Youtube hearted comments of Thump Er the Sweaty Fat Guy (@SweatyFatGuy).

  1. Women leave 70%-90% of the time Men are blamed for it 100% of the time.
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  2. A lot of what you say in this is what I am doing. As I was waiting for my divorce to be final in 2013 I bought some land, and closed on it the week after the D was final. Started building in 2015 when the child support indenture ended to the first ex. I cleared the trees and did the foundation work myself, with a borrowed Kubota and rented skid steers. Lots of work for a 46 year old crippled guy. Built my 32x48 shop first, cleared 3 acres and used the straightest trees to build the shop. I built my shop and house, hired a couple guys to help with the roof, but I was doing the work along with them, and I did everything else. I bought an Allis Chalmers One Eighty this spring, its been getting a work out moving dirt, yanking trees, moving rusty trucks, and grading the driveway. Its not a small tractor to city people, but it is to farmers. Equipment like that is a good investment when you own several acres in the middle of nowhere. I was seeing a girl from '14 to '18 who lived 7 hours away, and we did lots of fun stuff, she knew there was zero chance of getting married or any sort of commitment from me. That will probably be the last time I will date, just not worth the effort. Paid off all my debt in Feb 2021, and now I can do whatever I damn well please. So I build old muscle cars. This year I went a bit nuts on an engine for one of them, a 99% aftermarket 505 inch Pontiac that can easily handle 20psi, and it will make around 1500 to 2000hp with that much boost. Have a 6-71 supercharger sitting here to go on it next summer, just for fun and science. The front timing cover is the only factory piece on the entire engine. I don't need anyone around most of the time, having an extra set of hands to help with some things is nice, but for the most part I go weeks without speaking to other humans face to face. Two divorces and I am done, I am not losing all of this to another lying cheating harpy. I find doing this car thing, making videos of what I do, and enjoying my life driving the cars I build is the most satisfying thing I have ever done. Next summer I am going racing again. Provided we aren't in a declared war or something. The last time I made a pass down a dragstrip was 2005, right before I got out of the USAF on a medical. They broke me in 2004 on my last deployment. I decided to get debt free when the potato was 'elected' because I do not want any bank or other as****e coming and telling me I don't own it anymore. Same reason I am never letting a girl live with me again. I am having fun doing what I want to do, how I want to do it. I wish I had decided to live for me and not allow females in way back in 1992 when I got out of the USAF the first time. Would be a lot farther ahead.
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  3. You started showing up in my feed recently. I'm an old guy too, build carbs, engines, transmissions, entire cars, plus I do EFI and other modern tech, often putting it in my 40+ year old cars. daily driver is a 65 GTO with a 455 that runs solely on E85 and E100 in it. I make E100 from tree sap and cattails, 10 cents a gallon lets me run my huge V8s with 13:1 around on the street all summer. Here is more info on the modern gas. The reason why it is boiling over far easier than it used to has to do with the multiple components that make up gasoline, the stuff that comes from oil. Ethanol has a 173F boiling point at sea level, it goes up with pressure like most other boiling points, but that is not what is causing the problem. Ethanol is somewhat counter intuitive if you know gasoline, its very different but raises octane considerably. That 10% ethanol they mix in raises the octane from 60/70 in the base gasoline to 87/93, depending on the mix of the gasoline components. The boiling points for what constitutes ethanol free gasoline has boiling points that range from 80F to 450F, flash points are equally varied and all over the place. Octane for each component tends to go up with boiling and flash points. So what they can do now is mix in the very light parts of gasoline that have a naturally low octane, and get it to run without knocking by adding 10% vodka to it. So that stuff boils in the lines or tank on a hot enough day. Where I live its rarely above 80F, so we get the really crappy stuff up here, and they charge us a fortune for it. That is the reason I got into making vodka to run my cars, because 87 octane gas was $5 a gallon until 2015, and now its nearly $3 a gallon for 87, and I am not even close to California. The gas you buy in Georgia or Texas is different than the gas we get in the far northern reaches of Michigan. We get the light crap, you get the slightly heavier stuff, but its all lighter than it used to be. They can sell you the worse crap because ethanol improves is so much. They used to use tetraethyl lead to raise octane, and that just might be why the boomers and their parents have such a huge problem with Alzheimers. Though nobody will look into it because the class action would kill the oil companies. That caused cancer and all kinds of other problems, so it was discontinued when I was a little kid. Then they tried MTBE, and that too was very carcinogenic and harmful. Meanwhile ethanol is consumed by millions world wide daily, used in de-icers and to remove water from fuel systems, so its harmless as long as you aren't addicted to it or drink too much and pray to the porcelain god the next morning. It cleans the hell out of your fuel system, removes all the varnish gasoline leaves behind, also it allows you to burn any water that condenses in the fuel tank rather than sitting on the bottom, causing corrosion and then making the engine not want to run when it gets sucked into the pick up. Ethanol when burned only makes Co2 and H2O, runs cooler, and can handle more compression or boost than gasoline can, all the while making more power. Its fun stuff in your car in high percentages, essentially a race fuel for the street. I have almost 1000 miles on the oil change in the 65 this year, and it is still clean. That engine has never been run on pump gas since I rebuilt it back in 2011. I have to run a 195 thermostat in it to get it warm enough even cruising around Nebraska in 105F weather. Nothing special in the engine and fuel system, its all basic parts store stuff and 1967 vintage 72cc 400 heads on a flat top 455 with an additional .04 stroke, and my Qjets run great on it, the FiTech EFI did very well too. No problems with vapor lock, even with mechanical pumps, here in Michigan or in Nebraska where my family lives. Yeah I road trip the thing too and have other cars I run on E85/E100. When they found they can sell the really low boiling/flash point stuff for profit, they took advantage of it. I do not blame them, but where I take issue is how they then blame ethanol for the problems the gasoline is actually causing. Business is business though, you do what you must to make a buck. I don't think its the companies themselves spreading that, but people who simply do not know much about it. Before 2007 I was building everything to run pump gas, race gas got too expensive in 2005 so I dropped compression in most of them. Then when gas got to where 87 was $5 I looked into making my own fuel just so I could drive my cars and not be stuck in a modern appliance. I got quite adept at tuning for pump gas, getting 20mpg from one of my 455s on a 1500 mile road trip, 2004R, 2.93 gears, 27" tall tires, Qjet, and enough wheaties to push that 4100lb GTO into the high 12s with the stock converter and those gears, on 87 octane with 8.8:1 compression. It was an engine I spent all of $1900 rebuilding with cast pistons and a mild cam. I love 455s. Cars that quick have a hard time getting a mechanical pump to feed them, so most of my 400 and 455 powered vehicles have electric pumps by the tank. That really helps with vapor lock, and I never had a problem with it. So yeah the ethanol is causing the problem in that it allows the oil companies to sell you a not nearly as good quality gasoline, but on its own, it is not a problem. The additives they put in the 10% stuff are also an issue, Jeff Smith from Hot Rod Magazine and Summit Racing wrote an article about that. https://www.onallcylinders.com/2018/05/25/ask-away-jeff-smith-e85-pump-gas-additives-not-ethanol-cause-corrosion/
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  4. How about a chick facetiming her boyfriend, telling him how much she loves him, misses him, and can't wait to see him again... all while riding you cowgirl? Trust them if you want. I don't.
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  5. Well I was a slow learner and did it twice.. If he thinks it will work this time, he can delude himself all he wants. With mountains of incentive to divorce her man, why the hell would anyone even consider it these days? There is no benefit, ZERO... for the man to get married. I got to finally live my life and not be indentured when I turned 46. I would rather take a .45 ACP to the brain stem long before I will ever get married again.
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  6. She doesn't care about you, she only cares about what you can do for her. My second ex burned her life to the ground because I got sick for a few months and she thought it would last forever. Worked out good for me, because she was holding me back in every way possible, but mainly financially. She will be 40 next year and the years have not been kind, to her credit she isn't fat.... but thats the only thing she has going for her. I'm doing cool shit with my life, time, and money. Can't do it with a 120lb leech in my wallet.
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  7. After losing two shops I rented (in the 1990s) when they were sold and I had to move like Tony did, two houses and garages/shops I owned in divorces, I bought 13 acres of woodland with a falling down cabin on it and electrical power run to it, with a slow producing well... for less than $30k in 2013. In 2015 I started building after getting another $30k loan to build something. I did the pole barn first, its my shop now, used the maple trees I had to clear off the land as the poles, they are freakin huge too. Its way overbuilt. Have a 5" thick slab under it, mesh and fiber in it, so its not going anywhere. The footings are sitting on the bedrock, so its really not going anywhere. Then I build a shipping container house consisting of three of them stuck together. Lived in that for 5 years as I got caught up with everything. In 2019 I reconfigured the house, from 480sqft to 1050sqft with a loft upstairs using the 4th container I had not used before but had on the end for storage. My crippled Iraq war vet ass did 90% of the work at least, ran the heavy equipment I rented, and only hired someone to help with the roof on both buildings and the concrete. I paid it all off last month, three years early. Now my passive income is all mine again, the ex's are paid off, I have no loans out there, and I have a bit of cash in the bank as a cushion. Its a crazy amount of work man, but I own this and nobody can take it from me unless its some eminent domain thing. I will never marry again, or even let someone else live here. I am not risking being homeless again now that I am 52 and rebuilding again is going to be impossible. The weather is finally getting nice up here, its almost 50 today and the snow is melting. So this will be the first year I can concentrate on building and moving cars, I have a bunch of them stored in Nebraska at the family farm. I have three in the shop I need to finish this year, then insulate the shop better and get my heat system working so I can work all year and not have to take January - March off due to the freakin cold. Figured why not make videos of what I am doing? I don't need nor want to monetize them, I want to share what I do and hopefully inspire others to get building their own. I used to take stills of everything and post it to bangshift and Pontiac forums, but now the new hotness is video. Got my cameras, tripods, some lights, and a shop full of car parts and the stuff for the house I haven't gotten in here yet making work interesting tripping over stuff. Figuring out the editing and making the narration interesting enough to keep some attention has been my winter project. If nothing else showing people how to do what I do might keep some of the information alive for future generations, just like Tony's videos... except mine are mostly Pontiac, a couple Mopars and Fords are also in my care, and of course the ethanol project I have been working on since 2007. No matter what life takes from you, find a way to rebuild it. If a roadblock is placed in your path, find a way over, around, or through it. I have somewhere around 25 old Pontiacs, four GTOs, eleven Firebirds mostly between 71 and 79, with a 68 and a 98 too, a bunch of LeMans 2 doors, two Mustangs, my 67 Cougar which was my first car way back in 1982 when I was 13, and trucks... lots of trucks. Ford Dodge and chevy trucks coming out of my freakin ears living in the north. How did I manage to keep all those through the years? They were not shiny so the ex wives didn't want them, and I rarely sold a parts car or a daily driver that ended up having too much needed done to keep driving it, so I got another one and turned it into a daily driver. No matter how hard life got, how broke I was, how many bills were due, I kept my GTOs, Trans Ams, and others.. mostly because to be honest other than the 65 and 70 GTO, along with one very rare Formula Firebird, they weren't worth all that much over the years. I found other ways to pay my bills, pay off the ex wives, and keep my old junk that I can build now. I did what I had to do, and I found ways to do it without having to sell the GTOs that I have lusted after since I was ten years old.. and finally own. I am tired of people taking what I built from me, and having to rely on others to allow me to work or store things there, knowing they can tell me to GTFO at any time. So I feel ya Tony... but I came up with different solutions to the same problems. I'll keep watching and commenting, even if nobody ever reads these long winded posts.
