Friday, December 25, 2015

Headlight Ideas

What if I changed the headlights on the car to look like this:



Junichi's car is awesome.  I hope he doesn't mind that I have a few pictures of his car.



His car used to look like this:



The headlights here would cure my headlight woes a little cheaper.  Some people like the headlights like Junichi has and some don't.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Work Work Work

I've been working so much that I haven't been able to do a thing on the car.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

The Block is Decked and Lifter Bushings Installed

The 351 Cleveland block came back from the CNC machine shop today.  I had lifter bore bushings installed and aligned them with the camshaft centerline by a Rottler F79A CNC machine. The machinist asked for lifters, so I bought what I liked, which were the Crane Cams hydraulic roller lifters. 


The Crane Cams lifters pictured above are nicely made with precision bodies and plungers. 


Here's the block, decked with lifter bore bushings installed.


Here are the lifter bore bushings, honed to 0.001" clearance.  There are 0.060" oiling holes in the lifters clocked to the oil galleries.


The block deck was squared to the crank centerline.  Apparently the block deck was up to 0.006" out of square!  The machinist also milled the top of the block walls for me, which was not requested but provided.  I like that kind of service a lot.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Just working

I haven't had a lot of time to work on the Pantera lately.  I have started to finalize the engine parts list and will start to buy parts.  I already purchased a set of Crane hydraulic roller lifters for the engine and the block is at a shop being CNC machined for lifter bore bushings as well as being decked and measured.  I plan to pick up the engine and purchase the rotating assembly, leaving only honing and a few misc. items to do at a machine shop. 

I'm definitely planning to go with electronic fuel injection right from the start.  I'm not scared by it, especially given the great new technology out there. 

The Mendeola was fit, mounts created, and is being sent back to Mendeola for evaluation of the necessary changes.  If Mendeola decides to make the necessary changes and cast a bellhousing, there should be a good alternative to the ZF available soon.