Reward! Help me find my old race car

It doesn't always involve cutting corners.

"Sometimes it's more like stages. Finish it to a level to bring to the Challenge, then take it to the next level. The vast majority of the blood, sweat, and tears can go into it. Custom professional paint jobs or shop built engines have to wait 'till later.

Yours would definitely not be the first car at the Challenge that was unfinished, or had a plan to improve further after the Challenge in ways that would blow the budget.

Hmmm....The tire thing has me thinking. Kumho has a V710 in 215/50R13. I need to take the tires off of one of my current wheels and get a good measurement on it and ask the Capri community if that size tire will fit on those wheels without any issues. The current tires are 205/60R13. I have to get tires anyway, might as well get some that don't count against the budget.

id be willing to bet all the money in my left front pocket that the 10mm section width diffeence will not matter. judging by how much sidewall bulge i can see in the pics, youll be fine.

and ive built a couple of challenge cars that never made it to the challenge. without cutting corners. and made them respectable daily drivers to boot.

keep up the resto. im enjoying this.

id still love to buy my old track truck back, or find another teal ext cab dakota.....

michael

I've stuffed the 215 Kuhmos on my 5 inch rims, you should be just fine.

Saw this and though you'd get a kick out of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1HYlgwQUOc

In reply to turboswede:

Thanks!

Now I will roam eBay Motors UK...

Coming up on being a year-long restoration.

Yup. It was just after Christmas last year...

I thought you guys might enjoy this. Both boys were home over Christmas so we fired up the Capri and took her for a spin though the neighborhood. This was the first time it had been driven in 17 years.

Capri 1st drive

In reply to mightymike:

Fantastic!

Thanks! This project is more fun than I could have ever hoped for.

Thats awesome, glad to see it back alive.

Great story, congrats

New Toyos...Do I smell an Auto X in the near future? All I have to do is: Sandblast and paint the wheels the new tires will go on, get them mounted and balanced, re-route the fuel line, fabricate the seat mounts, mount the seat, secure the fuel cell, secure the fuel pump...

Well overdue for some updates. The Capri project was on the back burner while I built the Shop of Good intentions, but I think it was worth the wait. Toss in retiring from one career after 29 years and starting a new career, getting the last son out of college, burying a good friend and everything else life brings along, 2014 was an interesting year.

Went from this:

To this:

And before we finished the inside of the Shop of Good Intentions, we pulled the motor.

We had the motor running after I bought the car back and it ran strong (we terrorized the countryside until we figured we were pushing our luck).

One of my desires for for the rebuild of this car was to take my time and do it right. I wanted to fill up all of the holes in the inner fenders and firewall and paint the entire engine bay the same color as the car. I will also paint the engine, and make the bay as clean looking as possible.

As an Improved Touring car, the rules required that the heater core and hoses, and most everything else stay on the car and stay stock unless the rules specifically stated that the items could be removed or upgraded. I want to put in aluminum radiator, lose the power brakes, fabricate solid motor mounts, etc etc. As a vintage race car, the focus is more on keeping the car visually accurate to the time it was raced.

The engine is getting a new, high performance cam, new water pump, Offenhauser intake and Holley 4bbl carb.

It won't look like this for long.

I was able to put some equipment that I have always wanted in the new shop. The parts washer and blasting cabinet are awesome.

The engine bay was just as dirty and greasy as the engine was, so I started cleaning and welding up all of the holes in the sheet metal.

A the top of the firewall, just below the windshield was a very thin piece of sheet metal that had rusted through at the very bottom.

It did not appear to me that this piece was structural at all, and was some type of plenum for the HVAC system, which I was going to remove, so I cut off the rusted metal.

I will fabricate a rectangular plate to cover the circular hole.

I did not trust the nearly 40 year old brake booster and master cylinder. Getting rid of the booster will also clean up the firewall, eliminate the vacuum line running from the intake to the booster, and add some lightness. One of the tech guys at Wilwood spent some time on the phone with me telling me what I needed to do to swap from power brakes to manual brakes, and recommended a new master cylinder with a reduced bore for increased pressure that that will also allow me to upgrade to rear discs in the future without having to change master cylinders. I'll have to install a check valve in the lines running to the rear drums for now. Also planning to put all new brake lines in.

The old fuel cell was out of date and I did not like the way it was installed. I removed the plastic cell and the metal boxes that had been fabricated to hold the fuel cell and provide a bulk head separating the cell from the passenger area since the Capri is a hatchback.

Now I have a big, gaping hole in the back of my race car.

The car sat for more than a decade, and when I removed the water pump I was glad I had decided to replace it. On the cover for the timing gears you can see where the water line was after it sat for so long.

Almost everything up to this point has been deconstruction. This weekend we are putting in the new cam, lifters, and push rods and possibly the intake. Nice to take a few small steps forward.

For those of you with stalled projects, I read some great advice on this forum and I've done my best to follow it since getting the shop done: Do something on your project every day, even if it is small. It's too easy to walk into the shop and tell yourself "I've only got thirty minutes, that's not enough time to do anything." I put a white board in the shop ($5 at the Habitat store) and made lists of things to do by how long they would take. Tasks that would take 30 minutes, tasks that would take an hour, tasks that would take three hours, and so on. It has really helped to keep me on track and motivated so far.

Thank you for posting this. I needed to see a stalled project move foreward.

Fantastic shop! Looks like the old one had "natural air conditioning".

Karl La Follette wrote: Awesome ! Great deal started New year off right with this story . Thanks !

Just rereading this story so F#^(ing awesome

Looks like some nasty rust on the edge of the cowl panel. That is structural. How will you address this? I doubt there are repop Capri cowl panels, but I've been wrong before.

There are a few of my old cars I'd like to find, but I doubt I could afford them now given the crazy appreciation of muscle cars.

Looks like great progress. Using you for my weekend inspiration!

In reply to maj75:

Thank goodness there is no rust in the cowl panel. That is some of the 5+ layers of paint flaking off.