'73 Vega GT All Aluminum Wildcat 355 Project

Contents:
Page 1: Engine Block prep
Page 2: Head mods
Page 3: Induction
Page 4: Engine Assembly
Page 5: Front Suspension Mods
Page 6: Rear Suspension/Weight Transfer Mods
Page 7: Rust Repair and Undercarriage prep
Page 8: Frame Rail fabrication/Unibody support
Page 9: Body Mods
Page 10: Transmission Mods
Page 11: BMW Radiator Swap

New Page! Body mods

OK this page is not going to be very long because I don't do much body work. I do need to repair some body panels though and make some modifications I thought Chevrolet should have done to the styling.

I've always thought the marker lights and taillights they were incongruous to the overall design. I thought the styling initially implemented by the round headlights and the round front signal lights was lost in the kinda cheap rectangular marker lights. Here's a picture of a car I'm planning emulating.

As you can see the modifications were the change from the rectangular markers to the Mopar style small round markers. Pretty cool. The other major change is the use of second gen Camaro round taillights.

The first metal/welding based modification I have ever made is the marker lights. I'm pretty happy with how they turned out:

I'm not going to build this but here's a sketch I whipped up of what I think GM should do to bring the Vega GT back in 2011 for the anniversary addition. They could use the Lotus chassis they are using for the solstice and Sky. I think it would be a hardtop version.

I bought a rear panel for a '72 Cuda and some similar vintage tail lights. They are a lot bigger than the Camaro lights at 5 1/2" but I think they are going to look pretty good. Here's a pic of a rear panel with Camaro lights I modified to and enlarged to show what the final Mopar lights will look like. You can see by the pic of the 'Cuda rear panel that it has a similar concavity to the Vega rear panel.

I cut out the tail light bezels from the 'Cuda rear panel and mocked them up yesterday. I was really tentative because I've never cut out perfectly good sheetmetal before. It took all day to finish, well almost finish, welding in the right tail light bezel.

Here's a pic after I grinded down the initial welds. And a couple pix after I smoothed it a little and put weld-thru primer on them for the last bit of welding. There are a lot of pin holes from pitting int the bezels I'm filling with welds. It's tedious.

This side went a crap load better. I was still pretty nervous but the problems that came up last time I was able to head off. I'm glad to be done with this part.

Peep this cool Matchbox I found this weekend! SWEET!

Sandblasting

SO I started sandblasting today. OMG it takes forever! I worked all day and finally got most of it done. I went through about 250 lbs. of sand. Here's what I looked like after a few hours:

Here's what the car looks like now. It's not perfect but good enough for me! I look like I should be drinking at the Mos Eisley cantina. LOL. My body aches like a MF. All the contortions I've had to do over the past 4 days... It's going to take a while to recover.

Chassis Black

I started sealing the bare metal with Chassis Black. I bought it from Eastwood. It's pretty toxic stuff but it works like magic! It really bonds with the bare metal. It's an epoxy based bonding paint. It goes on thin but builds quickly. It's really nice and super black!

Here's a couple close ups:

I finished up the paint on the undercarriage I've just got a few places to cover in the cracks. I also got some silicon sealer I'll be installing this week. The engine compartment got Rust encapsulator and a couple coats of satin Engine Enamel.

You can see in the back I left the rear foot wells. I'll be cutting those out to make clearance for mufflers.

A couple pix of our CarNight club:

That's Joel (HotHotWeezly) pretending to drive from his engine bay. We are also working on a Rabbit for the 2008 Challenge. Here's our hogged out engine bay!

This is the neighbor girl Cat. She's part of our CarNight. She's chopping out the rear footwells to make room for the dual exhaust.

Here's how the floor turned out. I'm pretty happy with the results. Now I have plenty of room for mufflers after the X-pipe. The X-pipe will go right where the floor is the lowest just at the front edge of these floors I fabricated: THANKS MUSCLE CAR! (SpikeTV)