I just joined here, this project has been underway since 2007 with a recent burst of effort. I'll post some of the history and slowly bring it up to date. This is the car as purchased in CA by the PO. I bought the car in MA as a shared project with an old friend who has the shop space and skills to build the car.
It had a 289 with automatic trans. The interior was badly done. Our plan is to restore the appearance to classic Healey spec and build the mechanicals to modern spec.
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We discovered that the motor mounts had cracked the frame and needed to be redone. A few close friends that were helping with high level fab stuff are big time drag racers so they suggested using a motor plates front and rear. We did this but finally decided to go back to more conventional mounts.
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This is the more conventional motor mount we ended up making. We kept the mid plate to add stiffness to the cowl area, just clearanced it for the bellhousing. I don't think I have photos of this, but during the discovery and repair of the frame damage from the poorly done mounts, we slid 2x3 square tubes inside each frame rail and plug welded them along their length to both strengthen the frame and also make sure the mounts had a secure foundation this time. The old mounts were just rectangular tube welded to the top of the frame.
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The front suspension is now a coilover design. The expert TIG welder I mentioned made the control arms from CrMo tubing using jigs that I made. I designed with 1 deg of negative [instead of +] camber and the same 2 deg of caster that the original design had. I kind of wish put in more caster after thinking about it for 10 more years!
We used the Healey spindles. We tried a Mustang II spindle but it would not with with the space available.
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Nice car! Welcome to the forum!
I should go back a bit. After the cracked motor mounts were discovered and the frame inserts were in, a few more repairs were in order. Some simple floor and sill repairs. The sills were reinforced with 1x2 square tubing inside.Our 'frame table' is an old lift that was removed from a longtime Ford dealership. The chassis was welded to this while all of the fab and repairs were being done.
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Those with sharp eyes will have already noticed the rear frame mods. Our first attempt/idea was to create the dipped frame like a BJ8 has to increase suspension travel.
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It was pretty obvious this would have limited benefit so the current build is to make the frame go over the rear axle.
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Scott, a late Thank You for your welcome and comment. Back to business, a bit more detail on the rear frame area showing the 4 link suspension.
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Upper angled bar mounts for axle housing,
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Just for fun, a picture of one of the several distractions that came along to drag this project out. Corvette 327 with 3 carbs, crazy widened body for the rear axle.
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This is the read end, a narrowed Ford 8". I found what was probably the last Currie aluminum center section. It is built with a Tru-Trac LSD. This is a Torsen style differential. 3.5 gears.
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Bearing end being prepped for welding.
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Rear assembled
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Back to the front. We bought undrilled Wilwood rotor hats and drilled the to mount the splines. Worked great. Nice vented discs on both ends.
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Looks like my memory is poor, I guess these were redrilled, not undrilled to start with.
Very cool project with a lot of nice fabrication work being done. Can't wait to see more progress. I see you are in MA. Whereabouts? I'm on the North Shore.
Rick, thanks for your note. I am in SE Mass, Car is in Western Mass. I have a small machine shop here as part of my business that I can do some of the smaller parts along with design work. I put the front part of the frame in CAD to work on the suspension. This was an early attempt to use Mustang II spindles, doesn't work because of the large kingpin angle and where the upper control arm would need to be.
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I am the 2nd 1/2 of this BN7 build. A little background, my name is Steve. Art and I have been great friends since we were 10 yrs old!! Almost 54 yrs later, here we are still messing with cars like we did when 16 yrs old. I've been a self employed car guy since I left college in '82. We both had big Healeys when we were younger. Back when you could buy them for extremely short money. This project has changed a few times over the years. I'm happy to say, that it is running again after 23 yrs. I have car at my home shop in Western Ma. The plan moving forward is to get the car roadworthy and driving for this season. If all shakes out as planned, car will get torn apart for proper chassis painting and detailing this coming winter. The body may or may not get done at that point. The focus is going to be on chassis and drive train. I will post updated pics as soon as I get a chance. The car build is much further along than what has been posted.
Steve
We did need to cut into the shock mount area to make space for the coilovers.
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A taller structure was added for the upper shock mount.
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Better picture of upper shock mount and upper control arm mounts we made.
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I don't have good photos of the front caliper mounts. CAD renderings here, maybe Steve can take a few. These are radial mount calipers so the mounts are simple, just angled brackets to line up to the ears on the Healey spindles.
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I found a bunch more photos on my phone from texts that came from Steve. Here is a better shot of the rear end than what I posted earlier.