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  8. In the 90s I ran a bit too much compression on a Pontiac 400, closed chamber heads with TRW slugs, on 93 octane pump gas. I knew it was too high, but I didn't figure it would really hurt it. It flattened almost all the upper bearing shells and spun two after just two first gear hits on a cool night. The rods were ok, had the crank cleaned up, put it back together and its been in 8 vehicles I own since then. That engine has been 7.7:1 and will be just under 12:1 later this month when I change heads again for another project. The cool thing about Pontiac is a head swap can change your compression a lot. A 455 can go from 7:1 to 13:1 with the same shortblock just changing the heads, and most people can't tell if its a 301, 326 400, or 455. Think sleeper The D port heads with 2.11 intakes all flow within 5-10cfm of each other, and the smogger heads after '73 flow just as good as the earlier Ram Air III heads. Its going on E85 and getting stuffed in my '72 Ventura for a very low buck fun project. Th350, 3.42 gears, lightened but gonna stay ugly and cheap. Parts laying around and some headers I got from a guy on Facebook. Its going to be around $2500 for the entire build. E85 makes it fun, easy and cheap to make power. Nitrous would be fun, but its hard to find up here so I would have to get my own mother bottle, pump, and fill them myself. Thats a lot of expense.
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  9. I've been hoarding parts for decades now. When I started on the car thing back in the 1980s I had to scrounge junkyard to find things, like the sequential tail light control for my 67 Cougar. Nobody made them, they were not in stock in 1985, so I went hunting for Cougars and T birds of the right vintage for them. Can't do that anymore. They have all been crushed. My solution in the 1990s was to buy more cars, entire cars. I have a pile of Firebirds and LeMans two doors sitting around now because I bought them as parts cars dirt cheap in the 80s and 90s. One $50 LeMans could get me $2000 worth of parts for a GTO in the late 90s when repops started showing up. Last year I started hoarding 99-05 Silverado 4x4s, so I can keep a winter beater going. I have complete trucks sitting here I got for $500 or less. Lots of parts on them, so along with being able to get rebuild parts for drivetrains, I have a stash of small stuff like BCMs, EFI manifolds, fuel tanks, and all the other related crap. I have seven 6.0/4L80s sitting here now, and eight or nine 5.3/4L60s too. So if something breaks, I have the part sitting here in my yard. Once I get another shed built, the rusty junk is going away, everything else is getting catalogued and stored out of the weather so my home doesn't look like a junkyard.
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  10. I am jealous of being able to wear the T shirt. I am still having to wear a hoodie while I work outside for two more months. Torsion bars are an entirely different animal. Aero makes a big difference, so getting the nose down is a great idea. I picked up 5mph to 115mph and .2 by blocking off the lower front grilles and putting headlight covers on my '79 Formula, a lot less drag but it did want to run warm on the street when I did that.
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  11. Ivo did with Buick what Thompson did with Pontiac, although Ivo didn't run 406mph in 1960 it was still ultra cool... Who doesn't like multi engine cars? Nailheads, Pontiacs, Hemis, and W chevys are the coolest engines ever. Any time I see one of those engines of any displacement in a street rod, hotrod, or drag car it makes me smile inside.
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  12.  @GomersPile01  I was still unable to see my kids that year. Its a long story and I bet nothing I say for the next week will be able to be seen.
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  13. One application where you don't want to block off the crossover is when you run E85 NA with a carb or TBI systems like the FiTech and Sniper. Here is why. Ethanol has a high latent heat of vaporization, which means it will pull heat out of the intake as it vaporizes. Gasoline does this too, but to a lesser extent. You want the fuel to vaporize, it makes more power on less fuel when its a fog rather than a spray. No worries about keeping the intake cool as the fuel does that for you. A roots blower running ethanol or methanol can develop frost on the case while driving around on a 90 degree summer day, it cools the charge that much. You want the heat while running ethanol, its your friend unlike on gasoline where its your enemy. Another time you don't want to block it is if you drive that vehicle in cold weather, as it takes forever to warm the plenum enough that it will idle without a choke. Up here where we get sub zero temps for a month or two every winter, and lots of snow, heating the carb in the winter is mandatory. In southern states you rarely have to deal with below zero temps for long if at all. On gasoline in a vehicle intended for performance only, its a good idea. Gasoline likes to have the fuel and air colder to make best power, Engine Masters with Freiburger did a test on that, the intake temp mattered less than the fuel temp, but it can make a big difference having the intake and carb cooler. On my Pontiac engines we fill the cross over with aluminum, because the hole is almost as big as an intake port. The heads on my 65 GTO's 455 have been filled, did that way back in the 1990s when they were running on another 455 with race gas due to the 11:1 compression. No idea how much difference it makes because they were filled before I ever put them on an engine. Now it runs E85 and I have to drive it almost 8 miles for the intake to warm enough that it will idle without a choke, and that is on warm days. Pontiac intakes are all air gap designs, from the first one in 1955 to the last 301 built in the 1980s, so they are more sensitive to the lack of heat running ethanol and they work great on gasoline when you block the crossover.
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  14. How does a 481ci engine, built on a block in which all factory parts will fit and work, make so much power? Just so happens I have a 467 Pontiac built by Butler that has heads with the same CNC program that Justin (Big Chief) runs. They are not wide ports or widened bore spacing, just hogged out Edelbrock castings. Mine makes over 700hp NA on pump gas with those heads. It makes that power at 6500rpm, and it is making over 550 ftlbs at the rear wheels as low as 3000rpm. If you are a chevy guy or into small blocks, that makes zero sense. A high velocity port under pressure is going to flow up to a certain RPM limit just like if it were NA. It will be higher with forced induction, but the torque it makes will be prodigious. Its about maximizing the benefits of a design rather than trying to make it do something it is not designed to do. Enhance the capabilities and it will move mass easier. Yeah we are only getting use from the top part of the cylinder because the expanding gasses only push for a handful of degrees after the combustion event... Unless its nitromethane. Justin is shoving 30-50psi through those ports to make 2500-3000hp, and is under 7000rpm doing it. My engines fill the cylinders rather well low in the RPM range, with high velocity ports. A fast moving column of air fills the cylinder better at RPM under 6500, and it is entirely dependent upon the shape and length of the port. Pontiac engines have a sweet spot in runner length and cross section that makes ludicrous torque from idle to 6000rpm in an iron head engine. Then they have 4.25" stroke cranks, Justin has a larger bore with his aftermarket block. He might have a 4" crank, can't remember exactly. We can go up to a 4.5" crank easily in any 400, 428, or 455 block. Grind one spot about 1/8" and it drops right in. The effect of going from the stock 400's 3.75" crank to the 4.25" or 4.5" crank is moving the RPM where max torque is produced lower in the RPM range, all else being the same. It also increases how much torque the engine produces, this effect is well known in the Pontiac world, and we often opt for the 4.25" crank in our builds, that allows us to run 3.08-3.55 gears, a 2400-2800 stall, and run 11s to 9s relatively easily. Pontiac engines are optimized to move heavy vehicles with highway gears, which is why building them like you would a 350 sbc makes them run slower.. every damn time. Put a 4.10 gear behind an iron head 455 and you will go slower than you would with a 3.08-3.55, often a full second slower. A 4.56 might work good with a 350 chevy in the 1/8th, but a 455 will waste that thick band of torque its making from idle to 6000, and it will stop pulling at 6000. No need to spin it any tighter than that. A mild pump gas 455 with smog heads from 1975 will make enough grunt to push a 4000lb GTO into the 12s with a 2.93 gear using a 1900-2200 stall. Be advised, that tends to break transmissions, even Th400s. Ask how I know... The difference in stroking small engines like the 302 ford or the sbc is not as effective as it is with the Pontiac. The Ford has too small ports, unless its a 351C where the 2V heads flow better than most aftermarket W heads and the 4V borders on the Hemi. The longer runner length of the C makes up for the huge 4V ports to some extent, and they can make crazy power with a larger camshaft than the stock tiny cams. The C only has a half inch of stroke over the Cleveland headed BOSS 302, but the power difference is huge, that is partly due to deck height and the resulting longer intake port, including the intake manifold. The tunnel port 427 FE engines were an extreme example of that, as are the Ram Air V heads for a Pontiac. Huge ports with long runners that increase velocity. The sbc has a big short port, which makes them an rpm engine, getting 450ftlbs from one of them is an achievement, and if a Pontiac is only making 450ftlbs its a disappointment. However iron Pontiac heads run out of airflow around 6200rpm even after porting. The engine design matters more than just bore and stroke, but those still make a difference.
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  15. I know that feeling. I have enough to do that it will be 20 years after I am dead that I run out of work. Its kinda by design, so I always have something to do so I can keep the dark thoughts from consuming my existence. Without the cars and trucks, there isn't anything keeping me here. I'm rarely overwhelmed with work, as long as its things I like to do.. and building old cars is something I like to do even when it sucks.
