How It Should Not Have Been Done

[hamondale]

   This post is a prologue to a future HIWD that I'll be compiling and submitting with pictures on my Bugeye Sprite 3.4L V6 conversion.  Although there is quite a bit of HIWD here, much of this post is tales of outsourcing gone bad, hence the title of this post.  I have a feeling I'm going to get some replies of commiseration, and that my experience is not all that unique. 
   So I'm picking up here from my last chapter that ended on my wedding day with the Austin playing a role.  As I said, we had some good years with that built 1275.  Didn't take long to snap a stock axle though.  Instead of going a conventional route, I got a Vega rear end with positraction out of a junkyard, and set it up with 4.11 gears.  I knew a good fabricator from my farm kid days, and he narrowed it and we put it in the Austin.  While we were at it, we converted to the full semi-elliptical springs and tube shocks.  That all worked pretty well.
   But those GM 2.8L V6s were out in the Chevy Citations, F-bodies, and S10 pickups and I kept thinking, those 60 degree motors are pretty compact.  Wouldn't it be cool...  One day around April 1986, one turned up for sale in the Swap Sheet, out of a wrecked Chevy Citation with 15K miles.  So I bought it.  Remember now, this was way pre-internet, no discussion  board, no someone else's HIWD because it had pretty much never been  done, and Hot Rod magazine didn't run articles on GM 60 degree V6 conversions.  So I went to the local Chevy dealer parts department, borrowed the four inch thick F-body parts manual, and made a copy of it over the weekend. (I worked for a copier company at the time so that sort of thing was free.) 
   Then I went about figuring out what bell housing and transmission I needed to convert this FWD motor to RWD.  Pretty soon I had a bell housing, and an empty BW T5 transmission casing, i.e., enough parts to bolt to the V6 and see how much space it was going to need.  Two things were obvious right away: 1) the original transmission tunnel was going to have to be hacked out, and 2) that was where a lot of the structural strength of the chassis was.  So first thing was to beef things up elsewhere.  I figured I could build a subframe and have it grafted to the unibody underneath.  I chose 1" x 3"  12 gauge rectangular steel tubing because it matched the width of the unibody frame rails up front and because it was low profile, and left room for other stuff under there, mainly exhaust piping.  (That was always a general principle of the project: whatever problem you solve, do it using the least space possible because you're going to need that space later for something you maybe haven't even thought of yet.)
   I laid out the path of the tubing along the fronts of the frame rails, out laterally at 45 degrees, and then straight back to the steel plates that the leaf springs were fastened to.  I cut the pieces and got a good welder I knew to come to my garage and weld everything up.  While we were at it, we added some round tubing welded to the bottom of the roll bar (already there from years before), and run up inside the rocker panels and welded to the front cross member where the side jack holes are.  Overall, plenty strong even after the trans tunnel was hacked out.
   So next was to figure out how to place the engine/trans assembly.  I bought a rear transmission mount and a couple of small block Chevy biscuit motor mounts.  I hand cut pieces of steel plate to make adapters that would bolt onto the 2.8L block.  Took them to the welder who finished them.  They bolted right up.  Now I had motor and transmission mounts in place.  With the chassis on jack stands, I put the engine/trans assembly in place, supported by wood blocks.  Hand cut a 1" x 3" tubing cross member and some pieces that would join to the unibody and subframe and extend upwardly as engine mount towers.  Had the welder come back and weld those in place.  Yay!  The engine and T5 were bolted in, enabling a lot more work to be done.
   This is where the serious outsourcing started.  I felt I had to outsource a major amount of the project because 1) I didn't have the welding and other fab skills and equipment to do a lot of tasks myself, and 2) I had a pretty demanding job with long hours but good pay.  So I didn't have much spare time, but I did have $ to pay someone else. 
   I also had a lot of experience in my engineering job outsourcing fabrication projects, designing and installing manufacturing processes.  I knew the key was to write a really complete job spec with all of the tasks itemized.  So I wrote one in tabular form.  Broken down by category: engine, drive train, chassis, interior, body, etc. in outline form (e.g., I.A.1.a etc.) specifying all of the tasks that needed to be done, the parts I would provide, the parts the fabricator would provide.  Start to finish.  It was about 10 pages long.  Neatly handwritten – I wasn't computer literate yet.  I figured I'd take the car to a local hot rod fab shop and work with them, and we'd execute the plan.  I think it was around that time that Mike Tyson said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
   So first stop was a local fab shop, mostly building drag cars, but well equipped to do much of the tasks in my spec.  Everything except body work and interior.  Ok.  Six months to finish all except body and interior.  Here we go.  I'd stop in weekly, and more often than not, nothing would be done.  The two things that did get done were he built a really good set of long branch headers, and he got the new T5 transmission installed with a McLeod HTOB.  (There was zero room to do a conventional external slave system.)  After six months, it was apparent that he'd lost interest in the project so we agreed to part company.  Back it went on my little flatbed trailer and back home it came to hibernate in my unheated barn for the winter.  This was circa November 1990 I think.
   Next stop was a sheet metal fab shop.  With the whole engine/trans in place, it was time to build a transmission tunnel (removable as it turned out), and the foot well sheet metal along the engine and headers, and paint it.  This went OK except the commitment was to get it done in a month and it took another six months.  Back home it came.  With the new sheet metal in place, I was able to get a few more things done myself, such as relocating the gas, clutch and brake pedals and dimmer switch.  But with my job demands, progress was slow.
   So I went back on the hunt for another fab shop, and found what appeared to be a reputable one (albeit 20 miles from home).  Met with the owner (who went by "Junior"), and saw a lot of cars in his shop with work in progress that looked pretty good.  He said he could finish the whole car, turnkey.  Based on what he had going in his shop, I believed him.  Trailered the Austin down to his shop, along with my many boxes of parts, all inventoried and numbered on the outside to match the plan, along with the engine and transmission, which were now back out of the car.  I put down a deposit of $1000.  This was circa September 1992 I think.
   Two weeks after I delivered everything, I stopped in and was told that Junior had been diagnosed with colon cancer and would be out for the foreseeable future.  And nobody else had been assigned to take on my job.  So there it sat for what, another three or four months.  I didn't feel good about raising hell given his prognosis, plus he had my $1000, it was winter, and not an easy situation to bail from.  Finally at some point in late winter he was at least back in the shop, and assured me that they would be getting right on it.  Over the next six months, the only thing I remember them getting done was somebody built a framework to mount the aluminum radiator that I had bought.