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This shows the rack and pinion from an MGB that we shortened both the rack section and the steering shaft. This is a new rack which I noticed has a smaller pinion gear then the originals. If it turns out to not feel good, we can always mod a used rack. This shows just the housing shortened, we cut and slid a tube over the existing tube with the holes to be able to plug weld it.
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We also needed to lengthen the tie rods, this shows an added section we made that got welded to the existing tie rod.
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This shows a mockup of the rack position. There is a flat plate the we tacked in place to get the final width of the rack. The goal is the have the upper and lower inner control arm mounts in line with the inner tie rod joint at the end of the rack. As the rack moves, that does change, so like everything in life it is a compromise to a small extent. This is to minimize bump steer, an effect that causes a toe change as the suspension travels.
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A not so great quality picture of the bump steer checking setup.
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Also not so great, shown the final rack mounted. Mounts are hard to see from this angle.
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Best picture I have of the finished rack install. You can just see the lower U joint.
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This shows the upper steering shaft. This is from a TR3 which presented a few issues for the steering wheel, more to come on that.
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We had a steering wheel hub that we wanted to mod to use an E-Type wheel. I was having a hard time getting them to mate and an original E-Type wheel probably should not be cut up. I cut the spokes and turned the OD and stopped there about 5 years ago.
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These next 2 are current, just taken, our welding friend helped to convert wheel center to adapt to a better wheel for the Healey.
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For now this will work well. I still want to make the trafficator work. Since we have a hollow upper shaft we can run the wires through the U-Joint and wrap them to allow them to go with the steering rotation. We need to add a deco piece to the center, maybe an old shift knob logo piece. Steve put the horn and blinkers on manual switches for now.
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The 1967 289 engine getting a 'rebuild'. It was blue but we decided it should be black as it would have been earlier. It ran very well when we first bought the car so it should run much stronger now! The Erson chrome valve covers are OK but we have some nice aluminum Ford Racing items that should look better.
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A bit of Ford geekout here. This Rotunda engine crane was bought from a local Ford dealer that was closing in about 1980. We split the cost, I think it was $275. Rotunda was the tool division of Ford that sold to dealers. Fun to use it on Ford projects. The first pictures in this thread show the car in that dealership building when it was rented by Steve in later years. He found records in the attic of cars bought by his grandparents.
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The driveshaft tunnel had been hacked pretty badly so we ordered a new one from Norman Nock's company. It requires mods for a 2 seater. This shows the old tunnel cut out and the driveshaft and new emergency brake cables. The emergency brake uses small drum brake shoes inside the brake discs.
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We decided to use a dual circuit brake master cylinder. Shooting from the hip a bit on the bore size since the Wilwoods are not offered in too many bore IDs.
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We took a stab at changing the motion ratio of the brake pedal to compensate for the larger bore of the master cylinder.
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Another effort by the mad TIG welder, Chris. We were gifted an aluminum fuel tank that had the pickup damaged in an odd way. Chris fixed the problem and then welded a block that can mate to the fuel system through the trunk wall. This car has a mechanical fuel pump so it is pretty simple from here on.
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They drilled into the pickup for some reason without realizing it was angled, so they drilled through the tube and it was sucking air.
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Project is coming along great. I grew up in Middleborough and a guy during the '70s put a 289 2bbl and C4 into a BJ8. He won many a street race and inspired me to do my Nasty Boy in later years.
Thanks for following along. All the cars we knew in younger days were very stock. I think we had heard of a Healey with a Chevy V8 in Easthampton but never saw it!
These show the cooling system, we used a dual pass radiator with 2 fans. Fits pretty well and should work well. I hate the fan noise from a stock [Healey] fan so this should be nice. I have one of the later fiberglass fans in a BJ7 and it is much quieter.