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  16. Back in the 90s I would get 850 Holley double pumpers from chevy guys who tried to run them on their 305 or 350 by jetting it with 56/62 because someone told them that would work on their circle track car. They could never get it right, so they assumed it was a bad carb. I have carb Shop and other somewhat high end carbs I got for $100-$175 from those guys, because they don't know how a carb works. Throw 82/88s in them and they work great on my 455s.
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  17. I run mostly GM vehicles, Pontiacs mainly. I always pull the hood so I can get to everything easier, and the hood opening isn't quite big enough to get the engine out. On a 68-70 Charger its really close and more hassle to leave it on, they don't open very far either so getting to the distributor and upper bellhousing bolts is a huge pain in the ass on the Chargers and my Pontiacs. My brothers have a 69 and 70 Charger, along with a bunch of other mopars. I caught the GTO genetics somewhere.. I rarely pull the trans with the engine, it makes less mess when its an auto, and I pull manuals from the bottom before I yank the engine. Seems like I am throwing engines and transmissions at cars all the time. I have a Pontiac 400 that has been in 7 of my vehicles, including the 76 C10 shortbox, its my mule and its going in a 72 Ventura with some heavily worked RA III heads. Its fun watching guys do this stuff for the first time. I was 9 when I pulled my first V8 with my dad out of his 76 F250. 390s are heavy. It helps to drain the water jacket on the block before you pull it, keeps the floor drier.. lol.
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  18. There are very good reasons humans are like this, respect must be earned because its based on merit. If you do not merit respect, you do not receive it. Merit is not something that is easily identified at a glance, it is displayed over time and you cannot claim it for yourself. The marxists like to claim merit is the problem, and respect must be given regardless, but that is not how it works.
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  19. About the 'manifestation' thing... They are not manifesting anything, what they are doing is trying to change their behavior and focusing on something. They put a bunch of woo into a rather simple concept to pretty it up. I competed in combat sports from 14 to 21. Mostly wrestling, and I got good at it eventually. If you want to become proficient, you need to focus on that for a while. Started out I was 4'9 and very weak, due to a diet I was on that stunted my growth. I focused on getting better at wrestling, getting stronger by pushing myself harder in practice and while working on the farm. When I graduated at 17, a month before I turned 18, I was the strongest male in the school, including teachers. I was bench pressing 265lbs while weighing 170-175. I am 5'8 but I became more than everyone else through focus and effort. I am big into old muscle cars from the 60s and 70s. Finding them and parts for them takes a certain amount of focus. I look for parts I want or need, and I change my behavior to make it easier to find those parts. I get to know people who have similar interests, and they pass along info to me about the parts I am looking for when they find them. People know I am looking for Pontiac engines, cars, etc. So when they find them, I hear about it. I am known as the Pontiac guy because of how obsessed with them I am. I own four GTOs, 1965, 69, 70 and 72. I have eleven Firebirds, four of which are Trans Ams, the rest are Formulas which have the Trans Am engine but not all the bells and whistles, so they are lighter and usually faster. When you focus on something you change your behavior and your thinking so that you can get where you want to be. If you are driving and you look at a chicken in the ditch, most people will tend to steer the car towards what they are looking at. Its a natural tendency. People steer themselves towards what they want and focus on. If you want to make money, you focus on things that make you money. You learn what you need to learn, do the things you need to do to get the money, just like I do with the Pontiac parts. Meeting women is somewhat different. The more interest you show in them, the less they are attracted to you. So to get them, you focus on other things, mainly yourself and building your body and mind. Get stronger, smarter, more capable, and more competent, all of which will make you more confident because of the effort required to attain those improvements. They always whine about how we don't show emotion like they do, but if we show emotion like them, they lose interest instantly. They are solipsistic, they think the universe is here for them, rather than understanding they are just a part of it. They think everyone should be like they are, and if you're not then you are broken, all the while not understanding that they are not attracted to men who are like women. They think they are manifesting things, but really they just focus a little bit and things happen for them. Its because they put themselves in a position to benefit from the effort a man puts into living. They sit around and wait for men to come to them, and they inevitably do come to them, then they can pick and choose which ones they want, and reject the rest. They are all about looking pretty and waiting to get noticed, which does not work for men. Nothing in this world comes to men without effort, nobody gives us a damn thing. We have to earn it, we have to take risks and make an effort. If we do not approach women and speak to them with confidence, NOTHING HAPPENS. Women do not approach us unless we are showing we have resources. They talk to me about my GTOs all the time, and they hope I will provision them as well, but its not me they want.. its what I can do for them. If I do not get a number or ask them out, nothing happens. If I drive my winter beater truck that is rusted and has a red cab and silver box, they sure as hell won't be telling me 'nice truck' in an attempt to get me to proposition them. They sit back and wait for things to happen, men make those things happen. they delude themselves that it takes monumental effort to wait for things to happen. Setting goals is a means of motivating yourself. Some people need to work on self motivation more than others. Its not a weakness exactly, its more about interest. If you are interested in something, you will motivate yourself to do that thing. Why are all of you here watching this content? Its because you are interested in women, and want to understand them better so you can avoid the risks and hopefully meet one that isn't like all of them in these tiktok videos. You come here because you are changing your actions and thinking to align with getting what you want. A goal only works if you have a deadline for when it needs to be accomplished. the deadline is the motivator. When the deadline is winter time and snow falling, you are very motivated to build your house so you can stay warm. The goal is build the house, and if its not done by the time the temps drop in fall, its going to be miserable trying to do it in the snow. If you want to lift a certain amount, you have to set the goal to lift it. Then you work towards that goal, focusing on how you are doing, what you are eating, how much work you are putting in. Take it from a man who has lots of muscle and is VERY strong, you do not get there without a commensurate amount of effort. To get my 21" arms took monumental effort, more than most people would ever consider doing. I was forced to do it in 1990-91 during my first war. I was not trying to get this big and strong, it was the result of what I had to do every day for nearly a year. 9000 calories in every day, and lifting then running with 200lbs most of the time, and pushing the equivalent of two F150s a mile or two on other days. My goal was to get the job done for that 12 hour shift. The result was I went from a 330lb bench to a 450 in less than a year spending zero time in a gym. If you have built any muscle at all, you know how much work that required. Imagine how much I was doing when I was 21 in 1990 to gain that much in less than a year. Men are built, either by themselves or by the environment around them. We have a sink or swim life, even the soft coddled kids who were bubble wrapped by their parents who moved all obstacles out of their way. If they want more than what they are given by their parents, it will require work/effort. You don't manifest a damn thing, you make it happen by focusing on the goal and getting there.
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  20. Callum 2023: MAKE BIMBOES GREAT AGAIN
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  21. My friends all know I am looking for Pontiacs. Nothing newer than 72 unless is a Firebird and they know it has to be cheap. In 2014 I pulled a 68 LeMans rolling shell with a bunch of extra parts out of a pasture in Nebraska for $300. Put $3000 into it and made it into a quick driver with a healthy 400, Th350, and a $150 posi rear with a 3.08 gear. I lightened it extensively, dropping 900lbs out of the shell. I even used an old aluminum screen door as the radiator support... Now it has a 461 inch mill built on a 400 block with some used Edelbrock heads, solid cam, and other parts I had laying around. I have to go pick up a 69 GTO, another rolling shell, that I gave $400 and an E85 conversion on a carb for. Its rough, but it has a title and is a great starting point for a cool ride. Last week I got a 68 Firebird for $200. Its rusted VERY badly, but I plan to use the shell and build a tube frame pro street ride with it. That thing is beyond most people, but its perfect for what I want to do with it. I find this stuff all the time. They are out there, you have to look farther than facebook and the high end for sale sites. Yes it is a HUGE plus that I have engines, transmissions, and all kinds of other stuff sitting around. The reason I have all of those parts to rebuild these old cars, is because my friends know I am always looking for 400, 428, 455, engines and heads from the late 60s so I can run high compression and E85. I buy cheap used parts, and have them waiting for the next build. I rebuild engines, transmissions, carbs, differentials, and everything else too. Not throw a kit at it or paint it, I tear them down and make them better than new. That makes it easier to get a rolling shell drivable when you have the parts and skills needed to put a car back together. Its also much cheaper than paying someone else to do the work for you. Do the work yourself and old cars are the cheapest way to get around and they are cool as hell too. What would you rather drive? A stain black 69 LeMans two door with a glass nose and 550hp for $4000, or a boring front drive commuter car or minivan? My daily driver is a 65 GTO that I got for $1500 as a severely rusted rolling shell, and turned into a kick ass 11 second daily driver for less than $15k. Nary a boring pos in my yard, even my winter beaters are supercharged Gran Prix drivers I got for less than $1000.
