Category Archives: Overhaulit

Come along for the ride in this 100-part series as we take three class cars – a 1965 Ford Mustang, a 1963 Chevrolet Corvette and a 1970 Plymouth – and overhaul them into dream rides!

Overhaulit Part 11
Out with the buggy springs

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Description

Pop quiz. What suspension technology found on our Project Plymouth dates back more than a century? Leaf springs no doubt smoothed the blows to the buttocks dealt you by a horse-drawn carriage. And in the early days when “cars” were nothing more than automated carts and carriages, leaf springs were naturally carried forward.
How, exactly, “buggy” springs found their way into the automobile well into the 1990s is anyone’s guess, but the pace of change – or more likely the desire to make change – was slow.

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Overhaulit Part 12
Material matters

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Description

There’s a putty, glaze, primer, glue, sealer, top coat, welding wire, clearcoat, tape, undercoat and masking paper for every job. And that can add up to thousands. By now you’ve met our 1970 Project Plymouth, which also happens to be the first car I ever bought. Back in 1984, I did what any aspiring university sophomore would do: spend some of his precious student loan to repaint his car. Stupid? Likely. . .

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Overhaulit Part 13
Custom fit . . . for an off-the-rack price

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Description

Do you see wheels and tires as an accessory to a car, the foundation of a vehicle, or the visual glue that ties the whole look together? It’s really a mix of all three when you obsess over it like we do, because, stylistically, the vehicle is a singular piece and not a collection of parts and pieces bolted together without consideration for the final result. So, you have to consider the vehicle, the mission of the vehicle – because functionality is a factor, after all – set the proper stance and “wheel up” appropriately.

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Overhaulit Part 14
Stance is everything

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No matter how capable a project car will be, packed with all the latest engineering and technology, it has to have the right look and the right stance for the job. This is the exclamation mark that punctuates the end of the statement.
Mess this up and the life savings and sweat poured into the project will be down the drain.

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Overhaulit Part 15
‘Don’t blow it up, OK?’

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Description

And we might: as long as it looks right on the outside, we’re up for pretty much anything on the inside. It’s no secret that we like new tech. And there have been plenty of those developments over the last six decades, eh? But when it comes to restoring a classic Corvette, that’s not the way of the purist and there are several types of those, too.

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Overhaulit Part 16
Narrow minded

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Description

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?
Beginning with a goal and a process to get there, all we had to do was execute the plan. And this part of the plan involved putting down that just-right stance.
With the 2004 Mustang Cobra wheels cut apart and narrowed to fit our 1965 Mustang, there was one more major hurdle and a bunch of fine-tuning to do. Well, as much fine tuning as one can do with leaf springs, anyway.

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Overhaulit Part 17
Open wide!

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Description

When it works, putting twice the rubber on the road is a beautiful thing. The trick? Actually making it work.
I get all jazzed up about tires. Compounds. Styles. Aspect ratio and section width. I could go on for days and days. How much do I love tires? I have been known to pay more for a tire to get a better looking tread pattern.
Obviously, I have issues, but the biggest one might be relaying the art of sizing, here and now. . .

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Overhaulit Part 18
Numbers game

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Description

How much would the car drop in value if we trashed the original engine? No one wants to find out.
When you last read about the ’63 Corvette, we were armpits deep in camshaft selection, cylinder-head porting and block preparation. Lots of technical stuff.
The purpose of this story is not to show you how to rebuild an engine in 1,429 easy steps, but rather to highlight the experience we had after we got the whole thing together.

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Overhaulit Part 19
When a suspension goes wrong, scrap it!

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Description

So much for experiments.
Sometimes they work out and sometimes you end up doing something completely different that costs three times as much money. Believe me, the latter would be my first choice, too, but when so close means it doesn’t work the way want it to, then sometimes going back to the drawing board is best. As awesome as our Mustang looked with all the tricks we performed to the rear suspension to get it sitting just right, it just didn’t perform.

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Overhaulit Part 20
Round and round

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Description

After months of waiting and then not getting what we ordered, complaining about work ethic isn’t going to get the job done. You would think that it would be as simple as dialing up some pizza, with the exception of the “there-in-30-minutes-or-it’s-free” part. Welcome to the world of custom parts.
Why did we even have to order custom wheels? That’s a good place to begin and the answer is simple: nothing off the rack in the right width would fit over our brake calipers, let alone within the fenders of the mighty Project Plymouth.

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