Howdy- I've been working on my dragster project for some time now, but it looks like I'm in the home stretch. It has been a long journey with a lot to learn and a lot of mistakes along the way, but I guess the value of this is to learn, right? This started back in 2010 when a good friend of mine suggested this to help as a distraction from a bad stretch I was going through personally. He was going to fund it, and do the machine work, and I'd do the wrenching and parts chasing and assembly. Sadly, he passed away in 2012 and for quite awhile I had to think long and hard about continuing. I decided to see it through as a testament to our friendship, and over the years a number of my friends have stepped in to help me out when I needed skills or equipment I don't possess, so this whole project represents my friendships, not just Mark. The impetus for this was to build a car that was as period correct looking as possible, but would cert so I could run it at sanctioned drag strips. Out here in California things seems to be a lot more strict, so as much as it would be great to have a three point cage and such, it would limit me pretty much to just running at Eagle Field. Though I plan on using it more for those kinds of meets, I have an NHRA drag strip 10 miles from my house, so I want to be able to run it there as well, even though I'm just looking to have fun with the car and not rotate the earth and go rounds. I figure once in a blue moon I'll drag it down to an ANRA meet at Famoso just to see if we can qualify. Other than that it will be Eagle Field and Kingdon and perhaps the Billetproof drags and meets like that. The car is 140" wheelbase, 327 Chevy with hilborn injection on alky. Would love to go with a clutch setup, but again - getting into certs and such for a car that I'll just run for fun, I decided to go with a powerglide that I'll run in high gear only, no trans brake. I've got ET five spokes on 10" M&H slicks for a regular drag strip that I'll run along with zoomies, and then for the airport type meets, I'll run the piecrust slicks and weed burners - so I can go from 1963 to 1966 with a wheel/tire and header change. Here's where it is at now, and then I'll back fill how it got here.
Mark and I originally found an old car to rebuild/update, but then decided it was just too far gone - it's the photo here. So we had a new chassis constructed. One of the keys for us was to have a decent looking cage, which meant having that front hoop layback about what it would have been in the 60s with a 3-point cage. In order to do this, extra length needed to be added to the chassis behind the rear axle to accommodate. Not knowing what we yet didn't know, we didn't realize that this was going to create some issues...
With where the rear end was in relation to the back of the chassis made it pretty much impossible to put controls in a way that wasn't goofy or weird, so the solution was to move the engine and rear end back in the chassis to put it under my knees. If legs under cars were legal, that could have been a solution but then again, I'm old enough to think that's a bad idea, even if it was still legal. Also discovered with that much overhang, it made loading the car onto a trailer next to impossible without a floor jack and every available chunk of 2x4. My pals Mike Smith and Robert Morris helped out with the axle and engine relocation. Took the chassis "down to the studs" so to speak and started over. Before After The bonus was that without changing the external dimensions of the car, we went from 134" wheelbase to the magic 140" which is supposed to make a difference in handling.
The digger back home with the engine and rear end in place. The next job was to do the fuel injection plumbing. Bought all the stuff to make hoses. I'm not a big fan of the steel braided lines with the blue and red anodized fittings, and at a glance I wanted to mimic the look of the early 60's when cars were running rubber fuel lines, so I bought the black hose and black fittings.
Now it was finally at a point where the cockpit controls could be fabricated. Towed it up to my friend Michael's shop in November so we could work on it over the next couple of months. He's a vintage road racer guy, and we became friends because I'm also involved in vintage racing karts, but he digs the dragster and along with my good pal Keith, has been happy to help. I always joke with my friends that I no longer relate to the world, and that even though I'm not "old" (though I'm not young) I'm a 20th century boy. I was kind of surprised that when we were towing the digger up to the shop, no one even looked twice. If I had seen anything like that on an open trailer as a kid, I would have begged my folks to speed up and follow it. Strange days, indeed. The first order of business was fabricating mechanical throttle linkage. I know the bowden cable is easier and more common, but it kinda defeats the purpose of what I'm trying to do. I've been in bands most of my life and even though I mostly play guitar, I have played drums before so I thought a Ludwig "Speed King" bass pedal would be fitting for a dragster pedal. The toe loop is in mock up stage right now but it will get one in order to make things safe.
