My name is Tom, I Have a 1958 coupe deville that I am going to be modifying soon. I am gathering information and tips right now on going about this. I am building this car to have alot of power but still have good manners and driveability. I currently have aquired a cadillac 500 motor out of a 71 eldorado. I am planning on building it up to handle two turbos and produce about 1000 hp or so. I have a 4l80e trans that I will be getting built for this application also. I plan on doing a EFI set up on it. I will be strengthening the frame of the car and putting big modern disk brakes and update the suspension as best as I can. All original parts that come off will of course be saved and ready to be put back on the car if I ever feel the need to restore it. here is a few pictures of the Caddy.
Welcome to the HAMB. That car is perfect as is my man. I'm currently building an efi 540 Cadi so I wish you all the best on yours. James
Yea I dont plan on doing much to the exterior apperances. Everything is in good shape, at least driver quality. I am the third owner of the car, and the second owner was a dedicated cadillac collector. He got the car at an estate sale. it lived in boulder colorado its whole life and has no rust what so ever!. The only thing I might need to change is the wheels, since the stock wheels will not fit with the disk brake conversion I am planning. I want to keep my stock hub caps, but I might be forced to use newer cadillac caps. when they went to disk brakes. the "sombrero" caps are hard to make work.
Thats an easy fix. There are several HAMB members that can make a custom set of wheels for you. I bought a set of 15 inch chrome steel wheels in a 5 x 5 pattern from HAMB'r EXK for about $75.00 each. The custom backspacing will clear my 12 inch rotors on all four corners. You can run the stock cap and no one will ever know. Remember the HAMB is all about traditional Rods and Kustoms. We might get a good tounge lashing for talking about turbo's and efi set ups. Tread lightly.
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