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  22. You're on to something Tony. I find that there are a few different types of 'car guy'. From the ones who are satisfied with the poster on the wall and the video game that lets them drive some exotic, to the guys who can rebuild, refinish, and repair everything on any vehicle built between 1909 and two weeks ago, which includes the guys who know how everything works and what also needs changed when you change parts around. From posters to interchange and mechanical processes in your head. You have the vast majority, who like to have a 'cool' car, but don't want to or can't work on it, no matter how old it is but they will do what they can/want to do. Then you have the checkbook guys who have shops do it all. Only thing about that group is when they claim its 'home built' and at most they put the rims under the car and hauled it around to various shops to get the work done. Most of the late model guys are in these two groups. They aren't the scroungers who were doing this before the internet, back when all your car friends knew you were looking for your brand of parts, and when they ran across them they would tell you where to go get it. Now we have the internet, so finding things is easier and faster, but also people think a $75 intake is somehow worth $600 now, or that two door rolling shell is worth $10k and not $250 just because it has two doors and is old. The crazy group I fit into that has a bunch of cars, tons of parts, can swap things around and knows how to do absolutely everything from machine work and engine design to electrical, paint/body, and the simple stuff, and they do it because its stupid grin inducing fun. Dave Freiburger, Steve Dulcich, Mike Finnegan, you and a bunch of other crazy bastards we know fit into that group. I call our group the hard core gearheads. We drive what the others consider junk and only farm out the stuff that requires special equipment doing the rest ourselves. Lastly we have the factory correct guys, who want it just like it rolled off the showroom floor. Date coded hose clamps and vintage original air in the tires. They don't want it hot rodded at all, and I hear all the time how I ruined my cars because they have headers disc brakes, swaybars, and aftermarket wheels. Seems lots of these guys are judgmental, because they want it 100% correct. Thats their thing, and I get it. I don't like the 24" wheels or the negative camber 'stance' cars, but I see why they like it. Whatever you like is fine by me. However if you want to get cocky and talk about how fast your Neon is, well you should be aware of which type of gearhead you are speaking to. Nobody is better than the others, and the best part about cars is you can go with the amount of involvement you want to have. Its shades of gray rather than black and white. From the white light of a sunrise to the dark blue of the retreating night sky, it is part of the same landscape. Some of us might know more about cars than others, be able to do things others cannot, but that is simply because we wanted to know how so we learned how. If you want to drive around in a cool car and rarely work on it, the late models are for you. If you want to work on it all the time and learn more using your daily as a test mule, the old cars are cheaper for that. If you like having posters and walking around shows, by all means enjoy it. I like to look at girls but I do not want to marry one.. maybe a test drive here and there. lol. Cost figures in. The more you can do yourself, the less it will cost you. Paying others to work is more expensive than parts. That is why I can do so much, I have never had lots of cash, but I have plenty of time since I don't watch TV and do things other people do that soaks up time. I enjoy working on my old stuff, although I am slowing down quite a bit lately. I took a $300 rolling shell of a 68 LeMans and turned it into a cool driver for about $3500, because I have so many parts sitting around I traded for, came with projects, or I bought. I have a 98 Formula and a couple C10s I am stuffing LS engines into, so I can do the late model thing, but the cars after 1979 feel like an appliance to me. My friends like their Scat pack Challengers, LS era Camaros, Subarus, and mod motor Mustangs, and don't want to do what I do. They want bolt on stuff, and they don't mind paying for it. What you like I might not. I am no fan of Honda, the chevy engine is pathetic junk to me, and I prefer not to work on any mopars after 1973. The best part about all of this is how varied it all is. Cookie cutters are boring. Seeing 25 green Challengers all parked in a row is like, seen one you seen them all. There are no other 1965 GTOs like mine, despite it using mostly factory parts... just not all parts from 1965, but those green mopars turn heads. My dad has a 70 AAR clone in that green, you cannot drive it if you hate attention. If its a cool car I will wave if they look at me in one of my Pontiacs, and I am always willing to sit and BS about cars, hear about yours and check out your ride if I see you in a parking lot. Some guys aren't. Now outside this microcosm of gearheadery, we have the normies for whom a car or truck is a utility for point A to point B, and they have no clue how any of it works, only where to put the gas in and what shop to take it to for work. That is the vast majority of people. They simply do not care about cars like we do. They might get interested until they find out how much work it is, then the project they tore apart sits until they sell it to someone like us.
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  23. How can I convert my 4 door 70 Barracuda to only two doors?
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  24. At my home track in Kearney Nebraska, one of the RMRW tracks, there was a slant 6 dart called the Buzzin Half Dozen that ran very low 12s. He was turning LOTS of RPM with that thing and managed to make it relatively consistent. He raced in Super Pro with the delay boxes, trans brakes, and other electronics, he was definitely having fun
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  25. Sounds like a solid high 13 second car to me, not bad at all for what it is. I think I had more fun driving my 11-13 second cars around than I do the single digit street cars I've built. Just 20 years go 11s was quick on the street, 30 years ago it was ultimate hero status, and now with EFI and turbos nines are slow. Might as well throw junk together like we did when we were kids and go have a blast beating the snot out of it.
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  26. Good info. One thing people need to realize is that the ethanol we put in our cars is the exact same stuff, made the same way, as vodka, but at much higher proof. In my 1970 GTO, that has the original tank and hard lines under it, since 1994 when I bought the car it has only seen either 10% ethanol pump gas or E85/E100. I switched it to E85 and home made E100 in 2007. Last summer I pulled the 13:1 compression 455 out of it and put it in my 65 GTO, because the 70 has so many electrical and suspension issues its getting a frame off. The 70 has been driven daily to sitting for years with the same E85 in the tank since 2007. In April 2017 I pulled the top off the Qjet I converted to E85 after pushing 3' of snow off the hood and took a picture of the float bowl. I had not touched that carb since 2014 when I drilled a couple more passages, and I converted it to E85 in 2008. The carb is still spotless inside, and it runs very hard on whatever engine I put it on. The 65 GTO is my daily driver all summer, I keep the E85 in 55 gallon drums because I have to drive 2 hours south to Wisconsin to buy it, its not sold anywhere closer than that. Next year I will have my stills set up again to make fuel here, from tree sap and cattails. Using tree sap it costs me about ten cents a gallon to make fuel, I can drive all my vehicles and have more cash left for parts doing that... plus it makes more power, runs cooler, everything lasts longer, oil changes are less frequent because the oil stays clean. The 455 in the 65 GTO has 1000 miles on the oil change, and it is hard to tell where it is on the dipstick because its still clean. No carbon buildup in the engine on ethanol. I am the first to convert Qjets to E85, all the information everyone else have about it, such as Cliff Ruggles and Rocky Rotella, came from yours truly. I had a carb kit that was new in the box from 1978 that I bought back in 1987 but never used. The accelerator pump cup in it did not like ethanol. However, I have not found a carb kit in the last 30 years that had any problem whatsoever. That is where the accel pump thing came from, but that carb kit was the ONLY one I ever saw that had a problem, and I build lots of carbs. Doing two conversions right now for guys. Will be doing a Tri Power for a Pontiac soon. Everything sold today is compatible, even if they say it isn't, when they want to charge more to get it to say it is. If its good with 10% its good with 100%, I have been testing it for 12 years now, from daily driving to sitting long enough for it to evaporate. I use E85 to clean pistons, carbs, and all kinds of stuff. The reason I got into making ethanol fuel and converting carbs and EFI to run it is simple. Back in 2005-2014 87 octane gas was $3.50 to $5 a gallon where I live. Premium was $6 for a long time, and being a crippled Iraq war vet on a fixed income, I can't afford to drive my hold hotrods and muscle cars. So I looked into making fuel at home, at first thinking methanol, but that is not as easy to make, its very toxic, highly corrosive, and requires special parts and an after run oil to keep it from eating everything. Ethanol has none of that, and you can drink it, but the government gets irritable if you drink it because they are not getting their taxes, so don't do that. Most people confuse methanol and ethanol, they are very different, but are both alcohols. One will kill you with 10ml (methanol), the other you drink in bars all over the world. Beeswax is also an alcohol, and its nothing like the other two. Old cars love ethanol fuel as much as new cars. Raise the compression well above where you can run pump gas, and you get the same or better mileage with more power on ethanol. My 65 gets 15mpg now that I dropped the compression to 11.5:1 with a head swap, and it has low 11 second capability now. It got 15mpg with a 400 that had 7.7:1 compression and would run on any camel whiz 87 octane you threw at it, and ran in the mid to low 13s. getting more than 15mpg with that car is a problem because the aerodynamic drag is quite high, but a bigger engine with almost 200hp/tq more gets the same mileage on E85. The 70 GTO managed 20mpg with one of my Qjets and the 13:1 heads, and had more than enough power to run 11s despite being a 4100lb car with a highway gear and a stock stall converter. The power and drivability available with ethanol is very impressive. Once you try the stuff with a properly set up carb in your muscle car, you are not going to want to switch back.
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  27. Completely different fuels require completely different tunes and parameters. Thanks for the info on the nitro, and it does make sense due to how nitro burns and keeps making power for the entire power stroke. Its going to slam into the piston at BDC because its not done burning yet, so opening the exhaust valve sooner to bleed off the extra pressure and throwing more fuel at it to slow the burn makes perfect sense. Plus you get a nice big flame out of the zoomies which is always awesome. Running gasoline vs ethanol vs methanol vs nitromethane, all very different tuning requirements. Trying to get guys to realize how different it is running E85 to E100 vs gasoline is like pulling teeth on a rabid rottweiler. Going to nitro is a massive jump, and it is nothing like the other race fuels. Then you get into hydrazine and shit gets really strange really fast. Honestly, ethanol is the easiest fuel to tune and work with. Its happy place is a wide range of AFR, and it will run well from 15:1 to 5:1 AFR, but you lose power and mileage going outside the sweet spots of 8.5:1-10:1 for mileage and 7:1-7.5:1 for power. You have to have a wideband O2 to tell where the hell it is too, because there is no way you are going to read the plugs with no carbon on them. I am having a ton of fun building E85 carbs and engines for the street that run race gas only compression and drive around easily without all the overheating, loading up, and fouling plugs. Plus its cheap and I can use all my 60s era small chamber hardware on my later 455s.
