66 Nova SS Project

[GregWeld]

When I said I was trying to come up with a road race Nova.... I was referring to HISTORICALLY -- as in back in the late 60's early 70's... Not just the one PT car build. You know - ala Penske Camaro etc...

[Flash68]

Say what you mean Greggers.. not mean what you say.

[byndbad914]

Originally Posted by GregWeld

When I said I was trying to come up with a road race Nova.... I was referring to HISTORICALLY -- as in back in the late 60's early 70's... Not just the one PT car build. You know - ala Penske Camaro etc...

I hear you - Trans Am is what I would refer to for that (as I did with the Camaros in an earlier post). TA started in 66 and I don't think Chevy campaigned anything until the 68 Camaro, so that might be why there was never a road race Nova. If they were going to run a small sedan it would have been the right choice to run against Mercury Comets/Ford Fairlanes and Dodge Darts.

[96z28ss]

the only one I was able to find was Dan Spiegel the driver of a 66 Chevy II Nova.

[Royalworks]

Are you going to rework the cowl vent to fit the hood. That is what I would do if they don't wanna work with you. That way you can still keep the carbon fiber and not have to do fiberglass work. Any other ideas on this?

[69c4x11]

Cut the cowl, heck, fill the thing and wiper delete it

[byndbad914]

Originally Posted by Royalworks

Are you going to rework the cowl vent to fit the hood. That is what I would do if they don't wanna work with you. That way you can still keep the carbon fiber and not have to do fiberglass work. Any other ideas on this?

Talked to Tracy at Anvil today and he gave me some tips on how to reform it without cutting it, and then they approved a discount I asked to have put to credit my card to cover me having my body guy do the work locally so the customer service has been great. Manal was really helpful with the purchasing and approved the credit within minutes of my conversation with Tracy so I have to say I am happy with the company's willingness to work out the issue. They were also willing to bring it back and ship me another but I didn't feel the need to go through all of that for something that sounds resolvable with simple rework.

Tracy suspected that it may have been pulled from the mold a bit too early and sagged and that while it isn't common, he knew of some ways I can reform it and pull the hood back up to match the cowl. I am going to be painting it so any minor rework causing some finish issues won't matter to me. I didn't want to rework the cowl because if I had an issue with the hood down the road and replaced it with another, I would then be reworking the cowl to put it back.

This weekend I am hoping to get a start on placing the front suspension pieces. I have some tabs I ordered that have 1/2" thru holes and I need 5/8" and had just planned to drill them. Holy chit they are HARD so it killed my bit immediately - I need to find a bitchin' drill bit to get through 'em I have done all the math in my engineering software to know my pickup points and so forth, just need to get the darn tabs drilled

[byndbad914]

As for that Spiegel car, thanks for the info on that. I went to a TA website I know of and saw that exact photo. On the same website there is info on the car that started me road racing back in the mid 90s.

http://www.historictransam.com/Drive...Mustang78.html


I had a 70 Mustang, met a guy named Mark Behne at a huge Ford show in SoCal that had restored this car (looked different back then, now it is completely a spec restoration, I liked his paint scheme a bit better back then and still have a photo of the car in my office) and owned it back then. I was drag racing my car at the time but loved the TA stuff; he invited me to his house, so forth and after becoming friends he invited me out to Willow Springs to watch the car run. He told me I would only have to road race once to never drag race again. I went out to watch and he offered the wheel to me! Literally having never been in the car or road raced, I hit the track in it and put down a few laps. He was right, I stopped drag racing that day

[byndbad914]

Tacked in the front lower control arms today and then was able to truly test fit the wheel in the fenderwell and visually verify the placement of the wheel center looks correct. I am going to have to get a bunch of custom tabs either plasma or waterjet cut to finish up and do the rear - I had a bunch of tabs I custom designed for the 914 and a few were left over that worked absolutely perfect for placing the susp components on the Nova too. I designed the tabs so there is either flat surfaces that align to square tube so there is no thinking, just attach it square, or they have a surface I can set level to ground and then adjust the height along the tube. In this case, the tabs are perfect as they align with either the top surface or the bottom surface of the tub and get the hole center exactly where I want it for correct ride height.

I took a break and went back to the old susp design files I had on the Porsche and updated them for this car. I set a lot of the lengths to things I can either measure with a tape or angle finder for ease of install. There are a bunch of (reference) dims that auto update as I mess with bump and so forth to verify toe doesn't change thru bump or verify camber gain. Certain dims are set such as the upright height as it is a welded piece that won't change (at least not without a trip into a wall). Those pieces were all designed in the same software for the Porsche.

Front sups has the 2.821" roll center height, rear is 3.470". All of that is what it ends up, I didn't force it to those weird dims Well, I guess I sort of did by using defining all of the other dims but nonetheless, that is a driven dimension by the design so I work all the other stuff to get those numbers roughly where I want them.

Interesting enough, the modern Vette has similar front suspension setup dims as the Porsches dating clear back to my 1972 car, so it is a pretty proven design. The front susp has a 10deg KPI and 6 to 7 deg caster and that is what Vettes and Porsches basically have. So on the front, I work the design to get the upright angle at 11.5deg - that is 10deg KPI with 1.5 deg of negative camber for the tires. The rear uprights have an 8.5deg angle built in so I went with 9deg to have 0.5 deg neg camber on the rear as a base setting. This is what the 914 had and showed perfect tire wear on the track with Hoosiers. Good thing is that won't chew the street tires up too bad at those settings. The fronts I will have to rotate on the wheel periodically to even out the wear.

Static RCs are inline with modern Vettes and Porsches as well.

Edit, pics attached. Note on the close up of the front tabs I have a flat spot on them I can use magnetic angle finders to hold flush with he top of the chassis. That is what I meant by having custom tabs with placement features. I want to try to come up with a rocker mechanism so I can run the Penskes internally.