Projects Altered Drag Car Build

Good going. What do the Shop Cats think about it?

 

Altereds are gay....

 

Fa
La Lah
La Lah...

 

I know this was tongue in cheek, but it and your signature together are chef's kiss.

 

You are correct sir.

 

They're happy when the heat in the shop is on

 

Took advantage of a snow free weekend to get everything blasted. Nasty job in the best conditions but even more so when it's 30°. Some things are definitely worth paying for.

 

So ..... what are you going to do with it?

 

Push it around in his garage and just look at it when it’s done. Same thing we all do.

 

Wanted to maintain as much originality of the chassis as possible so I wanted to locate the bellhousing off the existing frame mounts. I thought they looked similar to a '55 Chevy setup but shallower and they were.


Made some new brackets to bolt onto the bellhousing that corrected the angle, and spaced things up a 1/4" to allow me to fit in between the existing brackets without having to modify them. Moved things as far rearward as I could. The engine is a few inches forward from where I would have placed it if I had started from scratch, but figure a little more weight on the front end is not a bad idea with something this light.

 

I liked it right out of the gate, and even more so as you move forward! I'll be watching how you go forward with it. I really love Altereds and Gassers. Pretty nifty!

 

Do you have a dustless blaster or did you hire it out?

 

Hired out

 

Im in... LETS GO!!!

 

Bite your tongue, Blasphemer!

 

I did a very similar restoration on Cody Parr's altered the "Apache" back in the late 80's. It was a 23 steel bodied T with an injected sbc. It had a tree growing through the middle of it and the trailer. The car had orginally campaigned with a supercharged Caddy, but later switched powerplants.

 

Very cool! Great that you are saving her. Looking forward to watching your progress.

 

Got boxing plates mocked up for the full length of the frame. Tried to anticipate everything that will get bolted to the frame and welded in captured nuts. Also added some internal nuts on the boxing plates to accommodate clamps for brake lines, battery cables, etc.

Took advantage of some sunshine to roll the chassis into the driveway for epoxy primer. I wanted to get the inside of the frame coated prior to boxing. Will probably throw a little rattle can paint in there and try not to burn all of it off when welding the plates.

 

wow, that's really something. was boxed tubing not available back in the day? why would you build a frame from Model A rails to go fast

 

60-70 years ago, pre war Ford stuff was as common as dirt, because Henry taught the world about economy of scale. Fords outnumbered everything by a huge margin before GM caught up. Whole "worn out" cars could be had for scrap value, while new steel from a mill was expensive. I imagine the builder had ready access to an unwanted Ford A frame, for nearly nothing.

 

I'm assuming this was built in the late 50's, prior to widespread use of square or round tubing for complete chassis builds. Based on my hundreds of magazines from that era, use of 20 year old passenger car chassis of all makes was pretty common.
Use what was available for cheap I assume was pretty common. My dad, who was born in 1932, bought a 1915 Model T army ambulance for $15 with a few 13 and 14 year old friends to drive around. Eventually their parents and the cops found out and put an end to their fun.

 

I'm gonna guess that he didn't have any water pipe lying around......

 

Sure he did.... That's what the push bar is made out of

 

Ha!

 

Waterpipe was easily available but he probably liked living .

 

Black iron pipe, used for gas pipe, was commonly used well into the 70s for roll cages for dirt track cars up here in the northeast. And it actually is not crappy material as everyone thinks. It’s a mild steel, usually 1018, welded pipe, made from HRS plate. It is not water pipe, typically similar material, but galvanized. The black mill coating is easily removed unlike galvanizing which isn’t, and will contaminate the welds and kill you if you breathe the fumes during welding.

It’s on a par with 1018 HREW tubing strength wise, just slightly larger od, and schedule 40 has a thicker wall. BTW, many cars are still being built with HREW tubing, that meets many sanctioning organization’s regulations. The reason for better materials, say 4130, is to allow thinner wall thickness, saving weight. If you look at the stress-strain curves for various steel alloys, you will find that the Young’s Modulus is approximately 30x10^6 psi. This is an important material property in design calculations, as it is the linear portion of the curve. If the loads are kept in this range, the member being loaded will stretch elastically and return to original shape after the load is removed. Exceeding this point on those curves is plastic deformation, and the structure will not return to original shape.

That point is the elastic limit, or yield point. As the materials get stronger, the elastic limit is greater as well as the ultimate load limit, where things fly apart, however the loading between the two points gets smaller. Higher strength materials are more brittle, while lower strength materials are much more ductile, deforming before failure. A handy feature for something like a roll cage in an accident.

And as one of my old professors used to say, strength and ductility are mutually exclusive. Well, until you get to the modern super alloys, also called unobtainium $$$

 

Spent the last morning of 2024 fabricating a mounting bar for shoulder restraints and getting it tacked into the roll bar and the first morning of 2025 getting all the boxing plates tacked in. A friend has offered to bring his portable TIG machine over to finish weld everything after the fab work is completed. Time to kick back and watch some football.

 

Just found this thread. Very cool and I’ll be following along!

 

It will definitely put that jetski shiteatin' grin on your face at the end of the track

 

While I had the chassis outside for blasting I noticed that the right rear axle housing looked bent outward of where it's rigidly attached to the frame rail. I had some bearing sleeves made up for the '55 rearend so that I could use my narrowing jig to see how bad things were off. The "good" side was off by at least 3/16", which was probably pretty good for a narrowing job 65 or 70 years ago. The "bad" side was so bent I couldn't even get the bare 2" rod through the housing. I'll assume the right rear wheel/tire encountered a wall or guardrail at some point in this things lifetime.




I cut the good side through where it was originally welded when narrowed and cut the bad side as close to the framerail as practical. I plug welded in some thin wall sleeves with an OD to match the ID of the axle housing to help center where the tubes were mated and located the outer ends with the axle sleeves and centering rod. Called it a day after getting everything tacked in place.