Hot Rod Sportscars

[HealeyRick]

Take a look at this thread on the H.A.M.B. https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/hot-rod-sports-cars.956823/  Lots of interesting stuff and once you get to page 9 there are a number of articles from the old engine-swapping guides from Petersen.  Even a picture of a young Jim Stabe in there (although the H.A.M.B. wouldn't let him post about his latest upgrades).  Good stuff!

[rficalora]

Cool stuff.  I remember reading some of those articles years ago.

[BlownMGB-V8]

That car is too new. I got kicked off the HAMB for wanting to talk about '63 models.

Jim

[Jim Stabe]

After all the cars they showed I was kind of surprised they wouldn't let me show updated pictures of my car. I was pretty much done with the HAMB after that.

On the same page 10 as the article on my car there are a couple of other car articles that I'm familiar with One is Mike Pace's MGTD that had a Chevy transplant. Ak Miller's Garage did the swap and he drove that car back and forth to Texas more than once. Mike was best man at my wedding.

The other car was Joe Reath's 57 TBird that had a big rat motor swapped in. I was working at Hays Ignition (owned by Bill Hays of dragster clutch fame) and Joe came in to visit with Bill. It wasn't long before I was installing one of our breakerless ignitions in Joe's TBird. After I was done I took the car for a test drive. There was a road nearby that had no side access and no place for cops to hide that we used for testing the cars we worked on. The car accelerated like a banshee and I was soon going over 100 mph when I began to stop for the stop sign at the busy cross road ahead. The TBird still had the stock drum brakes and I thought I was going to bend the steering wheel trying to get the car to stop. We forget just how bad the brakes were back then.

[BlownMGB-V8]

Yeah they were pretty horrid. Good for one hard stop. After that there'd better not be any cross traffic.

Jim