I'm following this because I can relate, right down to losing my racing partner to cancer. We won A/F at Cordova Ill in 2007. Short while after My best friend got cancer. I understand about it taking the wind out of your sails. Great looking car. I'm watching. Lippy
Thanks so much for the kind words and interest. I really appreciate it. After we got the throttle linkage built, the next thing to tackle was the output shaft/pinion cover between the trans and rear end. Oh man. The rear end. Every build has its Achilles heel, and the damn rear end has been mine. You don't think it should be that big of a deal, right? I wanted to keep things period so I went with a Chrysler 8 3/4. I know an Olds probably would have been more period for an early 60's car, but we ended up with the 8 3/4" It has the 489 drop out, which has the 29 spline pinion. Mark had bought a coupler before he passed away, but it was for the 10 spline 742 case. Darn. So I look on the Mark Williams site, do not see a coupler for the 489. Call them and they tell me that the Dana 60 coupler is exactly the same. Welp, despite what the fine folks at Mark Williams insist, the 29 spline female pinion coupler for the Dana DOES NOT fit the 29 spline 489 set up. Two different brand gear sets (and two different restocking fees... grrrr) attest to that. Discovered that Richmond Gear makes a gear set for the 489 that has the 10 spline pinion end like the one on the 742. So I go with that and can use the 10 spline coupler Mark bought to begin with. I take the morning off from work and haul all my crap - gear set, bearings, spool, drop out, solid pinion spacer instead of a crush sleeve (I don't want any more kids, but I'd still like to be able to walk the rest of my days) zooty steel racing caps, and new adjusters down to West Coast Differential to have everything set up. Aaaaand they tell me that the caps have to be sized first before they can set up the 3rd member. Unfortunately they don't do that there. They recommend a guy named Cliff who is the last guy in town who can do this operation, and he works at a small machine shop that is part of a semi truck painting shop 40 miles the other direction. I gather said crap up and head over to see Cliff. Cliff is a grizzled ol' machinist who you can tell right away from the 100-yard stare and monosyllabic grunts that he's not one to suffer fools. But like a lot of those grumpy guys, he's a stale marshmallow - crusty on the outside, soft on the inside. I'm just naturally curious about stuff and want to learn and through sheer luck, I appear to be asking at least what Cliff deemed as being reasonable questions, so he must have figured that I was okay. He warms up, we talk about the dragster and his history as a machinist. I leave the drop out, adjusters, and zooty caps with him, he tells me he'll give me a call in a couple days. Sure as shootin' Cliff gives me a call in a couple days, but it wasn't to tell me that the drop out is ready to pick up. It's to tell me that he tried sizing one of the caps, and the drop out is just too worn out to use. The adjuster rattles around in there like a pinball. Crap. Tells me that I need to find a new drop out, and he thinks Yukon still makes one. That's good. It's only money, right? Ahh, yes. Money. I've never been bucks up, but I've discovered that good practice for preparing to build a dragster is to take a stack of $20 bills and a cigarette lighter, hold a bill in one hand and the lighter in another, set the 20 alight and try not to flinch. Once you can do it without batting an eyelash, you're ready to build a dragster. This project is in equal measures, the coolest and the dumbest thing I've ever done. You fine folks who build hot rods have half a hope of getting a reasonable percentage of your investment back (not including labor!) should the time come to sell. With a dragster you've never spent so much money on something you'll be lucky to sell for $12,000 when your local strip closes down. Okay, enough about my own idiocy. I buy a gleaming new Yukon 489 drop out, take it to Cliff, he blesses it with holy machine oil and all is right with the world. Drag everything back to West Coast Diff, and 3 days later they tell me to come pick up the finished 3rd member. All is right with the world, and I can check the rear end off of the list. Or can I? Fast forward to November and my friend Michael's shop and 3rd member goes in place, and the pinion cover gets fabbed up. I'm trying to anticipate making life as easy as possible when servicing the car, so I had gone out to a metals yard and scrounged a length of scrap thick-walled 4" steel tube from the cutoff pile. We pie cut it, weld on tabs to mount to the back of the trans, weld on trunnions to act as hinges so the cover can open either direction, or remove the top completely and Bob's yer uncle.
As a slightly goofy aside, I can't afford chrome but I do want the digger to have style. Everything is chrome moly, so I figure that maybe I can polish those pieces that would get chromed if it was in the budget and while it won't be chrome, at least it will have a little shine to it. I buy an industrial sized roll of 3M red pad and spend a Saturday with a stack of CDs and my best zen frame of mind and go to town on the brake handle, then the drag link. After the 3M pad action, hit it with Wizards metal polishing cotton, and then top it off with Mother's polish. Hmmm. not bad. Fortunately when we're up at Michael's he's got a lathe, so polishing the radius rods and tie rod is a quicker job and Keith takes care of that task. All I've got left to do is the front axle.
i didn't see where you said what gear ratio you are running. the reason i ask is i bought a 137 wb dragster. this car was built to run a 440 dodge motor and a 3.39-1 gear in it. the rear is a early olds. i was curious what gear you are running. i haven't got mine running but i do have a altered and it is happy with a 4.10-1 gear. i have always thought a lite car can take a higher gear. anybody got info?
