A little more room for those wider tires and lower ride height
Since my car will be around 1/4” lower in the front now with wider(275) tires, and because I already had rubbing issues at my previous height with 245 tires, I decided to go with Anvil’s carbon inner fenders. I don’t necessarily like the idea of putting carbon fiber on a classic car, but the function of these instantly will solve that rubbing issue for me so I decided to go with them. The fact that they saved me about 14lbs off the front versus my heavy GM originals is a welcomed side effect also. The folks at Anvil were great to work with and these fit pretty good actually. The outer wheel arch in my original fenders is slightly off so I had to massage a few mount points here and there on the Anvil inners, but overall they bolted without too much difficulty after creating the 2.5” holes required for the RS headlamp door assembly. I also had to drill the holes for fog lamp harnesses and the 3 mount points for the rear support brackets. I added some rubberized undercoating to the bottom to dampen the sound and protect them. I was going to paint the tops satin black to keep my original look and ‘conceal’ them, but the satin carbon look has grown on me so I’ll leave them as-is for now. I may paint them later. I’m sure some old-schoolers will give me hell about them at shows. Oh well.
This is the only picture I have so far. You'll see them a little bit in a few other photos:
My wallet may be on fire but my new engine shouldn’t be
One thing I completely wanted to avoid with the future bigger, higher-compression, higher HP motor was cooling issues. I decided to play it safe, bite the bullet, and go with AutoRad’s setup. It’s a bit pricey but it’s the right thing to do and worth it, plus it looks much better than my previous setup. The folks at AutoRad were a pleasure to work with, they finished it right on schedule, and I was happy to do business with them. I decided to powder coat the core support and close-out panels satin black to keep the overall engine compartment appearance that I had before. Everything fit pretty good with the exception of where the hood latch assembly bolts to the upper cross bar of the core support. For some unknown reason, the upper bar and mounting holes on the bar were nearly 1/2” lower than where they needed to be. Just seems to me like that the crossbar is simply too low because all other holes and mount points on the support are dead on. There was no way the hood latch assembly would bolt up to this upper bar mount point AND the center support bracket that comes in from underneath it and ties everything together. I had to get the rear mount point to come up somehow. Since the bar itself and mount points on the bar could not be changed, I changed the rear mount points on the latch assembly. Not too difficult since there’s some room(thankfully) on the assembly to move those rear mount points. It just caught me by surprise considering how great all the other mount points had lined up and it took me a few minutes to figure out how to resolve. Overall, I highly recommend this setup to anyone.
I only took a photo of the radiator and you can see the powder coated core support a little in the last photo. I'll take more photos when I get the close-out panels installed and the radiator hooked up.