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This is a bit off-track but I wanted to give a shout-out to Chris, our buddy who helps so much with welding. The guy is really talented and committed. He builds these incredible cars, works hard and is raising a family! The link below goes to a video showing his recent build.
https://www.google.com/search?q=godzilla+swap+1968+mustang&client=firefox-b-1-e&sca_esv=f07dd38fdcfe8355&sca_upv=1&biw=1420&bih=834&tbm=vid&sxsrf=ADLYWIL-QLCwUaasCvxE6m9K5KacLtQ6MA%3A1718631574428&ei=ljxwZsTbGfaf5NoPgJSH4AU&ved=0ahUKEwjE_vjD4eKGAxX2D1kFHQDKAVwQ4dUDCA0&uact=5&oq=godzilla+swap+1968+mustang&gs_lp=Eg1nd3Mtd2l6LXZpZGVvIhpnb2R6aWxsYSBzd2FwIDE5NjggbXVzdGFuZzIFECEYqwJIlBpQ7g5YhRhwAHgAkAEAmAFHoAGaA6oBATa4AQPIAQD4AQGYAgagAqkDwgIEECMYJ8ICBhAAGAUYHsICBhAAGAgYHsICBxAjGLACGCfCAggQABgHGAgYHsICCBAAGAUYDRgewgIIEAAYCBgNGB7CAgsQABiABBiGAxiKBcICCBAAGIAEGKIEwgIKECEYoAEYwwQYCpgDAIgGAZIHATagB4Ig&sclient=gws-wiz-video#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:43702066,vid:8Z2IRMP3MY8,st:0
The exhaust that came on the car was pretty weak but we are putting it back on to be able to run it and do other debugging. Headers look to be homemade which is pretty 'period' cool. I like the small dia primaries because the ports are tiny on the stock iron 289 heads. They got beat up a bit over time and distorted during some repair attempts and welding practice on our side. The flanges should be able to be straightened and used short term.
I only have a picture of the RH side header and no pictures of the piping. I need to get some, it is pretty funny. There is an almost 90 deg bend below the collector on one side. It ran well and sounded great though!
If you look at one of the steering posts you can see the top of the LH header installed.
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This has been quiet over the summer. Steve bought a building that needed attention so that was the priority. We have gone down a few not-very-intersting rabbit holes. The car never had wipers after it was built in CA and we need them here for inspection these days so we are digging into that. A friend in Westport has taken many Healeys apart so he donated a few wiper motors and a friend of Steve's also donated one. Out of the 3, one is working, so I am going to clean it up.
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Steve reminded me that the rear reflectors were weird from the original build. I was already in the process of fixing a similar issue on a BJ7 that was lightly modded many years ago by a friend and bought by us a few years ago. He put some lights in that spot but they don't look good. I have some 12V LEDs that seem to fit nicely into the proper reflectors with a bit of minor surgery. I ordered 3 more reflectors from Sports & Classics, fingers crossed that the are correct looking.
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We decided to buy proper headers for this, the old ones would not seal. As cool as they were being from the original old school build, they were pretty hopeless. Knowing that headers would require mods, they actually fit in pretty well. The outlets are right over the frame, that will be solved with some clever welding and fab by good old Chris....
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Most of the little stuff is done on the left side. Spring rates will be the big area of interest once the car can be driven. I chose the front rates a long time ago based on a stock Healey, which is will probably be too stiff. Time will tell.
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Another update on the left front with brakes installed.
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Installed travel limit straps on rear axle.
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Right front together. Right rear needs final assy, and then it can go on its wheels.
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It looks like your header outlets are positioned like mine were, right into the frame rail. In order to have the pipes run over the top of the frame rail, I had to have the outlets re-welded to 90 degrees. Even still it's a tight fit.
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Rick, yes, well need some close cutting to get them to turn over the frame. We'll be using V- band clamps there.
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Future exhaust system, at least the front part.
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Really nice progress on modding the headers. We'll probably want to add some clearance to the frame before final prep and paint. Driver's side:
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Driver's side
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Passenger side:
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Chris angling for hazardous duty pay! This was about 7 hours of work over 2 days. 7 hours for a pro that is...
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Yep, that passenger side fits exactly like mine. The things you have to do if you want to route the headers over the frame.
Sitting on its wheels for the first time in a long time. We replaced the 100# rear springs with 150#. Time will tell what it wants, but for now it is one step closer to being able to test it. My goal was always good suspension travel for back road driving which implies reasonable spring rates with good damping control. The cobra center-laced wheels look pretty good, they may fit without much body interference.
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Up in the air showing suspension travel. I would like to see more droop in the rear, the limit straps probably need to be longer.
Major pain putting in the sparkplugs, the headers were designed for the later small plug size and that space is super tight in any case. Body needed to come back off the put them in! I'll be seeing the car this weekend, hopefully running, so looking forward to that.
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We had a productive but frustrating weekend, got the brakes and clutch bled but it was a major project. All of the copper-nickel lines were leaking at the fittings. We ended up replacing them with steel. I think the flares end up too large since the material is softer.