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  28. I live in a rural area, its 22 miles one way from my house to the grocery store and if I have to do much running around that requires mere fuel. To get an electric car that can make that trip more than once at higher than 45mph costs $100k. Where I grew up is even farther, and a Tesla is going to have a hard time getting around in BFE Nebraska where there are hours of driving between towns. I like the idea of charging it at home with wind and solar, because I am all about making energy rather than buying it. Its why I make and run my cars on ethanol. However, a conversion to electric costs considerably more than my stills, fermentation, high compression heads, and even building a car from the ground up to reuse amortized parts. I don't buy new cars, I build old ones. Its more work for me, but that means I can use the limited funds for other stuff so I am inadvertently green. If it costs too much, I am not going to do it. If it causes problems with parts or other things, I am not going to do it. If it makes more power I am going to be very interested. Then we have the season ware are heading into now. We get over 200 inches of snow here, they salt the roads so heavily that a new vehicle is rusted out in five years if you drive it in winter. Corrosion is the biggest enemy of the electric car, as resistance builds up from corrosion and creates heat which wastes energy and can start the damn thing on fire. Replacing the battery, yeah its going to cost more to do just that than it does to rebuild an internal combustion engine. All the lithium and other components of those batteries need to be mined, not much can be recycled either. So its a net loss. I fly RC airplanes and the electric planes are much faster than the glow engines are, same with the electric cars, but we are not talking a small $100 brushless motor , we are talking large batteries and motors. Copper is going to be a premium, far more than it is now. Sounds good for the miners in the area, but damn thats a lot of waste to support electric cars that are mainly charged by coal fired power plants. So range, cost, corrosion, and battery life are the reasons I am not into electric cars, because they sure as hell are not slow. The Tesla that did Drag Week this year ran 10.40s and all he did was pull out interior parts. That is damn quick for something off the showroom floor. So yes they will run hard, but that is a $100k car. I can run faster than 10.40s for less than $10k with my old dinosaur Pontiac engines, so the bang for my buck just isn't there. I want a Prius though, not to drive, but to use as a power supply for my house and shop. I can charge the battery with the engine, wind, or solar, and the drive units can be used as PTO to run other things, like a sawmill or whatever else. So I can run my house and shop on the Prius battery, and run the engine on methane I make for damn near free. If I can find one cheap enough, with a decent battery in it, it will be gutted and turned into a power plant for the zombie apocalypse. Making my fuel is simply tapping some trees then adding yeast, or digging up cattails to use the starch in the roots then adding an enzyme to change the starch to sugar and adding yeast. Wait a week, then distill it, keep it out of direct sunlight and I have fuel as well as antiseptic, degreaser, and if you ignore the taste and we aren't encumbered with taxes/revenuers we have party time as well. I would rather run it in my car than drink it though. My GTO is an alcoholic, it loves the vodka.
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  29. I have crates with Qjets in them, more crates with Qjet parts, and I run them on daily drivers and hotrods, some are E85 some are pump gas. I am one of two guys who are converting Qjets to E85, and I have done it the longest, so I kinda know those things. I have somewhere around 15 or 20 Holley carbs from 600s for my dual quad Offy to the 1050 Dominator on my street strip toy. A couple Demon carbs too, the 850 mechanical secondary one is one of my best E85 carbs. Not a fan of the Edelbrock carb, not enough tuning range, they're always down on power, drivability sucks compared to Qjets and Holleys, and if its not similar to a stock 350 chevy you can't tune it easily to fit. Secondary opening rate is the big problem why they are down on power, you have to have a bunch of air valves laying around because they are weighted rather than having a spring you can adjust like a Holley or Qjet. I have been into EFI since I got a 92 F150 and owned my shop where I built hotrods on the side along with transmissions, engines, carbs, set up gears etc. Did some supercharged 5.0s in the 90s that ran relatively well. Several LS engines in trucks and a 98 Formula Firebird. In '16 I bought a FiTech Mean Street EFI that is good for 800hp, ran it for two years then took it off last year to tune some E85 carbs I did. It will go back on another car this year, not sure which one yet. Its a TBI speed density system, so its kinda limited compared to the port EFI. All up including the fuel system I built for it with a Walbro external inline pump was $1200, that is more than my 1050, Victor and electric pump cost me. Most of my carbs were used, so I got them anywhere from free to $250. The Demons and 1050 were new, and I really like those things. The nice thing about the EFI is being able to make adjustments without opening the hood and getting dirty. Unless you have a separate wide band O2 in the other collector, you have no freakin clue where its running for AFR on E85, because the unit will display what the O2 says in accordance with the CID parameter you put in. The way you make a speed density system run on ethanol is you increase the CID, now if you go up 30% in CID, you are massively over fueling it and wasting fuel, its more like 10%-15% more CID in the handheld to get the 7:1 -9.5:1 AFR that runs best on E85. It starts real nice in any weather and will idle without any input, so thats nice too. The other place the EFI shines is when you are trying to make an over powered turbo car go down an unprepped stretch of highway or track, you can pull power from it by changing the timing, boost, and other parameters and then ramp it in as you pick up speed and not blow off the tires. With a carb, that is all in your foot, so its much harder to do. The EFI will adjust to it on the fly, and you can change the tunes in seconds. Its a lot quicker than swapping barrel valves, power valves, jets, or whatever, and it stores all the info so you can tell what it did during any given run. It lets you see what its doing, remember it, and be able to go back and put a tune in that worked before. If you are on a budget, the carb is the way to go, if you are building a street machine to go stomp egos you can go either way. If you want to race no prep with lots of turbo power, the only way you can compete is with EFI unless you can dead hook on about any surface and aren't making so much power that you can blow the tires off at 100mph by thinking about it. ================================================================ There is a difference in fuels, ethanol is VERY good at pulling the heat out of the intake charge, it vaporizes easily at 173F, lower the pressure and that temp drops. Engines run on vacuum, so its lower pressure than atmospheric, and you can utilize that with ethanol to make more power on less fuel. Heating the fuel in the rail or after the regulator and return will make it vaporize instantly and completely, the gasoline in E85 takes its sweet time, but the ethanol is nearly instant. You can't do that with a carb because of the vents, heating the fuel just makes it boil in the float bowls, but with EFI you can run 60psi in the rail and it still doesn't boil at 240F, but you only need 200F fuel temp to make it work. That is easily achieved by running the fuel through part of the cooling system, and running a 200-210 thermostat.. it will make more power doing that on ethanol too.. you want the heat. Efficiency is power, the more power it makes on the least amount of fuel the faster you will go for longer. You want a complete burn, and making as much power with the least amount of wasted energy to heat as possible. Improve efficiency and you improve power. With a heated fuel system, EFI, over 13:1 compression, and decent aero body work, 30mpg from a 500hp engine is rather easy on ethanol. No blower or boost needed. Throwing boost at an engine means you have to throw more fuel at it too, I'd rather just squeeze it harder in the chamber without shoving more atmosphere in it. A port fuel system has about two maybe three inches between the injector and valve. A TBI system has much more distance, introducing the vaporized fuel earlier makes the charge more dense, pulls more heat from the intake, and it will make more power. Doesn't work as well with gasoline, but it too has a similar effect, on a smaller scale. To a certain extent throwing fuel at it will make more power on ethanol and methanol, because they have more O2 in them than gasoline does, along with fuel you're adding O2, so its going to make more power until its just too pig rich. Gasoline likes to run leaner to make power, make it fat its safer but will make less power. Make an ethanol engine fatter, it picks up power. Takes different thinking. EFI systems are mostly geared towards being bandaids for gasoline, because it likes to ignite when it feels like it rather than when the spark lights it, the poor latent heat of vaporization, and the atomizaton makes for large drops that burn slower. All of that is taken into account, and that is how we got the EFI systems of today. Carbs are still a great way to go fast or daily drive, the more you know about them the better they will be for you, and its all hands on stuff. You can never know too much about carbs and how they work.
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  30. An EMP is like a super massive alternator/generator. The reason it fries electronics is it induces current in every wire that cuts the magnetic waves, and its a massive amount of current. Millions of volts at least, electronics work on millionths of a volt, but the rest of the wiring, in the starter, alternator, harnesses, its all going to fry and arc between grounds if a few million volts with god knows how many amps behind it suddenly appears in the wires. If the car is not protected, its toast and will probably burn from the EMP caused by a CME (coronal mass ejection/sunflare) A Faraday cage can make the induced current go around up to a certain point, but they also bounce off the earths iron core. So you need it in the floor too. Fun stuff. I accidentally made my shop a Faraday cage, steel mesh in the concrete floors and steel siding around it, so whatever happens to be inside is probably going to be less effected, provided it doesn't burn down. As for fuel, its crazy easy to make ethanol. Tree sap, any sugar or starch, even waste paper can be used to make ethanol. Its simply vodka. Unlike what we have all heard, it doesn't harm anything, but you do need to put more of it in the engine, because it has a lot more O2 in the fuel than gasoline does. The 2.2 is for METHANOL, not ETHANOL. Methanol is very different, its made in a completely different process, is highly toxic, and takes ten times as much water as ethanol. You can drink the water after producing ethanol, but water used to make methanol is toxic. Methanol is NOT moonshine, ethanol is, the same stuff already put in gasoline all over the world... and they run it straight in Brazil. Methanol will kill you with ingesting 10ml, that is ten milliliters, not very damn much, like .1cc, and 100 proof ethanol you can drink quite a few shots without dying. I usually open up my carbs between 25%-30% for ethanol, which has a different specific gravity than gasoline and methanol. Just because the orifice is 30% larger doesn't mean its going to use 30% more fuel either. Lots of variables, compression, engine material, cam timing, etc. Sugar in water, with yeast, kept under 90F, without oxygen, and the yeast turn the sugar into vodka.. yeah same exact stuff we put in our tanks. Vodka made from corn, because we have billions of tons of the stuff, so why not make fuel from it. We don't eat that corn either... but what is left over feeds livestock much better than corn does, its DDGS if you want to look it up. I use tree sap and cattails to make mine. You get 500 gallons of fuel from one acre of corn. You can get 1000 to 10,000 gallons of fuel per acre from cattails. Trees are easy to tap and trees with the most sugar in the sap will give you the most ethanol/vodka. Sugar maples, birch, etc. You can run straight ethanol with 22:1 compression, all the way down to 5:1 compression. I run mine around 11.5:1 to 13:1 with my Pontiac 455s and 400s. It burns cleaner, leaving no black soot inside the engine, so your oil comes out looking new after 8000 miles, and there is no wear inside the engine after 500k to a million miles. Burns cooler, so you need less radiator capacity due to far less waste heat than gasoline. It keeps the entire fuel system spotlessly clean. Also it makes more power. Over 12:1 or so with iron heads it gets the same or better mileage than gasoline, because of the increased torque output. This is what I do, and have been doing it for over 13 years now. Check my videos, lots of engines on E85 over the last decade. E85 is 15% gasoline and 85% vodka. Crazy power.
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  31. I can't be around tobacco smoke, gives me migraines, nausea, and I end up spewing from both ends for three to four days. Not fun at all. So I can go to events now that there is no smoking inside. Swap meets are rarely useful to me though, since I am heavy into Pontiac. Its super difficult to find Pontiac parts at non Pontiac only swap meets. Can still get carbs, wheels, etc..
