my 67 impala, another round.
 

Hello everyone! I haven't really bothered to do anything but lurk here for the past few years. I've been pretty occupied by facebook and instagram as far as keeping up with my automotive obsession on social media, but with the recent pandemic nonsense and lack of any major car shows and events in my area, I've felt a need to reachout to be involved in a car community again.

Some of you may remember my 67 Impala project, "the pendejo". It was a relatively mild redo of the car with airbags and sway bars and otherwise stock suspension, c6 brakes and a carbureted big block and six speed. I'll be the first to admit that if I could time travel I'd go back in time and kick my younger self in the a**. I wasted a lot of money on wrong parts and never really had a solid plan or goals for my car. When I realized I didn't know half the stuff I thought I knew I learned a lot at a very fast pace.

Anyway, this rebuild starts with my family and I towing the car to Ocean City, Md to the spring Cruisin OC show. Upon arrival in OCMD, I had come to the realization that the car had blown an airbag and the it would never make it off the trailer for the rest of my getaway. Before leavingon the trip I adjusted the rear upper arms to change pinion angle and didnt realize that the rear end brackets were rubbing on the air bag. I still enjoyed the weekend, but a plan was brewing to build a reliable, drive anywhere car that could retain the killer stance but eliminate the airbags and compressors. I always will remember how Greg Weld preached "you gotta drive em" and about making things reliable and functional first and it has stuck with me since before his passing, ( I was just starting to talk with him online not long before he passed.)

SO WHAT DID I DO?
I ordered an art morrison c6 sport custom order chassis. the car would lose its og frame and floors and become a unibody. heres a preview picture and the frame, c6 based suspension with a lower mounted rack, and triangulated four link, and went with a 9 inch as well.

Ill update this as I have time, the car is nearly complete and totally different looking now, but this post is already long enough to bore you all.

Its hard for me to rember three years ago. But I'll do my best to fill you in on everything this required to pull off. I cut every inch out of the floor from firewall back. 90 percent of the firewall left too. After lining everything up, I got the body back down on its new home and stitched the rocker panels to the massive 4x4 art morrison rails. From there I built mounts for the engine. Hindsight being 20/20, I shouldve move the engine back about 3-4 inches, it wouldve let me drop the engine down for much needed hood clearance, as I intended to go back to a flat hood again with the big block. But hey, I didnt want to have to have a new driveshaft made again......smdh. It made an enormous struggle for me to get a good efi intake on and keep the hood flat. ill touch on that as I go on. The exhaust is completely stainless, with kooks race mufflers and an x pipe, and its all tig welded. to keep the tailpipes up high I put a 5" hoop in the frame rails so the exhaust could pass through instead of going under and back up again.

The info & ideas typed in the posts are much more informative vs FB or IG. Pics are great to look @ but w/o the info they're just images.

Looks like a nice project. Learned how to drive in one of these (67 SS396 car).

Nice work, Mitch! Love what you're doing. I'm typing this as I watch Supernatural with the wife :D

Always a fan of these big Chevy’s.

I really liked your quoting Greg Weld in your post too.

UGHHHH SUPERNATURAL!!!! Ive never watched it, but what that show has done to the 67 market is unbelievable. people are paying more for junk 4 doors then then will for a solid 2 door car because they want to build "babies". the prices on trim and stuff for these cars have skyrocketed, alot of which isnt reproduced.

The next step was floors and firewall. bought a manual woodward fab bead roller and immediately realized I should've sprang for the motorized one. I'm still using it, and I've gotten really comfortable with it. This was a pretty straight forward, but I still made more scrap then I would've liked. I tried to keep all the lines flowing with each other and many of them flow through into the next piece.

Been watching on IG. Turned out bitchin.

After I wrapped up the floors, the car went back on the ground. I spent a few weeks building an overdesigned, much too busy set of inner fenders for the car, and then sent them to the scrap pile. I was talking to my upholstery guy (Bux Customs) and he mentioned how often less is more, and said often a lot of his seats have three lines in a pattern and it made me think. well the next set of inner fenders followed his advice and I decided they were good enough to move on. from there the car went onto the rotisserie for me to work on the bottom side. I originally intended to smooth and finish ever inch of the bottom side perfect and base/clear it. well this 17.5 foot long beast is a lot to make perfect! I still spent a lot of time on slicking out the bottom but I elected to bedline and then base/clear the bottom with satin clear. The paint is BMW tanzanite blue, a color that took me a long time to pick, but after seeing an M3 painted in that color it stuck with me. I finished the rear suspension parts in Ford sterling gray and flat clear, and for some dumb reason I chose to polish the stainless exhaust in entirety.

