Good Art for Bad Eggs. Marc Nischan .com presents lowbrow art from the trenches of pop culture.
V-8 NIGHTMARE: The Mad Thrash
Well dear reader, if you're still with me on page 12 or whatever, you have no doubt seen that I lovingly documented the process on this car with the obsessive zeal of a new parent. Yeah, well, I'm in a hurry now, so the hell with all that! I even put the wife to work!
Suddenly, June was only a couple of months away and I had to get this flea circus on the road. I had started The Mad Thrash to get this heap running. Exhaust was the next piece of the puzzle. Grabbed from the parts bin were some swap meet ram's horn manifolds. I called up Southfield Exhaust and set up an appointment. Me and Jeff (drummer for the Tarantulas and himself the owner of a fine '65 GTO) got up early one morning and back-streeted it to the shop using his jeep for a tow vehicle. Got a lot of funny looks from the morning commuters (there was no sheetmetal on the car from the windshield forward).
They did a pretty good job for a reasonable price, especially considering that there were some pretty gnarly bends and twists for them to engineer. I got yer basic aluminized custom dual exhaust and a couple of Flowmasters. I'm not sold on the Flowmasters because they sound like a motorboat, all "blub blub blub blub." Kinda loud, too. I know, I know, "They're supposed to be loud!" but this thing sounds like a mud-bogger or something.
I put on a trans cooler, and a jillion other little parts and mounts and crap I had to make. I made a battery holder from some angle stock, an old belt, and a junk bumperette that was sitting around.
I learned a lot along the way. Foremost I learned that aluminum intake manifolds should ship with Helicoils. I mean, why try to hide it? Just put some in the box with the manifold and give me my receipt and a firm handshake and look me in the eyes and growl "Son, as you walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Stripped Threads, ye shall fear no evil for the Helicoil will shepherd you. Stay strong, son. Drill straight and stay strong."
I have put a half dozen Helicoils in that manifold.
Now, bear in mind that I got it used, so those threads had been abused by some mullet (it had to be a mullet because the manifold used to be painted yellow... which, as many of you know, is a mullet color... at least ever since the 5.0 Mustangs came out).
I still hadn't bent the gas lines, so the lawnmower gave up it's gas can so I could get the car started. I had this ancient Quadrajet that I got for free and I bolted it on and Jeff came over to help me get her going.
Now, I should tell you at this point that my wife is, at all times, prepared for disaster. More concisely put, she is posessed of a talent for predicting disaster. She can predict disaster anywhere. She knows if you're going to poke your eye out, or decapitate youself, or wind up a vegetable that she's going to have to take care of for the rest of her life so you better put your goddam seatbelt on I don't care if you're only going a block to the 7-11 because her Dad was in an accident going across a parking lot and if he wouldn't have had his seat belt on he would have been seriously injured and her Mom would have had to take care of him for the rest of her life... You understand.
Well, we filled the carb full of gas and guessed where the timing should be and tried to get that engine to fire. And the flames are shooting out of the carb and it's backfiring and dying and we're trying for an hour to get it to run, and Jen is standing on the porch with a fire extinguisher pointed at my head the whole time. I'm like "Don't shoot that thing unless the car is actually on fire!" because I could tell that deep down inside, she really wanted to use it.
The Q-Jet ran real sickly, but I think it's because we blew out the power valves with the backfiring, or maybe the old Q-Jet was just cooked from sitting, because the engine wouldn't run for more than a minute and it wouldn't rev up. So, I parted with a few more dollars and got myself a chiny - not shiny, chiiiiiny! - Edelbrock carb! That Mouse fired right up and ran like a noisy clock! Whooooo Hoooooo!!!!!!!
