we're ready yeah oh 585 man this is cool i know oh 602 pretty consistent 5 55. it's a second faster i think we're ready to take this out It's going to be heavy , a fully equipped 360 with transmission, don't break that grill, okay, it's up, down, a little careful, that's our engine and transmission. Here is the 360 ​​engine and 727 transmission that came off our donor truck. This is going to come in. our off-road challenger, but not before making some changes, let's start from the bottom and work our way up, first of all, the starter motor.

I want to change it to a later model mini starter, it spins the engine faster and is lighter, more compact, just better around the oil pan, here is a rear sump that is for truck, only the passenger car has a sump central, so you definitely have to change the engine mounting brackets again. The truck parts need to be changed for the car up here. We have a lot of accessories, we don't need most of this stuff, the smog pump that will go to the air conditioning compressor, we'll say goodbye to that, I'm not sure if the power steering pump will work, but this is it. we're going to have to figure it out right here we have the exhaust manifolds we're going to take them off we're running headers now moving towards the top the intake manifold is coming off we're going to come back with our tunnel ram so that's going to be cool and finally this broken electronic ignition distributor will go away and we are going to put points on it because it is very simple and will work well on this engine go a little to the left I can't even believe it's It's been two years since we took this apart so we've reduced our expectations.

There will be no big radical engine. There will be this original bone 360 ​​and that will happen fast. I'm going to take out the radiator. Steve is going. To get this on Jax, so we're going to pull the transmission out of here and then this should, as we say at Steve, show you how we need to plug these factory air injection holes under the exhaust manifolds. What's happening? with that dolcich, when did they start doing that? Oh sometime in the 80's the problem is if you put in initial headers or manifolds they will leak air or leak out of these air injection ports, you can tap them and put a little pipe plug in. there, but it's easier to just get a piece of welding rod and tamp it into dolcich.

He wanted to assign me the comfortable job. There's always a split tagger around here where he loves to make connections, so he's making the transmission shift connection and he let me do it. The engine was running, so I was going to put a points distributor in this thing because the distributor coming out of it was electronic ignition, but remember how wobbly and destroyed the shaft was in the place where we had this points distributor, but I thought to myself, hey, we could also update, we could also put new points in this, but wait, this will be a new segment called the Freiburg aftermarket, this is ridiculous, I bought a set of new points and they are the number correct part number. correct application, they look like the ones that came out, but look at this, they are completely tight and don't even touch the distributor cam, they don't open or close, the friction block is made too small, this I'm getting tired of the aftermarket can't do it. parts for old

cars

and I find that more and more you buy things like this that just don't work and the question is, what is this like a set of three or four dollar points?

No one will bother to return it, just "I'm going to get mad and do this so no one will ever know it's the wrong thing to do, so my advice to you would be to return things when they don't work, it's the only way the aftermarket will react and realize that they don't work. I'm losing money making parts that don't fit, in the meantime I'll be here restoring my old set of points and forcing them to work perfectly. I just agreed to give the dosage jump because I have a blown 383 small block. my jeep and him have the used crap 360. no thermal quad and keep in mind I'm in two wheel drive, I don't have the advantage of 4x4, yeah that's like trying to race you with one arm tied behind my back, It's true, uh.

I ain't got no mumbo jumbo, I'm talking about my busted jeep, lost for a bone flat fender with a V6, I ain't got nothing to say, just action, game, I won, I legitimately want to drive this thing like a new card and to do that, Put together a suspension that is really my own mix. Remember that what I'm looking for here is not the

best

management. I'm looking for daily driving capability so I want everything to be quiet. I don't want to hear the bushings squeak. I don't particularly need Killer to handle, but I need him to be good enough, so what I did was go to Global West's suspension page and review their recommendations and then back them up with my own version of

cheap

er writing. and smooth this is where it starts I'm going to put some coil springs Scott Drake this is a reproduction company they make a lot of things for Ford this is a one inch drop spring I'm using it along with a rubber top spring seat thin original.

I wanted them there to prevent squeaks and for a smoother ride. The other thing I'm going to do is replace the strut rods because I'm worried the car might be bent. Now I'm going to use rubber bushings. on the front of the strut rod, however, these are high durometer rubber bushings from Global West, so they are a little firmer than what you would find stock, which I find important to prevent slamming. steering because honestly the suspension is very flimsy on these as you can tell by the look of the lower control arm which is simple stamped metal like this.

Similarly, I have a top spring seat that just uses regular old rubber bushings. Now the only place I deviated from is on the upper control arm. This is a global. west suspension negative roll upper control arm, if you've seen it in the previous episode, when we have the mustang in the air, you can see the tires drop like this and when they compress they go like this, in other words the camber curve . on them it's the opposite of what you really want and that camber curve is mostly corrected by using this global upper control arm west and relocating the pickup points on it oh yeah we're making good progress now it's available now yeah . and I second you, here is the story of our center section, so we just removed a set of 3-0 gears with 28 spline shafts, the smallest and flimsiest shafts they have ever made for a nine-inch Ford.

Now my new center section is a 370 gear set with limited slip and I have 35 spline axles, which is a ridiculous overkill for what we're doing with the sucker. I found that the cheapest thing for me to do was to use this whole pig, but then ask my friends at Moser to make something custom. axles to make it work, they were able to come up with a bearing that had a thin enough wall thickness to accommodate the large axle but still slipped on the end of the axle tube. This is not something they really recommend because it's kind. from a weak bearing, but it'll be fine for what I'm doing here and there's absolutely no chance I'll ever break that whoa that's sounding pretty good ah hey David, I think the x-brace has to come out right, like this is.

As a normal debacle for us, the X-bracket was installed under the car and then the guy put the mufflers on and welded them in a way that captures the from the car which means there is no way to fit the driveshaft into the car so I will have to cut tabs off the clamp to get it out and then redesign it, then I only had to cut one. tab okay great oh I got it right now the driveshaft should slide down as you lower the fryer. I'm going to install more chassis reinforcement. This will be a global export bar to the west, a strut that connects the shock towers to the firewall and pinches them all. together nice and stiff and cool, then we'll also add a Monte Carlo bar here and there.

The point of all this is to triangulate and stiffen the shock towers on the firewall to keep this whole car from buckling. Looks like race dolcek wow. This thing is made just for the open road, look at the way it grows, that overdrive so far, so good, I don't know why I'm nervous, no way, it's like you have brake failure, I'm going to go through that windshield, look. Look, this is the scenario, yeah, rattling in traffic, this is where this car is worthless if it overheats or if it makes too much noise or if it, you know, rattles, yeah, it's too annoying.

Do you think anyone will notice we're driving a '69 mustang? in traffic I don't know it's late no one cares yeah dude the thing isn't even 160 degrees yet that's awesome yeah you got a really good transmission package on the accessories and the fan and the radiator are huge, yes.