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  32. When you are working with small engines small reductions in weight stack up and make a big difference. My 400s and 455s make so much torque that they really don't notice most of the small things, but the small stuff end up being big in a slant six or an OHC Pontiac 6. If I could find one of those OHC 6s in decent shape for a decent price, I would do it up like this and drop it in something light so we can see what runs faster... all low buck of course. Slant 6s are lots easier to find. The leaning tower of power! My sister in law has a convertible early Dart with a slant 6, it sounds like a sewing machine, lots of fun to cruise it. Tiny little car so it moves ok, not faster than my GTOs, but they can roll 75-80mph in it if they dare.
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  33. There is a balance to fighting back and protecting yourself. However, they want you to cower and hide. They want you to try and protect yourself by laying low and doing nothing, it gives them carte blanche. Where your grey rock comes into play is obfuscating or hiding your movements, do not broadcast your true intentions. They will not stop rooting out all dissent, if you do not comply they will come after you, and hiding will not help you. You have to be prepared to fight back, when the opportunity presents itself and you must choose the battlefield. Not in some futile gesture like in DC last week. This has been in schools, universities and businesses. I had to deal with this bullshit in the US military starting back in the 1980s. My method is to have the opponent underestimate me. Be innocuous, I look like an old fat guy, gray beard, hair and all. I dress so you cannot see the muscle, so I look fat. I wear things most people will overlook, loose fitting black T shirt (or hoodie this time of year), ball cap, jeans/carpenter pants, and quality work boots. I like redwings. I go the same direction with my vehicles that I like to race, you'd never know by looking at them that they haul ass. We call them sleepers. The whole speak softly but carry a big stick. You want to hide that big stick and only bring it out when you absolutely have to. Be unobtrusive, unremarkable, and wait for the opportunity to present itself. If you want to get around and not be noticed, a silver or white beater is your best bet, those are the most popular colors for daily drivers. That beige champaign color on grandma's Buick works well too... nobody notices my 1970 GTO while I have it painted that color. Its a 455 powered GTO and nobody notices it, because of the color. You do not want to be the brightly colored frogs... the green frogs that blend in are just as dangerous to their prey.
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  34. Since the GTOs run on E85 and E100, with compression too high for pump gas even if I retard the timing, a carb that is set far too rich for gasoline, and no stations within a two hour drive that sell E85 which means the only fuel around here is in my 55 gallon drums at home, I carry 5 to 10 gallons of fuel in a can all the time. I change it out every year, but because whiskey and vodka do not go bad, I do it to change the gasoline which does go bad. I have maybe two more weeks of driving before its too cold for a car with no heater, and then in November the snow usually shows up. If I run out of fuel away from home, I have to call to get a ride back to get more fuel or my truck and trailer. I throw two barrel air cleaners too, but I go for distance. I have one for a 1050 Dominator but it won't fit under the 4" cowl hood, needs a 6-8 inch scoop. I would throw it but its still new and I might use it someday... lol
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  35. I don't really trust 40-55 year old valves with lots of spring pressure. If I am going back with mild stuff for a daily driver then sure, old valves work. The stainless valves I use in my Pontiac heads don't have the lip on the intakes and the exhaust is already smoothed, provided ya don't get too rambunctious with the valve grinder. I have a set of Pontiac heads from 1969, they are 62 casting and I have a virgin 400 block with the cast slugs in it. I am going to throw it together as a dirt cheap budget build and see what it will do with a hone and cleaning. 10:1 ish compression, RAIII sized cam from Summit, a set of used Comp 995 springs, and all the stock parts I have laying around. Then one of my E85 Qjets to top it off. Should be a fun little engine to stuff in something. Really don't want to break it, 400s are good blocks so no reason to throw rods into the sides, but I want to see what it will do Junkyard Jewel style, like your 318.
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  36. Oh and I would be buying all those QJets... I convert them to E85 and build them for friends. I love those things.
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  37. This is why I buy $20 (71 mustang fastback, yes seriously and I drove it home too) to $2000 cars that need rebuilt, rather than going to some lot or Ebay and spending tens of thousands on something I have to fix a ton of stuff or completely rebuild anyway. My 65 GTO was severely rusted, it was not even a good parts car when I got it for $1500, but its a real deal GTO and I have a sawzall and a welder. Three years of work, 22lbs of .023 mig wire, and about $15k in parts/materials and I have a fun driver that won't win any shows but its a blast all summer to roll around. No, most people will not take on a project that has rusted pinch welds so you can't put front and rear glass in it with the dash rusted away from the body and no floors, but my $300 68 LeMans was pulled out of a Nebraska pasture in '14 and is now a mid ten second street cruiser for less than $5k. I can do this, so I do it. I build drivers, a car I can take to the store and pick up groceries, drive in the rain, take on 1500 miles road trips having an insect genocide the entire time mashing bugs in the grill and windshield. I haven't bought a running driving muscle car since 2005, and that one needs a ground up rebuild, but its one of those cars that is exceptionally rare and desirable. I paid far less than it is worth, because it needs some work, but its numbers matching and still drivable. Before that it was 1994, and that was my 70 GTO and the $20 Mustang. I have gotten some for free, just haul it off because they want it gone, and I have turned some of them into drivers and street strip toys. I got the first one back in 1982 when I was 13. Man I worked my ass off that summer for that $450 67 Cougar. I still have it but haven't driven it since '87, however its close to being a driver again other things are priority right now. The thing is, you can probably do the work, but you have to learn how just like everyone else. The big thing is to not be afraid of doing the work, but to not half ass it. Tony is showing people what, how, and when to do things, and from what I can see dude knows what is going on. I can spot a fake or a halfwit easily, the booger and cat poop welds are a dead giveaway for the not so great guys. Take the time to learn it, dig in with an old car, collect the parts, and make it happen. If you don't waste time watching inane TV shows about who is doing whom to a laugh track, you will have plenty of time to rebuild the car. You can also bond with your kids, save money by keeping your daily going, and not be the guy in the minivan or crossover who looks longingly at my GTOs wishing he had one but his wife won't let him. Don't be that guy. Don't get an old car if you do not have the burning desire to drive it and the willingness to do what it takes, because you will take it apart, let it sit taking up space, then sell it at a loss to someone like me who will rebuild it in a couple months and start having fun with it. These things are simple to work on, but you can't just slap parts on it, you have to learn how and why they work and do what they do. That is just as much fun as driving it once its done.
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  38. What about when you run a resistor wire because points can't handle a full 12v for long? HEI has to have 12v to work right. I run breakerless conversions so I don't have to mess with the points every so often,and when I put them in I have to pull the resistor wire from the fuse block and replace it with a regular wire so I know I am getting enough voltage. Yeah I know Mopar uses the ballast resistor instead of a resistor wire, was it hooked up? I have a few of those distributors laying around, just in case the world goes TANGO UNIFORM or something. I am not opposed to them, but not having to mess with the points ever is nice. I hated putting points in the 318 powered 69 Charger my family has had since the 1980s.
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  39. I have never bought an old car done by someone else. I have had to cut away 'repairs' from the 60s, 70s, and 80s that were done poorly, particularly on my 65 GTO. The drivers side quarter had been smashed, they brazed another one on through the C pillar, leaving a 2" deep crevice they then filled with bondo. They didnt repalce the outer wheelhouse, just left the crushed one in there with a big chunk of the quarter still attached to it. So it had parts of two quarters sandwiched under the LeMans quarter they poorly tacked on. Luckily for me I found a Tempest out in the woods that had been hit by a falling tree with a quarter that only needed a patch on the lower rear, because nobody makes full quarters for 65 GTOs. That Tempest was a post car and the Goat is a hardtop, so I had to cut away the inner structure and turn it into a hardtop quarter. The GTO is my summer daily driver, not going to be flipped and its sure as hell not a show car, but it was not hacked together like what these flippers do. 25k miles of problem free driving since I finished it in 2016. The only time I have torn into it is to do upgrades like more power, overdrive transmission, and things like that. It was not even a good parts car when I got it, the rust was extensive. Now I have a 68 Firebird in a similar condition, but its going to be more race car than daily driver.
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  40. I started with a '67 Cougar way back in 1982 when I was 13. I still have it, but have not driven it since '87. Life got in the way after starting to repaint it in '86. Super easy to work on, distributor is up front, unlike my Pontiacs and small mopars, but finding Cougar body parts means scouring for them, not much in the way of repops made for a Cougar. Same with the '65 GTO/LeMans, only quarter panels, fender/doorpatches, and floor patches available for them. Makes it more difficult to find certain things like door shells and full quarters. Those are easy to work on, but some stuff requires scrounging, which is ok for me since that is the old school way I do things and its cheaper for me that way. Having to scrounge everything is going to suck, no way am I touching an AMC or a Hudson. I am not a masochist. The Cougar isn't as popular as the Mustang and camaro, so they are usually cheaper. The LeMans is the same car as a GTO but with different trim and engine, you can make a LeMans run just as hard as a GTO and no need to pay for the 242 vin (LeMans starts with 237). The LeMans is lots cheaper than a GTO unless the GTO is really ragged out and mostly missing everything. My 65 GTO rolling shell was extremely rusty for $1500 and a 65 LeMans post in grandma fresh not driven since 81 or so was also $1500 with a very nice interior for the GTO. I picked up a 68 LeMans rolling shell for $300 in '14. Lots of parts available for a 68. The cars with no drivetrain and interior are fine for me, I have 20 engine and transmission cores sitting around to build, some on stands ready to go in, and lots of other parts needed to take a vehicle that has not been driven since the Reagan administration and make it a driver for cheap. It might be a bit too daunting for your first project, so at least get something that is all there even if it doesn't run or you will be hunting for all kinds of strange stuff, like brackets, mounts, and then figure out how to run it all. I run into that when I do a different year that I have not had before, so that 65 LeMans also showed me where the factory put things, so that was useful too.
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  41. It has more to do with port length than it does with the stroke when the engines are all similar CI. Also the ratings were kinda fudged, its incredibly easy to make 500+ ftlbs with a Pontiac or Olds, using factory parts. Throw compression at it like A, E, or C heads on a later Olds that came with J heads (not as much dish in the pistons and smaller chambers) or '67-'70 2.11" intake valve D ports with a Pontiac and 600ftlbs is real easy to do, but you need E85 or race gas. The longer stroke makes more torque, but the Buick makes up for it with a larger bore which makes it mostly moot. CI is CI. Longer ports means more torque in the bottom RPM, short ports means it needs RPM to make power. The Buick has a long port like the Pontiac, but the Pontiac has a higher velocity. The nailheads were extreme examples of port length and low RPM.
