February 2010 Archives

A local sandwich shop here sells sub sandwiches they call Grinders. The story goes that they were sold to shipyard workers building Liberty ships during WW2, and the workers were called Grinders, so the name stuck to the sandwich. Today I was a Grinder, a job that is dirty, noisy and definately not fun or as tasty as the sandwich.

I was hoping to get the halo and A pillars of the rollcage in but first the old rollbar tubing had to be removed from the 6x6 1/8" plate welded to the floor by the kick plates. When I put those bars in I was much less experienced and frankly did a pretty horrible job of fitting the tubing and tried to fill large gaps with the welder. The end result was a lot of weld metal to be removed. I cut out as much I could with the plasma, but ended up spending two hours with the angle grinder, on my knees, eating sparks. Picture is of one of the cleaned up floor plates.

Before that grinding experience I painted the rear housing with Duplicolor truckbed liner. It comes in a spray can and leaves a nice mottled finish and its supposed to be tough as nails. It definately looks the part. One tip I learned off TV is to take a piece of cardboard and use a hammer to punch the studs through, then overlay the gasket and cut around the gasket. This masks off the area where the third member installs. Very nice!

I bought a 1994 Ford Probe off craigslist for $100. It had been sitting for several years at an apartment complex and the owner was finally told to move it or lose it. I brought it home on the trailer, put a good battery in it and it fired right up and seems to run great. It has an exhaust leak and some condition issues but who could turn down a running car for $100? Haven't decided what to do with it yet, sell it, drive it, enduro car, rollover contest, who knows?

Something of an anual event for us is the February swap meet at the Deltaplex in Grand Rapids. In the past I've been able to snare some good bargains but frankly the last couple of meets have been disappointing with the number of vendors down and the quality of the stuff below par. Still, Joey picked up a good deal on a small block Victor intake for $130 and Bill found a Holley Pro-jection setup for $120.

I've been doing a lot of buying and selling with Jeff from Sturgis who calls himself USA Performance Parts. I've sold him a couple of big blocks and recently purchased a set of Dart 320 bare heads and a freshly turned 454 crank. The heads will go on a 452ci BBC (0.125" over 427) while the crank is for a 481 (0.125" over 454). I'm building the 481 with a pair of heavily worked 1971 LS6 rectangular port heads and will keep it as a spare unless someone makes me an offer I can't refuse.

Tomorrow I have the day off and will be back on the Monaro. I have bought 80ft of 1 5/8" DOM tubing from Alro which should be enough to finish the entire cage.