   One day in the summer of '93, I stopped in and their excuse for not getting anything done was, "Well we had a fire in the shop last week.  But it was in the back, not where your car is, and the sprinklers came on and put it out.  Your car and stuff is all ok."  They did look ok to me.  I could see that way in the back of the shop, the ceiling was pretty sooty.  So other than thinking, jeez it's always something with these guys, I didn't give it much thought.  Remember this incident.  I'll come back to it.
   Autumn of '93, in my job I had a 3 month assignment where I was out of town, from Labor Day to 12/22.  I couldn't do any progress checks.  So around 12/15, I asked my wife to stop in at the shop and ask them what was going on with her husband's car.  That night she called me and told me the place was closed and there were signs on the door that said that everything in the shop had been seized by New York State.  When I got back home, a couple days after Christmas, I went down there myself.  There was a State employee there watching over the contents.  He told me that the business went bankrupt and was in arrears on NY sales tax, so they would be liquidating the contents of the building.
    I told him that there was property there that I owned.  He wouldn't let me in, and told me that the only way I could remove any of it was with proof that it was mine.   Here's one time where my OCD attention to detail paid off.  I kept every receipt of every part I ever bought for the car.  So I went back with those receipts, and we went through everything box-by-box, and I got all of my parts back.  BUT MY CAR WASN'T THERE.  Where did it go?  There was a former employee there, and he told me Junior had decided for some reason to outsource the paint job to a buddy of his.  The ex-employee gave me the address of the buddy's paint shop.
   So off I went there.  The buddy said that Junior (now bankrupt Junior) owed him $1000 more for the paint job, and he wasn't going to release the car until he was paid.  No good choices here.  On a late afternoon in early January, I went back with my flatbed trailer and $1000.  Loaded it up.  My trailer had a four foot high box on it, so I tarped it over the top to keep the road salt spray off the car.  I still remember driving 20 miles through a lake effect snowstorm to get it back home.  Back in the barn it went.  At this point, I was so fed up that I said to hell with it.  It sat for another five years in the barn collecting dust while I found other things to do with my spare time.
   But one day around September 1999, I was out in the barn and I stood there looking at the dust covered car, the engine and transmission now again out of it, and the boxes of parts.  And I thought I have to finish this now, because if I don't, someday we'll have to move out of here, and I'll have to sell all of this as is for next to nothing.  Plus I was getting that feeling back of what it could be.  But again, I had more money than time, and the key work to be done was putting in an MSD ignition, upgrading the old Lucas wiring  to something current, putting the 2.8L engine/trans back in, and starting it up.
   As luck would have it, a young guy named Lee had just bought out a hot rod shop from the former owner's widow, and was looking for new work.  The shop was only a mile from my house.  I could stop in there daily.  So off went the car, my engine and T5, and my boxes of parts to his shop in early April 2000.  And each day, I could see progress being made.  I thought I might yet drive this thing this year. 
   One day  Lee called me at work and said, "Did you leave your engine outside for a while?"  "What?  No."  Then he said, "Well we put it on an engine stand to do a few things, and when we spun it upside down, a couple gallons of rusty water ran out on the floor.  And the engine is seized.  We can't budge the crank." WTF???  Oh no.  Remember that fire at Juniors, where the sprinklers came on?  Well the fire may have been in the back, but the sprinklers must have come on where my car and parts were too.  But by the time I stopped in, my stuff had all dried out.  On the outside of the engine at least.
   By this time, the internet was up and useful.  That night, I did a search, and found a New Jersey GM dealer with the best price (about $1600 I think) for a 3.4L crate motor.  Put it on a credit card, and three days later it was in Lee's shop.  So that's how I came to have my first 3.4L motor.
   Lee got the wiring and ignition done, the engine/trans in and started up, and I loaded it up in mid-June.  From there it went to a local body shop, where they did a decent paint job in a few weeks, redoing the crap job by Junior's buddy.  Then on to a local woman's upholstery shop, where she did a nice job on the carpets, from the foot wells to the trunk, and recovered a pair of Honda Del Sol high back bucket seats. Back home it came, where I did a lot of finishing details and installed the seats.  I remember sitting in it for the first time.  It had been over 14 years.  Feeling how compact it is.  How close the dashboard is.  And looking down that hood, with the air cleaner sticking out of it a little bit.  Thinking, "Man. This is $@%^%ing insane."
   Lee had gotten the engine started up and run in, but the MSD ignition wasn't tuned.  I had no experience at it, but after a couple tries, one Saturday morning, 10/1/2000, I got it about right.  I went for a test drive (country road), and after it was fully warmed up, turning onto another road, I hammered it (but only to about 4K RPM).  Holy crap!  This is what I'm talking about.  I came back in the driveway with a huge grin.  We had a nice October that year.  I put 1000 miles on it before the snow came down and the roads got salted.
   I drove it another four years or so.  Lots of fun.  But one day with a stocky passenger on board, I went to do a burnout, and the 185-70 tires hooked up instead of fried.  Tore the rear U-joint out of it and broke a tooth off a spider gear that went out through the posi unit.  So I got a Ford 8" rear end housing on eBay, and went to yet another local fab shop, a guy who built drag cars.  In a few months' time, he narrowed the rear end, converted it to 4-link and coil overs, and tubbed the fender wells so 245-50 R14s would fit.  I took it back in rolling condition and finished that conversion.
   More recently, I've put in a newer more powerful 3.4L engine (Why? Because I can.) built by BMC in Minnesota.  That build was a two year process, and when it came time install, there were certainly some birthing pains, but it's running well now.  And most recently, I've converted from the Holley 390 CFM 4 barrel to Holley Sniper2 fuel injection.  I got one test drive in this fall on 11/10, before snow flew and road salt followed.  It went well.  Feels noticeably faster  and smoother than the carb setup.  Looking forward to next spring.
   So that's the saga of my Austin.  Some How It Was Done, and a lot of How It Should Not Have Been Done.  Putting this story together, it seems like a miracle that it ever got finished.  As I said at the start, for those interested in the tech details, I'll put together a HWID with lots of pictures, probably in February when I have some Florida downtime.  For now I'll just leave you with one picture circa 1977, and the other from August 2025.

