Whew! It’s been about six months since we last updated you all on this build. But that doesn’t mean progress on the ’55 has stopped. These past few months we’ve been working away tirelessly on the car. The big news is that it runs! Check out all the progress.
It’s All In The Details…
Mainly, we’ve been working on details. For example we had to figure out hoses for our Champion Cooling radiator set up and finish wiring in the fans. There was some wiring we had to do for our Holley Terminator Max X computer before we could fire it. Turns out, we had the wrong gas pedal and had to order the correct one.
All the stainless on the car was sent out and professionally polished as well. We tried to polish it ourselves and it just wasn’t up to our satisfaction level. Now it’s a mirror-like finish! Installing all that took some time as we had to sort through all the various clips and screws to get it all on. While we did that, we also installed the new emblems we had picked up from Classic Industries.
And speaking of Classic Industries – the pile of parts we picked up from them has been slowly dwindling down. We installed the door handles from them and all the window felts. Then we had a company that came out, cut all the glass, and installed it! They also installed the front and rear windshields with the gaskets we had picked up from Classic Industries.
As you can see, lots and lots of progress. We also had to finish up a little bit of the Painless Performance wiring along with the Dakota Digital wiring. We also installed the gear shift selector add on from Dakota Digital as well, so now the RTX display shows us what gear we are in! That’s pretty sweet.
Fire It Up!
But lastly and most importantly, we got the car running! We finished wiring up the Terminator X, hit the key – and it didn’t start. We figured that we wired something up wrong as we figured out that the coils and the injectors weren’t seeing power. We gave a quick call to our buddy Andrew AKA Dr EFI AKA Project Gattago who figured it out in about one minute! The wire that gives the injectors and coils power, we didn’t wire properly. Soon as we hooked it directly to the battery, like the instructions clearly state, it fired right up! We had already put a base tune in it on the handheld at this point.
The next day we had Andrew remote tune it for us. He set up all the timing and fuel tables, tweaked this, tweaked that, and holy cow does the car sound good now. We didn’t quite get it so that we can drive it out of the garage under it’s own power, but it’s really close! Keep watching for the video of this ’55 Bel Air driving around the block!
