Our recent trip to the mountains
Just thought I would post a few pics of a trip we recently took in our 46 coupe. Due to covid, we haven’t really been able to go anywhere far off for several months, like everyone else, and my wife and I were anxious to see some scenery.
We have been to the Pigeon Forge area several times on the motorcycle and love the area for sight seeing. We both love the mountains. I’m not interested at all in the typical tourist stuff that seems to fill up the area, like getting shot out of a giant slingshot or being spun at high speed until I puke. We love the beautiful high vistas and the curvy mountain roads. When we found out that there is a car show in northern Georgia that is put on by the same folks that do the Emerald Coast Cruizin in Panama City Beach, we decided to kill two birds with one stone.
To get the old coupe ready, I had to repair a small leak on the master cylinder cover that turned out to be a bad gasket and a little rust build up on the gasket surface of the MC. Also, had a bad connection on the right taillight. Checked the fluids and tires and she was ready to go.
A little introduction to the old car before I get into the trip. I actually bought this car as an unfinished project car about 28 years ago when I was married to my first wife. The chassis work that came under the car was really, really bad. I trashed everything but the frame rails and rebuilt the chassis quite literally under a shade tree using my Dad’s welding truck. All I had was a drill press and a grinder for 95% of the fab work. I did have occasional access to a lathe, but not very often. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on it, so all the parts came out of a back woods junk yard that my second wife called the red neck mall.
She helped me put the car together while we were dating and we have been driving and enjoying it for about 25 years. My kids grew up riding in the back seat, so I never put a finished interior in it. I wanted them to enjoy it too and didn’t want to be constantly fussing about the interior. The back seat is a Cadillac Deville leather job and still looks good for what it is. The European smooth monochrome look was the fad when I built the car and I wanted to rebel against that, so I went for the resto-rod look. I think it’s timeless and looks just as “in style” now as it ever did. It even has rubber covered running boards. We drove it in black primer for a couple of years before I painted it.
The chassis is typical street rod stuff. Mustang II front end done the old school way. I actually cut a MII front crossmember out of the MII and grafted that to the 46 chassis. It still has the stock strut rods, although I don’t really like them because they make running exhaust harder. The front brakes are Granada rotors with Thunderbird calipers on Chassis Engineering brackets. Carrera coilovers in the front and junk yard anti-roll bars front and rear. The front sway bar is a GM metric part and the rear is a 2nd Gen F-body unit.
The rearend is a 9” Ford with Explorer disc brakes. The springs are some kind of parallel leaf springs that I found in the junk yard. Over the years, I’ve added and subtracted leaves several times. What I have is fair compromise, but not ideal. This is the second 9” that has been under this car. The first one turned out to be bent bad and I replaced it with another one. Rear gears have been 3.25’s or 2.75’s. The 2.75’s are in there now for a poor man’s overdrive. They’ve been in there ever since we did the Power Tour in 2015.
Engine started out as a 383 stroker with 3x2’s, but that motor overheated too many times until I finally killed it and I never got around to redoing it. I had a low mileage Goodwrench crate engine with a very mild Howards retro roller cam conversion and stuck that in the car. Performer intake, Q-jet carb and recurved HEI. Pretty much the equivalent of a 1970’s era 1 ton truck motor. Nothing to write home about for sure. I do miss the 383 and hope to add another one soon. She’s a big, ole heavy girl and needs more gear and motor, but that’s another story for another day.
The trans is a TH350 with a shift kit and extra clutches in the clutch packs and came out of my grandfather’s old station wagon. He’s the one that had it built that way. I had it freshened up many years ago. It was behind the 383, too. Shifter is a B and M ratchet unit and I use it a lot with the crappy rear gears. Around town, I often leave it in 2nd and drive it like a Powerglide.
I eventually fixed the cooling issue that killed the 383 with a big Griffin Rat Rod series aluminum radiator and a very high output Cooling Components slim line fan (about a 60 amp motor), along with the solid state fan controller that Cooling Components sells for their fans. I still can’t run the AC in heavy traffic, but in spite of insane traffic in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg (I actually saw a lady with a walker moving faster than we were!!), as well as many long ( 15+ miles) mountain road pulls, I never saw it get over 205 and it never puked. Most of the time it stayed under 200.
Here are some pics of the car from several years ago before it picked up the “driven for several years” patina. I even included a shot of the old 383.
https://i.imgur.com/YusUqI9.jpg?1
https://i.imgur.com/HFU4Xiw.jpg?1
https://i.imgur.com/wewc2jo.jpg?1
