Hey Art. Thanks again. When and if they air it I'll certainly provide the link to it IF, I don't come off as a complete idiot. A normal idiot id OK, LOL. I'll keep an eye on it for sure.

Mark

I don't think I've even seen one of these before. Is that the stance it will keep with the body on the chassis, or is this before the suspension?

Hello Jeremy. That is pretty much what it will stay as. The suspension is all done. The only thing I might change at some time in the future is to go to a custom tubular front straight axle versus the dropped beam factory axle. But the more I look at these last pics the more I like the beam axle. It gives it a solid full mean look. The tube axle tends to look more spindly, thin. My car does not follow some of the more trendy "Street Freak" styling, which is sky high front ends and overall raised all around look, I'm keeping it closer to the normal car height. Just raised a little. It'* a look I prefer. Since the car is so big to begin with, I want to keep the "large presence" of the car to stand out.

Mark

Art, I'm sorry I forgot to answer your second question on what'* next. If I should be lucky enough to move on to a "next project", I want to go in an opposite direction. Small bodied small motor build. I'm such a died in the wool traditional Pontiac motor guy that I want to build small Pontiac motor in a smaller car. In 1977 Pontiac took their physically large engine design and cut off one inch of deck height and took some meat out of the block here and there and made a 301 ci "small block". Their mistake was the redesigned crankshaft. It was a disaster. They took out so much meat and left out several counterweights making the crank useless for any kind of power. They snap like a twig. The recast smaller block was also built too weak and they had a high failure rate, so in 1980, they made a turbocharged version for the Trans Am and recast the blocks again with more meat put back in spots to make them much more sturdy. This block in a less stressed shorter stroke cubic inch build is something I want to do. But it will require a custom Billet crankshaft to get where I want to go. I like small cube high RPM motors so I would like to build a 327 out of one of them. They have a 4 inch bore stock from the factory so a 3.25 stroke custom crank will get me a 327 and with an overbore of .030, a 331. Custom cranks are very expensive so the likelihood of me doing this is low. But it is a dream build. Then I would drop it into a Vega or Astre, or a mid '70'* Sunbird. Maybe an early 240Z. I've also played with the idea of using it in a late '80'* to early '90'* Vette.
I also have that 1962 Pontiac 4 cylinder which is half of a 389 to build. That would also be great dropped into one of those Vettes. Lots of dreams, not a lot of money anymore. Depends on my ability to keep physically able and the money again. I guess time will tell.
But like I've always said. "A man is not dead until he quits dreaming". I'm still dreaming therefore I still am. Cheesy hey???!!!! LOL!

Mark

Thanks for the reply. It looks great.

I've been thinking about the distributor back in the firewall "cove" and that it will be almost impossible to work on it when the engine is in place. So I plan to drop in a stripped out old early Tempest 4 cylinder distributor. The Old 4 cylinder distributor is shorter and the cap is smaller in diameter than a V8. All I need is the body and the shaft to run the oil pump so I plan to do whatever I can to even get rid of the cap. So that leaves me without a distributor. I've also been worried that the BIG OL' Hilborn fuel pump may be way over the top for GPM than I could ever need. I'm worried a regulator may not be able to keep it at 6-7 psi. So I've been playing with a Pontiac aftermarket (Summit) HEI I have on hand to make it into a front drive, off the cam, distributor. But I want a functioning mechanical and vacuum advance for the street. IF, I can make it work with the turbos. I cut up the aftermarket HEI to fit on the end of the fuel pump extension but it'* counterclockwise operation makes the mechanical/vacuum advance system unusable. So if I have to run a locked out setup I'll run that, BUT, the body is longer and sticks the top of the cap right up to the little intercooler radiator. I picked up a Chevy HEI and with it'* shorter body (main upper body to the mounting flange), it would allow the mechanical/vacuum advance system to work (clockwise rotation) and it will fit about 1.5 inches farther towards the timing cover. You can see the difference in the pics.

The Pontiac HEI body.





The Chevy distributor.





The bases of the distributors have to be trued, and the extension machined to catch the distributor mounting flanges of the distributors. The distributor shafts will have to be shortened and machined to a hex to mate with the pump drive on the cam.
As you can see, I've pulled off everything from the front of the motor in anticipation of pulling the motor.

Mark

i dont think you can use a vacuum advance setup on a boosted engine. how would you do that?

to me it seems better to use some sort of boost referenced electronic setup

The vacuum advance does not know it'* under boost. It would return to it'* zero boost location and stay there until it sees vacuum again. Or possibly the boost might push on the diaphragm and retard the timing??? The diaphragm could also rupture and create a leak. Otherwise it will work only during normal off boost conditions. I'm more worried about the mechanical advance system. It may not work with the boost. It would advance mechanically under all conditions and I may not want that during boost. I still have to figure that out to make sure what I'm getting into.
A good electronic system would do all that for me. Just do not have the money to use for that.
GM had a turbo on the Corvair back in the '60'* and used a vacuum advance canister that advanced under vacuum and retarded the timing under boost. It also seems that Ford had a two way vacuum advance canister that went both ways too for emissions use. But I have not seen either of them so I don't know if they could be adapted. I should open up a regular canister and see if one could be pushed and pulled??? Be worth a try.

Mark

i am not sure why you would want timing retard under boost, why wouldnt you just use the mechanical advance, with nothing hooked up to the diaphragm then, unless you plan to try to run it without the belt on or something. dont think that would work so great. guess it depends what you need for idle and how far you need it to go. im not real familiar with boosted setups.

Fuel octane reacts to boost the same as increasing the compression. The higher the boost the higher the octane rating needed of the fuel you are using. If you run X amount of timing, as you increase boost you need to retard the timing from that point to prevent pre-ignition. Since my engine will be spending 90 percent of its life on the street I want to be able to use a street friendly timing curve. But once boost comes up I want to retard it an amount that my fuel will allow. 91 octane is our premium down here. But I'm going to run E85 unless it becomes an expense problem. E85 acts much the same as 100-105 octane so I'll be able to run a lot more timing with it. But with any timing that allows good drive-ability and efficiency on the street, it will have to use some form of timing retard for boost even with the E85.
My previous Trans Am had a factory HEI that I modified with a better MSD module and a custom curved mechanical advance. But I also ran a Mallory 685 box with boost retard. It was set to pull 1 degree of timing for every pound of boost. On the dyno I ran it at 36 total and 15 pounds boost. So it pulled the timing back to 21 degrees total timing at full boost/full timing. It worked great. On 91 octane, no knock, and at 15 psi it made 1065 HP at 5800 rpm. 886.8 at the wheels. That was with home ported 6X cast iron heads. Aluminum heads tolerate timing even better. For the strip and some street people will just lock the distributor at a certain timing amount and leave it there. But I want everything as efficient for the street side as I can get and to morph into a strip curve for boost.

Mark