Nice fab work. Everything is looking so good.

Nice tin work, Mitch.

A 67 4 door hardtop Impala is a great looking car. I'd still rather have a two door, lol.

thanks man, just started following you on IG and on here as well.

they are much better looking than most muscle car era 4 doors. but I'll stick to my coupe.

Yessir...thanks. I followed you back. Keep up the awesome work.

Gotta say I'm extremely grateful that Lat-G is as active as it is.

Another car-related forum of which I've been a member for at least 20 years suffered a major data loss (hosting company screwed up badly) right around the time Facebook was taking off, and that was basically the kiss of death for the forum. Even though it's still online, it's a shell of its former self. Since you mentioned it, thought I'd thank you specifically for posting your progress here. It's so much better than Facebook.

Can't wait to see more of this one!

Once the car was a roller again, progress slowed down. The plan was to start body work, but as I began that I also bought a new house with a garage that became a massive project ( and still is to this day.) the house had a 24x24 garage with a bad roof on it. We talked to a few contractors and after finding one we like expanded the garage to 24x48, leaving the original walls to create a "clean" and a "dirty" side. it took a few months but the car finally got moved over from my parents to the new garage and I could resume body work.

The body of the car was very good, except for some rust in the rockers that I patched. I had painted the car before but being young and not experienced in anything but collision work on minivans and daily drivers, the panel fitment and gaps were lacking. So nearly all the focus was spent of making the car straight and fitting as a whole. I didnt strip the car back to bare metal because I knew what was under the previous paint job I did was still solid. Around that time I started to follow Tyler and Adam Krause, who are known for doing work for shops like Mirandabuilt, David Lane, Andy Leach and more. Tyler posts a lot of information, and I read it over and over and applied it to this car. In its previous life I had bonded a 4" cowl scoop to the hood, but it just wasnt the look I was going for this time around. I found an incredibly rare 67 ss427 hood in Long Island, one of only around 2100 built. I also spent a ton of time making the windshield and backglass moldings fit, even had to weld and file them to fix the shape of them. After the body work was completed the I put the car in epoxy followed by five heavy coats of polyester primer.

More body work pictures.

For some reason, I decided to completely slick out the front frame section. My fingers will never forgive me for that! Also I put a lot of work into the door jams, an area thats often not given much attention. I had a few breakthroughs of the first round of polyester (tan), so it was recoated in polyester again in gray this time. The black coating you see over top the primer is guidecoat, which I used a lot of to make sure the car is straight and to make sure there is no heavier sand scratches left behind. The primer was blocked in 100,220,320 and then 500 before paint. The last picture is an up close of the fitment of the windshield moldings after hours was spend re fitting them.

Lot of hard work right there. Gonna be nice for sure. I take it you're planning on painting the frame instead of powdercoating it...

yes the frame is built into the body now. so paint it is. another update coming soon.

It took me months to decide, but I chose BMW Tanzanite Blue as the body color. I pulled the body apart, and built racks to hang all the body panels seperate off the car so the jambs and everything could be painted at once. I sealed and basecoated the car early one morning, then tacked off and cleared the car the following day. 6 coats of clear on this thing used up a whole lot of material!!!! I let it sit with the heat cranked up for a few days before I started wetsanding it with 600. Then I let it gas out for another week before 1000,1500,2000,2500,3000, with guidecoat used in between each grit to make sure the sand scratches got eliminated. It was my first time using guidecoat on clear, and it saved me a lot of time both sanding and buffing without having to try to fight heavier grit scratches with the wool pad.

The engine bay actually got painted first, with a matte clear over everything. all the suspension pieces got sterling gray with a matte clear as well.

Very nice. The finish looks great.

Daniel

Very nice!! That deep, rich blue looks sick.

Wow!Sweet! I love the color

Fantastic color choice!

Can you expand on how you used a guide coat on clear, please? Do you mean like using a guide coat when blocking primer?

Thank you all!