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  42. A mopar nut I know back home had a 413 in a T bucket with the cross ram on it. He also had a 440 Cuda with a tunnel ram, the first street legal car in the area to run 11s in the early 80s. Seriously cool intake, but man does it take up room.. lol
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  43. I kinda know the Qjet. Considering I am the go to if you want one that runs on E85, I should know them. I pull the main well plugs out, tap the holes, stake and epoxy set screws into the holes. Also I redrill the needle seat inlet to .152" so it flows more fuel. I prefer the inlets with windows in the sides, but really any of them will work. You have to make a new seat with a check ball when you do that, but it works very well. I do that on gas and ethanol Qjets. The added heat for the float bowl helps atomization with the Qjet on E85, thats why I can get better mileage and power from them than the AFB and Holleys, but man can you make a Holley throw the power at WOT.... mileage goes out the window though. My 455s will drain the bowl on Qjets or Holleys in first gear at WOT with a stock mechanical pump, or too small of an electric, plus it needs to be mounted lower than the tank and by the tank because they don't suck very well. Moving that column of fuel through the lines with a car that will cut a 1.6 60 ft will need a pump behind it. 7psi works pretty good and will keep the bowl full with the other mods I mentioned. Its not that the carbs can't handle it or the engine uses more fuel than it should its about overcoming the G force of the car leaving and pulling hard in each gear. 455s have a little bit of grunt to them... like 500ftlbs just above idle to 5000rpm is very easy to achieve. That works for gas or ethanol, and my 65 GTO has a Qjet on it right now I have been getting tuned for E85. The pump is too small so it falls off in 2nd gear, but driving around its great. Its one of those really cheap fuel pumps with 1/4" inlet and outlets. Its not set up for drag just street driving, I have larger pumps if I am going to run it hard. Right now I am getting it to all work correctly. Each one is slightly different and it takes some time to get them right on E85. Much easier on gasoline, and you don't need a wideband O2 for gas, you can read the plugs if its not burning your eyes. The later carbs like you have in the video have the APT system in them, that allows you to adjust part throttle and idle air externally. Its handy. Things I do to all of them are throttle shaft bushings, pulling the emulsion tubes from the main body to clean them, sometimes open the restriction on the bottom, and if I can get a smaller float for it I will run it so it takes up less space in the bowl. The brass and plastic floats work fine with ethanol, and I haven;t found any modern parts that are not compatible. Really old accel pump cups don't last long, but all the new ones made in the last 30 years work fine.
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  44. I have a 65 Tri Power intake I want to put on my 65 GTO, the center carb base on the Tri Power manifolds, except for 66, are smaller than the ends, so they require that base plate for the carb. All the other Rochester 2 barrels have the same pattern as the ends. Makes it so much fun. Since I will be using regular 2v carbs I have had for years on the ends, its going to be mechanical secondary. No worries, my 455s don't bog unless the air valve on a Qjet has no tension, setting the idle/float level is the hard part due to very high vacuum. Its in the works for this winter, if I can get the center base. So we might be doing them at the same time. Not much carries over between the Holley and the Rochester, other than they are carbs, but it will be fun to watch you build the Ramcharger.
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  45. I've built a lot of engines, installed a lot of cams. Sometimes you get one that goes flat on ya. You can do everything right, and shit happens, it eats a lifter and lobe. I've soaked them, put them in dry but lubed, molyB, comp/crane/lunati break in, and even went a bit light on the break in time with one (that cam is now 27 years old and runs great). I've had all the big names and the no names flatten a lobe since the 1980s. The problem for me is a roller costs $1000 more than the flat cams. I have two rollers, one solid one hydraulic out of 20 vintage engines in my yard. Then I have an LS sitting here with a lifter mushroomed so I can't get it out except by dropping it through the bottom.. it ate that poor thing, and now the metal is all through the 6.0. Roller cams can go bad too. Its something you have to deal with and expect it can happen when you play with engines. If people do not realize that mechanical things can fail even when brand new right out of the box, well then they are ignorant of machines. Its a lot better in some ways than it was 50 years ago, but in other ways its a lot worse too. Bad metallurgy, crap remans on alternators/starters/etc, so many things can go wrong. Its part of doing this kind of thing. If it happens to you every time, chances are you are doing it wrong. Once in a while, is to be expected. If you're 100% successful, then you aren't doing very much.
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  46. Its also like tolerances stacking. If you go to the high side on everything, something is not going to fit at the end. If you improve 1 thing 100% it isn't as great a change as if you improve 100 things 1%. Coupled with the Pareto Principle the outcome from all the small things adds up. The less power your engine is making the bigger the difference all these things make. 1000ftlbs of torque is going to be less effected by these changes than 100ftlbs will. Thats also why 100lbs off an 8.50 car doesn't have the same effect as 100lbs off a 16 second car. That kinda thing works both directions, but not how ya might think, the return on investment gets smaller, but as you get into the more stratified arena of ludicrous power those tiny things add up to precious tenths. Lots of variables in play with machines, and every little bit helps even on the big nasty ludicrous power engines. Exponential vs linear really messes with people, like the difference between the power required to go 100mph vs 200mph vs 300... The power requirement goes near vertical the faster yo go, so cd improvements net larger results than power does. I love math related to cars. Funny since I failed algebra twice, but that teacher had no idea how to figure volume of a cylinder in cubic inches.. I do. bore x bore x stroke x .7854 x number of cylinders
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  47. People keep sending me links to cars.. I have like 52 vehicles total, at least that I can remember off the top of my head. I have about 13 that actually run at the moment. I have something like ten keepers, with different uses/directions for the build. All but two are V8s and most are older than 1979. Its why I have 13 acres of land, a 32x48 shop, and a driveway that has a loop so I can pull the trailer in then back it to the shop and unload the non running vehicle almost to the lift. I don't even want to think about how many gallons of fuel, oil, etc... This summer I will be parting the junk out and selling some I got just to get running and flip... stupid Mustangs.... Have a few LS engines to swap in, a couple tube chassis to build, and a frame off Cutlass to finish for a friend. Gonna be a busy year, so I have a new camera to video most of it.
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  48. Make the most of what you have, maximize its strengths, and minimize its weaknesses and you will go fast for cheap. That is why you do not take an iron head 455 with a 6000 RPM limit due to airflow and try to spin it to 7500 with a 4.56 gear like you do with a small block. Its not designed to do that, so you will go slow. Very slow... You can't run a 2.73 gear behind a 273 or 318 with a stock converter and hope to run 11s on the motor either. Its not designed to work that way, you need more RPM with the small engines. Factory parts are trick parts, you can do so much with them when you start with the right engines and improve their ability to do what they are designed to do. Some engines have crap heads, tiny cams, poor intakes, some have better top end parts, what you start with will dictate what you have to do. Chevys need the aftermarket, unless you find some of the unobtanium parts like L88 or ZL1 stuff, garden variety chevys make garden variety power. They need all those parts.. lol. The 351 Cleveland is an amazing engine. With a tiny cam the 4V made more power than any small block until the LS1 came out in 1997. Throw some more cam timing at it and you have 500 then 600 hp real easy. HUGE ports that like to rev. They are hard to find because they were only made from 1970 to 1974 in the states, Australia has lots of them though, if you don't mind shipping stuff from there. The 4Vs I have are the only small blocks to ever scare me. The 65 GTO I drive daily all summer has had a frame off, not many aftermarket parts available like fenders, doors, full quarters, so I had to scrounge and make parts to rebuild it. I did all the work to rebuild it. It has a front 1.25" swaybar from a WS6 Trans Am, a rear bar from a 70 GTO, 3 turn lock to lock steering box from a mid 90s Jeep Grand Cherokee, I put disc brakes on the front from Summit, and some UMI rear control arms because they are cheap and stiffer. It has a 700R4 trans, 455 with 11.3:1 compression from '67 vintage 428 heads(670), and a 12 bolt rear from an ElCamino that I put 3.42 gears and a posi carrier into. I know what will fit from other vehicles that is an upgrade. It runs E85 and I use it to tune carbs I convert with wide band O2 sensors in the header collectors. It also has a hidden stereo with 12" subs, two decent sized amps, and it sounds real good for being in a rattly old 65 GTO. Its a very fun driver that handles great, gets good mileage, and makes silly grin inducing power. I have about $15k and 3000 hours in the GTO, it was extremely rusty. Now on the other side of what I do. I have a virgin 400 block on a stand, I am considering doing a ring and bearing, hone the cylinders, then bolting up some stock 72cc 69 vintage heads (62s), run a RA III cam, a stock intake with an E85 Qjet I have done, and the only performance addition that isn't a factory sized piece will be headers. That is because manifolds that flow well to fit the X body 72 Ventura I plan to stuff this thing into are much more expensive. Headers aren't cheap either, but I found some used for $200. A Th350 trans and a posi carrier for the 8.5" 10 bolt rear with 3.08 to 3.42 gears stuffed in it. GM made a torque converter for the L88 Corvettes that stalled higher than a stock one, they sell for $100-$150 at any trans shop just ask for the Th400 High Stall, and it will fit both the Th400 and Th350 trans. The car came to me with no gas tank, so I have to put a fuel cell or something into it, and I will use an electric pump because mechanical pumps have a hard time keeping up with an 11-12 second Pontiac. Otherwise it will be as many factory parts as I can use. All up I will have around $2000 in the entire build, depending on which wheels and tires I put on it. There is also a low buck stock rod forged .040 over piston 400 on a stand that has been in 7 vehicles I own. It has gone 12s in a 3700lb 79 Firebird with the 670 heads on the 65 GTO right now. It was a daily driver engine in the 70 GTO, 76 C10, 65 GTO, 71 Formula, and gets moved around into various vehicles often. I have some heavily ported RA III heads (48) that are fresh and milled to make almost 12:1 on a 400 with flat top slugs(they are 13:1 with a 455 at zero deck with 8cc valve relief pistons). That engine with a RA IV cam and some roller rockers I picked up cheap might find its way into the Ventura or maybe an Opel GT sitting in my yard. Not a max effort build by any stretch, more of an exercise in what can be done with a 400 on the cheap using reworked stock parts. $800 for the shortblock 25 years ago, $1700 to have the heads worked, and at most $500 for all the little stuff. Only one of my engines is a full on, only the block, timing cover, and cam retaining plate are stock the rest is aftermarket build, its a 400 block stroked to 467 that makes 700hp@6500 on 92 octane and likes to idle at 1200rpm. At the rear wheels it has made 520ftlbs@3000 rpm with 4 bent valves, so its not an engine that starts making the power upstairs, its making it everywhere. Its near the limit of the stock block so no spray or boost allowed. You can go completely stupid like this engine, but its rather rough on you driving it around, NA pump gas making that much power is a radical engine, so much more comfortable doing it with boost. I like cubes with a long stroke, they make lots of power down low so you can run a highway gear behind them and still haul ass. 11 second daily drivers are lots of fun, single digit cars are fun too but not as daily drivers. regardless, cars are tons of fun and I like throwing parts around and seeing what works best for cheap.
