Time for an update now that I have something to update with...the cage showed up and Dave bought a pretty nice tubing notcher, seen here:
http://www.vansantent.com/tube_notcher.htm We got the car moved over to where the build will be taking place -
a friend's spare garage, that has (almost) everything we need: room, power, compressed air, tools, stereo, fridge, toilet, etc. Kyle, the owner, even showed up with an Econotig while we were working! The 'almost' is the lack of heat, but there's a gas line there so we're hunting for free heaters.
Saturday, we got the doors and hinges off. Sounds simple, right? No. It sucked. We prevailed, however, and moved on
to eliminating the rusty floor. Dave (bless his heart) spent about an hour with the cutoff wheel and now it's gone. This car has some
rust issues, to say the least! It's strange, though, because all the outside sheet metal is great. Maybe a P.O. put new quarters on it at some point. I spent some time looking over the frame, though, and it looks to be solid.
Anyhow, with the floor gone, it's a lot easier for me to visualize what we need to do for the cage, new floor, and rockers.
The rockers were so rusty that I can't even tell what the inner / outer originally looked like and how they joined the floorpan!
We have a pretty good idea of how it's going to look, though - we're thinking the inner rocker will be a piece of 1" x 3" tube...
then the new outers and the new floor will weld right to the inners.
Next time, the body comes off so we can blast the frame. Another good thing about the garage - we can sandblast right next to it in the yard. Gotta beat the snow!
We've been tossing other powerplant ideas around, too...those LS Chevies are sooo nice. A 4.8L from a truck would be a decent basis for a 'D' motor, I think. That would allow us to run EFI, right? That would be a little more turbo-friendly than a blow-through Holley, I'm thinkin'. The rulebook says 'OEM' Efi is allowed in Classic category...has anyone pushed the definition of OEM in this situation? How much of the system would need to be GM standard issue? Hmmm....