A little further on wetsanding clear with guidecoat. I first knock down the clear flat with 600 grit, once thats broke open the guidecoat will stick like it would just for primer. Only use it up to 2000, after that the finer grits wont take it off. I use to struggle really bad with buffing, Id always see heavier scratches that would always need more attention after compounding. By using the guidecoat it gaurantees me that every inch of that panel is eliminated of heavier scratches before I move on. It makes the compounding step much quicker and I'm not going back over areas time and time again.

If you have time, check out this link. I go back to these tips time and time again, and my work has improved 100 percent.

https://www.trueblox.com/blogs/wet-sanding-buffing

That's awesome. I had no idea you could guide coat clear. It makes sense but it sounds scary that you're putting paint on top of clear.

he's not using crappy spray can guide coat. he is using powdered guidecoat. since the car is so dark I'm going to guess he used mirka white powder guidecoat

Oh! That explains it. Thanks, Mike.

i actually used black, because its what i had. took alot of light in the shop to see it all. but yes, mirka guidecoat. actually using it right now on a car im painting for a friend and it makes buffing so much easier. no chasing heavier scratches with compound or going back with wetsanding again.

After the buffing was wrapped up it was time to put the drivetrain in. This is about the only area of the car that didnt get completely changed from previous versions. The engine is a 468 with edelbrock performer rpm heads and a lunati voodoo cam, all forged gm rotating assembly and pistons. Transmission is an old Richmond R.O.D. six speed, which is basically a doug nash five speed that they added an overdrive. Its proven, so it stayed. The engine was painted VW Habenero Orange, the valve covers are just 39.99 summit cheapies that I painted the Chevy script on. Trans was painted in Sterling gray metallic and mated up to the Lakewood bellhousing and Centerforce clutch. One major change is I bought an Edelbrock Toker 2 intake that I welded injector bungs into so I could run EFI. For an ecu I used a holley hp, with a dual sync distributor to run coil on plug. Coils are 585 truck coils and injectors are zl1 injectors, easily available in case an issue would arise. The accufab throttle body and torker intake keep it LOW, because hood clearance is at a premium. Headers are actually the same Hookers I had on the car with the stock frame, i just had to move a tube to clear the steering.

Glad is old school powered. I bet an updated EFI BBC & 6spd is FUN.

thank you. I havent gotten the pleasure of driving it with the efi yet, still things to work out on the tune and get the car aligned and things. but it was always fun with a carb so it can only get better. I had bounced the idea around of going LS but I would have only done it with a supercharger or something big like a lsx454.

once the engine went in, it was on to wiring. mounted the fuse panel in the trunk under the package tray, next to the battery. ecu went in the passenger footwell and is covered by a false floor my interior guy built. In the cars previous life i had attempted a few different dash panels and was never pleased with them. I thought about going back to a nearly total oe dash with dakota digital gauges, but some of my previous modifications altered the way those pieces wouldve fit. So I set out and built a gauge panel out of aluminum. I found some gauge bezels at a boat store that fit the classic instruments gauges I intended to run, with intention of honoring the oe style, but make it a bit better( at least i hoped). Worked out pretty well and I think the polished aluminum and chrome retro autosound radio and vintage air controls contrast nice against all the blue, with blue leather in its future.( matching relicate leather swatch posted on top the dash in one of the pics).
almost forgot, I had designed the gauge panel to come in and out because the wilwood masters are right behind it. originally as i was building it i had the panel held in place with magnets, but i didnt test it with the radio in and it made it a little too heavy for just the magnets, so theres two screws that come out first. still plenty easy when i need to check and add fluid. the car originally had a cheasy plastic collar around the column, which i replaced by molding in a 4 inch tube to make it all one piece and have it flow together.

well after I got the car running, it was off to Bux Customs for a complete interior. Chris and I have worked together on my moms nova (see super chevy article "momma said knock me out"). I had intended to keep the bench seat, but i couldnt modify the frame enough to make it clear the driveshaft tunnel. so Chris ordered bare bucket seat frames and completely fabricated the rear seat from scratch to clear the big tubs. the only pieces i supplied him were the door cranks, steering wheel, dashpad, and door panel tops, everything else was his doing. The leather is Relicate Napa leather in Marina blue. I wanted to keep the interior honoring the stock style of an original 67 but still make it high end and the guys at Bux absolutely nailed it. They even made a matching travel bag to go with it! the leather color looks different in every light, but in person its a near perfect match with the matte finish tanzanite blue body paint.

Very, very nice!

Beautiful work, the interior came out sweet!

Love the interior design and color choice! They did a great job.