The clutch is too stiff, we have concentric slave cyl with a 3/4 master cyl. We ordered a smaller master to see how it works.
We started it briefly to see how the new/old exhaust sounds. The carb leaked like crazy at the accelerator pumps so that was also short-lived, but it sounded good.
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The car has BJ8 seats, we placed one in to be able to work the pedals.We will need to shorten the steering column a bit to get more space.
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I like the Cobra-laced wheels. I have GT40P heads, which makes installing spark plugs with the headers a real joy. You're making great progress. I found installing the driveline the easiest part. It was all the stuff that came afterwards that took up about 80% of the time.
Impressive skills, Art. Regarding hedder/collector/frame issue, perhaps "wedge cut" primaries at flanges, allowing to swing up and outward, reweld.
Cheers, Art.
I had the same idea about the wedge cuts. I am in no position to suggest that though! Chris was doing the welding as a favor and I am far enough away that I can't really see what the possibilities are. I had one idea to try to dump the left header to the inside under the oil pan and back across the top of the right frame rail so that we could do side exit on the passenger side. Things are too tight under there once I checked it out myself. I have also wanted to have some kind of crossover, but again, things are too tight.
Expedience is 90% of the plan now so that we can get it together and start testing before taking it apart for the final finish work and build.
Thanks for the comments! We are gaining on it...
Steve has the smaller clutch master installed but I don't think it is bled yet to test that.
A little late to the party but.....
Back in the day, I, for some misguided reason stuffed a LT1 into the lovely Lynne's 82 hard top 2dr Mazda 626. No it's not a typo.
I wanted it to look Mazda ish. so the Mazda script was grafted onto the valve covers and a Mazda air filter lid was used on the dual snorkel Pontiac air cleaner base. The rear end was a 9 inch with 15" steel wheels all around. The factory 4 spoke mags were machined in half and used as hub caps to maintain the look.
However the incentive for this post is the exhaust. There was no room for it to exit the engine compartment. So a set of swept back shorty headers were installed backwards facing the front of the engine. The exhaust crossed over in front of the engine went down both sides of the trans and joined up into a single 3 inch out the back of the car.
With the balance pipe in front of the engine and the convergence into a single exhaust the thing sounded incredible.
It looks like you have room for the same thing. A decent flowing exhaust with very little compromise.
Live like you mean it.
Fred
I recall Ford 390 engines in trucks having a front crossover. i don't think we have room for that, it is tight with the steering, fans, etc.
Minor update today, the 5/8" clutch master seems to work better. Now that the engine can be run longer with some carb work, we see that the driveshaft is hitting the emergency brake mechanism inside the tunnel. We have a 3" dia driveshaft, maybe just too big.
Looks like this will be the driveshaft solution. Funny, we had the other one custom made...
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Looks like the new driveshaft will work well.
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View from the transmission to the rear New shaft is still pretty close to the brake mechanism. I think the Ford rear must have the pinion offset more than the Healey did. I doubt we took account of this when we were building the housing. Not sure about the 8", but the 9" was designed to have a much lower pinion position for lower cars being designed. That could play into this as well, there is a lot of headroom in the tunnel.
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Good point Fred, keep our options open. Thanks to Chinese polished stainless SBF shorty hedders, can be readily
modded to fit other small block V8's. RV8's, 4.9L. Cad's/etc.
Cheers, Aer.
Starting to put the body back on with proper bolting, etc. to be able to start running the car for shakedown work.
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Some housecleaning need on panel gaps, etc. The LR fender needed to be cut and re-gapped. A bit of Dynaglass to cover things and a quick coat of either Chevy or Hemi orange will tidy it up for the shakedown phase. The rocker [repro] will also need to be corrected, the indent is in the wrong place and these fenders have various old patches that will need to be done better.
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Body mostly back together.
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The vertical grille looks better but the opening and trim for the original horizontal grille do not fit it properly, there a small gaps at each end. The obvious solution is to remove more bars and create the later factory rally look. We'll need to make the aluminum 'scoops' to finish it out. Our radiator is wider than stock, but we should be able to work things together OK.
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Not much happening on this, other distractions like always. I saw that the site had been down for upgrades and that new submissions were being requested. This shows the carb being resealed this week, it was leaking pretty badly when we first ran the car last time. Hoping for more activity this winter!
A bit more carb work.
Car is finally out and about. Lots of tweaks and development needed but nice to hear it run and go through [a few] gears.