[Scott Costanzo]

John,

Great story! It's amazing how many bad, dishonest shops are out there and it's probably worse now!

Your car looks great by the way! Hope I get to see it in person some day!

Scott

[hamondale]

   Thanks, Scott.  Looking forward to putting the HIWD together.  I actually enjoyed this morning putting that story together.  It was the first post-mortem I had ever done, and it was interesting to think through all of the stuff that had happened over 14 years.
   In a related matter – a couple weeks ago, I put some parts up for sale on a Facebook Spridget group, and I stumbled across a Modified Healey group there.  So I thought, well my Austin's that. so I posted the street photo previously posted here, and one shot of the engine with the freshly installed Sniper2 FI shown below, and the text, "Then there's this."  Then I added the three artwork photos I posted on my intro post here a couple of months ago.  Maybe some here saw my FB post. 
   I'd never used FB much other than to sell stuff.  That post had a firestorm of > 1200 reactions within a few days (mostly likes), and over 120 comments, mostly favorable.  But a fair number, not so much.  From some people, a lot of assumptions were made and conclusions drawn from just two photos that showed no technical details. Bad handling, nose heavy, won't corner, no structural strength, suspension will fail, only good for a straight line.  Basically, How It Could Have Been Done, How It Should Have Been Done, How It Could Not Have Been Done Right.  And by a few, How It Never Should Have Been Done In The First Place.  People mourning that I didn't leave it original.  On an FB group with the words "Modified Healey" in its name.  What did they expect?  That's like joining a cattle ranchers group and then rebuking  a poster because he likes to eat beef.
   I posted a couple of replies and said I'd present the technical details on a future HIWD post on BV8 and then let the rest go, quoting Dalton in Road House: "Opinions vary."

[BlownMGB-V8]

Pretty cool build. Just a shame it took that long but at least you have it sorted now and can enjoy it.

Jim