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  49. Its crazy to me how you have far less snow than I do in the UP.. My sleeping bag is a -30F bag I got from the US military. It works quite well, except I barely fit in it now. My shoulders have gotten much wider over the years from hauling heavy stuff. It looks a lot like here in northern Michigan in your videos. Same trees, same kinda terrain, except we are buried in snow right now and have been since November Its been kinda warm for the last three weeks, in the teens and 20s F. Barely any ice banks on the big lake this year. I have seen them stretch out 400m before.
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  50. No throwin mah Qjets! Maybe.... Just maybe, in a perfect world, where people actually listen then go look and learn, we can get people to understand these things called carburetors enough that they aren't wasting fuel and not making enough power. Its simple physics at play, which means they are low tech, but some can be quite complicated. Knowing how it works is paramount to knowing how to make it work right, fix it, and make the most power. Carbs are siphons with a pump here and there, its all about velocity and pressure variables. I love these things despite all their limitations and strange stuff they can do.
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  51. I'm not a mopar guy, but I reworked the throttle and kickdown linkage on my dad's 426 wedge in his 64 Sport Fury so it would work with the dual quads someone put on it. You can't look that up in a book, you have to understand what needs to happen, what does happen, and then figure out how to make it function correctly within the confines of what needs to happen so it works right. I see stuff in my head, then I try to make it reality with metal, wood, composites, or whatever. I picked that up from my grandpa, he could make almost anything from wood, just about anything from metal, and he never had a plan on paper. All I need is the vision in my head. I'll end up doing some stuff a couple times before its right, that is going to happen no matter what. Filming it, hell I have no idea, that takes a different skill set. I'm learning that though.
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  52. The new cam sounds pretty good. That thing rips pretty good for just a 318. I have air bags in the rear coils of my GTOs, they don't have a wheel hop problem or spin too much, though I can destroy the tires easily if I want because 455s are like that. I can use it to fine tune the suspension, and for when I want to carry something heavy in the trunk like tool boxes, fuel, etc. With the A body GM coil spring rear ends an air shock moves the weight point, essentially changing the fulcrum, and that causes a host of other issues including wheel hop. Another thing I have on my '65 that helps a lot with twisting the body on launch is a rear sway bar and UMI tubular control arms. The stock arms are rather flimsy, the boxed arms for a factory rear bar are better, but tubular arms have removed any notion of axle tramp. You can see some older GM cars lift the drivers front wheel high in the air on launch, and some leave nice and flat, that is the swaybar in action on the flat leaves. My leaf spring '79 F body has high rate WS6 springs, they're intended for cornering on a Trans Am or Formula. They do not hop and the body only twists a small amount, the problem with the Firebird (and the parts car for Firebirds a pos Camaro) is the front subframe flexing at the body mounts. The camaro has hop problems because they have lower rate springs and they handle even less well than one might expect compared to the Formula and Trans Am. The air shock or helper bag works pretty good on the camaro with its weaker springs and softer suspension.
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  53. Bangshift is full of really cool guys who live, eat, sleep, and breathe cars. Good to hear they helped ya out.
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  54. Tony is a mopar guy, and he knows those things very well. I am heavy into Pontiac with a bit of Ford, so I know where to go if I want to sell or buy parts for those. I am more into building these days, 30 years ago I was selling parts to pay for my builds, but anymore I prefer to build nice looking daily drivers and street machines. Anyone can do it if they can take a car apart and have a spot they can store the parts until they are sold. A junkyard has hundreds or thousands of vehicles, guys like Tony and I have a dozen at most, but anyone can do it with a single car. Particularly if they part 4 doors which use most of the same parts as two door muscle cars. That was my thing in the 80s. It was much harder back then, now I can post something online and its usually gone in hours if not minutes. I have to be quick to get parts I want, and if its not in the first two to five minutes, someone else buys them. Its only when someone is asking stupid money for a common part that it doesn't sell. You put a good price on it and its gone. The guy who wants $600 for a factory iron intake from a '69 400 is nuts, because those are everywhere for $75 and very common, most don't care about a date code and those who do know they can get one for $75. $300 for a factory Tri Power is a decent price without the carbs and linkage. Complete but needing rebuilt its minimum $900 for the 65-66 units. It depends what it is, the condition, and what it fits. Its really easy to do this with the internet now. All you gotta do is be willing to cut the thing up after taking it apart carefully. However, when its in decent drivable shape and someone cuts it up for parts, that is just sad when it could be built into something cool. A 74 Duster is meh.. a 78 Camaro is even more meh. A rust free two door 60s GM A body or mopar E, A, or B body even without being one of the big engine cars would be very sad to cut up. I've rebuilt cars that were so far gone nobody else would even consider them, and they aren't even good parts cars. The only car I cut up for my 65 GTO build, which was REALLY bad, was a Tempest that had a tree fall on it and sat in the woods for 30 years. The parts I needed were in good shape, so we cut the car up with a sawzall and carried it out by hand. I got about $4500 worth of parts for the Goat from a $300 wreck. If you saw my GTO build, you'd think I am nuts. Wait until ya see the 68 Firebird I am building... it makes the GTO at its start look minty.
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  55. People wonder why I am so heavy into Pontiac. Massive interchange between all the engines, from the 326 to the 455 and all the old engines, most of it will physically bolt on. Then they wonder why I have ten (6 Formula and 4 Trans Am) Firebirds, four GTOs, and five LeMans two doors. Why do I need a pile 350s along with all the 400 and 455 cores? Because all the stuff other than the pistons will fit a 400, and the 455 needs a different main journal crank in addition to the pistons. I have piles of head bolts, front drives, and all the other stuff that comes with parts cars that I need to put an engine in a rolling chassis. People give away 350s, and they can make good power too, just not like a 455 can. I run the old fasteners through the bead blast cabinet, its faster than the wire wheel and cleaner for me too. I do them at the same time as the valve covers and other pieces. It still takes up lots of time, but I have also pre cleaned all the stuff I need to build four more engines, and its sitting in boxes. When you do this as much as I do, you get to know exactly what you need for every build. Many of the cars I own were bought as rollers, or non running. My daily driver 65 GTO was a rusted out hulk that wasn't even a good parts car when I started. It needed everything, and I found a granny fresh 65 LeMans that hadn't been driven since 1982 in Flint Mi for $1500. It provided the interior and a bunch of small stuff. Now that LeMans is going to be a gasser, its not scrap if you build it. Going from scratch, finding every little piece is going to suck. If you know what you need, that is a huge head start, if you have no clue you better be good at fabrication. I like Pontiac because cubes make it easy to go fast. A $2700 455 with stock rods can push a 4000lb car into the 11s with a 3.08 to 3.42 rear gear. Been there done that in the 1990s and no nitrous was needed. Imagine that engine in a 2100lb car with enough tire to hook the grunt and a taller gear to harness it longer... How to get it in the 2100lb car? Better know exactly what it needs and what it doesn't, and know how to not only weld, but how to shape metal. I like how the exhaust ports point downward rather than straight out, so I have no need for fenderwell headers unless I raise the engine a bunch. Besides, they are the best sleeper engine ever, because it can look like a 301 but really have 540 cubes under the hood. The 68 LeMans has a 400 stroked to 461 with Edelbrock heads in it, low buck used parts for cheap power, but I had to fabricate an alternator mount for it. None of the brackets I have, not currently being used on cars, would fit those heads. I made the front bumper and hood from fiberglass, pulling molds from the steel parts. That car is similar to the bottle rocket, being mainly scrounged parts and has home made/fabricated stuff all over it. It was a $300 rolling shell I pulled from a Nebraska pasture in 2014, and turned into a street strip / summer daily driver with a 400/Th350/3.08 posi in 2015 for all of $3000, then I put the 461 in it this spring. Its silly amounts of fun, and thanks to having a big pile of all the stuff needed to throw an engine in, it took me all of a month to go from rolling shell to driver. Without all that stuff, or having to change everything to make some other engine work, it might take forever. Having a pile of engines and cars sitting around takes space though, so whatever you do, if you have only one car, don't lose or throw away all the stuff you need to put the engine back in. I have been building Pontiac and Ford engines since the 1980s, that means I know them very well. So well I often think I forgot to do something because I have done it so many times before, was that a 25 year old memory of torquing the rods and mains or a week old memory???
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  56. Joker, I will be making a video showing how to build the compost pile heater, and how to produce methane with it later this fall. If you want to do it, start getting woodchips, sawdust, grass clippings, enough water proof material to line the bottom, some fencing panels that will make at least a 20'x20' circle, 600 feet of 2" plastic sprinkler pipe, and two of the 275 gallon square plastic tanks, or a large tank with a removable lid to make the methane. I usually put around 275 gallons of water into them, so a tank to hold that much will be needed, no use in wearing out your well pump, collect rain water from the roof of your shed. You mentioned it the other day in a video. It will be towards August or September when I do it, I don't need to heat anything until October. I'm trying to order a sawmill so I can make lumber and get plenty of sawdust, and later this year I will probably get a 3 point PTO driven woodchipper for my tractor too. Then I can make heaters without having to travel to get the wood. All I have to do is clean up my forest every year.
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