I originally was going to run a pretty tall gear in it - I think the first set I had was 3.73 - because I don't want to run a wheelie bar, so I thought that would help keep the front end down and also keep from buzzing the mild motor on the top end. (a side note: I will have a caster wheel tucked under the chute pack tail, positioned so you can just see the bottom of it poking from under, just to protect the body and frame should I brain fart on the drill and hike the front end at the hit.) People who know better than me and have actual experience said that I should go with a lower gear, so I went with the 4.10. But I would imagine with the total lack of weight you can probably pull almost any gear you'd like if you throw enough power at it. Regarding the not running a wheelie bar thing, I know the conventional wisdom is to make that concession but there have been a handful of stubborn farts like myself who have the proof of concept - Jim Rodarmel and Gene Krueger have been my mentors on that deal. Gene had Pat Foster rebuild the old US Mule A/Fuel dragster not too long before he passed, but with an injected SBC on alky. It's pretty much the blueprint equipment-wise on what I'm doing. You can still find some poorly shot, but still very cool footage of the car making passes from a decade ago on You Tube. Gene has since sold the car and the Bates family, who continue to dominate A/Fuel and Jr. Fuel nostalgia racing bought it. It was a member of their family who built the car originally in the 60's, so it has come back home. There's also a guy out of Canada named Roy Ranquist who runs (ran?) the with the Pacific Northwest group, and he had no wheelie bar on his blown SBC-powered digger. I know it is doing it the hard way, but I have never claimed to be particularly smart.
I remember your car! That was really sweet! It was the Kansas Twister, correct? I'm really sorry to hear about your partner and friend. It's a sobering experience. Do you still have the digger?
Thanks for the kind words. The weedburners don't exist yet, but I'll post photos when those are fabbed up!
With the pinion cover done, it was time to move onto routing the fuel shutoff and then working on the shifter, which we were going to build ourselves and have a hopefully idiot-proof, or at least "idiot-resistant" design. By using a quick pin as a lock out mechanism, and tabs welded to the top of the rear end, once you were between the tabs all you can do is shift between low and high. You have to press the button on the quick pin to get it to slide past the tabs and into neutral, reverse, and park. This is where we discovered we had another problem. In addition to that laid back front roll cage hoop, another important aspect of the car was to give it that early 60's "engine dump" in order to get the look. As a consequence, the rear end sits pretty high up in the chassis. This also means the gap between the top of the rear end and the bottom of the steering wheel was pretty small. While laying out the shifter and moving it from one side of the center line for as much clearance as possible, we came to realize there was none. The bottom of the steering wheel was going to foul the shifter. In addition, spending a bunch of time getting in and out of the car, it became clear that ingress and egress was a little bit, shall we say, "yoga-esque." The byproduct of now having the rear end in the right place, but that front hoop laid back. So the realization was that the steering hoop would have to be raised and then moved forward. This dovetails into the other realization that the steering box mount wasn't going to pass tech- as cool and vintage as it was, with the single arm mounting. SFI states that there needs to be a crossmember down by the footbox area that spans both frame rails. I guess this is to keep the cockpit rails from peeling back in case the car breaks apart at the engine plate, exposing the driver's legs. We had mounted the fuel shutoff on the steering hoop, but raising it a couple inches and scooting it forward 4-odd inches was going to put it out of reach. So we'd have to relocate it after we got the whole steering deal worked out. Before: After:
Once we had that sorted out, we could go to town on building the shifter. A 1/4" socket u-joint serves as the swivel portion to get the rod down to the shifter arm on the trans.
Everything looks great, the only thing I really dont care for is the un-supported length of the throttle shaft that the throttle arm is attached to,, under numerus hits under the return spring, the shaft will bend and possibly stick in the housing. Use the 2 bolt holes in the back of the head to create a support close to the throttle arm so that it takes the load instead of the shaft
It maybe the angle of the picture, but with the throttle peddle at a forward angle, the link is only going forward a tiny bit before it travels down and the movement is minimal. You are trying to operate at 2 different arc circles. Since you still have to fab a toe loop on the peddle anyway, I suggest that you incorporate the rod end mount behind the peddle so that the rod goes up and forward instead on down during the arc rotation
Thanks Bruce! That rod on the pedal is too short and just a placeholder - it came in the kit I got from Speedway just to work out the proof of concept . I actually have a longer tube with male rod ends so the pedal will be more upright and the linkage angle between the pedal and bell crank will be correct with no threat of going over center.
The Jalopy Journal
