Full Build: Taking A 1972 Chevelle Barn Find Back To Its Former Glory

today on detroit muscle we've got a big basket full of how-to tech for you starting with a brand new project car it's an iconic muscle era machine and a real deal barn find [Music] so [Music] [Music] hey guys now obviously we're not in the shop right now we're out on a treasure hunt and we've all heard those cool stories about all those awesome cars hanging out in buildings a lot like this one that's right this is an old hay barn now i'm sure you've heard the term barn find tossed around so much lately that it's lost its meaning the fact of the matter is we found a real one [Music] what this is is a 1972 chevrolet chevelle malibu they're one of the most popular and most sought after muscle cars that ever rolled out of detroit and this is our next build but this isn't anything special or rare it's not a big block or an ss in fact it's a small block with a bench seat and a column shift so it's a blank slate we can do whatever we'd like we can go new school with ls or lt power or we could go old school with a big block and a four speed but it's still early to tell which way we're gonna go first thing we need to do is get this thing out of here and back to the shop [Music] so [Music] now we got our chevelle off the trailer and we're just about ready to take it all apart but before we do that we want to give it a quick bath for a couple of reasons one we want to wash off what's left of that bird and two this thing's probably got a couple critters living in it because it's been sitting in that old barn for as long as it has now we're not going to kill them but we are going to force them out we aren't planning on using this hood so we'll go ahead and get it out of the way right now but before we fire up that pressure washer though we need to get some de-greasing done here in the engine bay what we're going to use is this gunk all-purpose cleaner and degreaser this gunk degreaser is designed to bust up really tough grease and oil like this old nasty stuff stuck in this engine bay the good news is that it won't damage plastic surfaces or etch your aluminum so you can use it to do the same job if the engine is still in the car for this job we're using it straight out of the bottle but for less extreme circumstances it can be diluted up to 35 to 1. with our greasy engine base scrubbed down we can go ahead and bust out our power washer to make quick work of this cleanup our gunk spray down made this stuff a lot easier to deal with heck some of this metal hasn't seen daylight in 30 plus years with that done we can move on to the body boy does she need a bath real bad [Music] nasty old bird well looks like those window seals are shot [Music] this old girl is sure looking a lot better already just look at that engine bay just look at it [Music] well we let our chevelle drip dry and i have to say it sure does look a whole lot better and definitely smells a lot better not on the inside it doesn't as a matter of fact since we're in here now we're gonna do the easiest and the least expensive part of building an old car that's a tear down coming up we'll do some automotive archaeology on our chevelle jackpot hey guys welcome back now that we've got our chevelle all cleaned up in here in the shop we can start evaluating its overall condition get an idea of what all needs to be replaced and get a game plan for attack after removing the dirt some of the old body work is starting to push through and you can see it right up here now the old car definitely has rust in the bottom of the quarters on both sides so we're going to need those and hopefully we're not going to need a roof but we're not just going to fix those major issues slap a paint job on this thing drop in an engine and send it down the road no we're going to do a complete build and the best way to figure out what our canvas looks like and to provide us with a really good foundation is to strip off all this old paint so the next thing we need to do is get this thing torn down gut that interior send it off to the blaster well one thing's for sure we got us a good low rush car as we started to really find out why we take it apart the telltale sign is that all the bolts come off much more easily than most cars of this age there's a lot to be said for keeping it out of the weather for a couple of decades even if it's in a hay barn well we made pretty good headway tearing the old chevelle down but we've hit kind of a small snack we can't get into the trunk which isn't that big of a deal but we got a couple of ways we want to show you to try to get in there now we pulled the keys out of the ignition both of them were square back in the day gm kind of had a square key that indicated for the ignition switch and kind of a round shaped one that was for the locks we don't know if this key was cut on the wrong blank or if it even fits or lock but this is how you can get in there the first thing to try is take a pick and fold open the little door and now use some lubricant and drown that thing you can take the key kind of slide it in there jiggle it around slide it back and forth because you're trying to loosen up the tumblers let's try that other key yeah it don't even like to fit in there at all also you can try the the old trick push the key in there pull it out just a little bit then try it nope that don't do it yo guys you know what i'm talking about all right guys the next thing we're going to try means something's going to have to die we've got two options one we can either cut the lock out of the trunk lid or we're going to have to sacrifice the lock cylinder now with our trunk lid it's actually in pretty good shape so the lesser of the two evils is going to be chewing on that lock cylinder start with a smaller bit to make sort of a pilot hole through the cylinder then jump to a half inch and wiggle it around to remove the metal that makes up the locking mechanism you don't need to use much pressure oh yeah jackpot some jumper cables and an antique that'd make mark a pretty nice christmas present all right now we got most of the body taken apart and the glass out of the car now it's time to move into that interior and get it good jump cable that's an everything what everybody wants well we're just cleaning out this interior before we strip it out we found some cool stuff in the glove box like original owners manuals pretty cool even got a warranty information it's neat and this is the coolest one it's the original bill of sale it's got some pretty cool info on it the original owner's name when they bought it june 14 72 this thing actually had white walls power steering and ac coolest part about this though shows here owner traded in a 1966 chevy ii they even got 1400 for a trade-in so that's pretty cool i think we'll hold on to that well we need to get the rest of this interior stripped out get the body separated from the frame send them off to the blaster today on detroit muscle we've got a chevelle floor that's looking pretty holy so it's time for some sheet metal [Music] surgery hey guys welcome to detroit muscle today we're jumping back on our chevelle project and there's gonna be a boatload of sparks flying for sure the last time you saw this thing we were ripping and tearing into it and taking off everything that was screwed or glued into place to get it torn down and sent off to the blaster [Music] we found this old chevy that's right in a barn she'd been parked there for a few decades but with some help from a winch we got her dragged out and loaded up then she got her first bath that she'd had in a pretty good while we went ahead and tore everything down in preparation for a field trip this big piece of blue metal is what's left of our chevelle project we've got it fully taken apart and we're ready to take the clothes off of it that's right the last time you saw this thing it was still bolted to our frame since then we unmounted it and installed it here on our rotisserie brought it out here to lebanon tennessee to blast from the past blast from the past is where we take our projects when we're doing a full-blown frame-off rebuild in addition to media blasting they have also powder coated a ton of stuff for us we know that chevelle is in pretty decent shape as far as sheet metal goes but this is going to tell us what the paint and bodywork is hiding blasting isn't a single trick concept though you got to adapt the process to the project we're going to use a crushed glass it cleans real well it gets in the pits cleans the rust out you got to know what you're doing because that way you make sure you don't you know take a chance of warping anything but the crushed glass works real good being crushed and have the points on it jagged it gets down in them a little hard to get places and cleans that stuff out now we've all heard the horror stories about cars coming back from the blaster and them being all screwed up well sometimes it's not the blaster's fault kind of like down here you can see where a not so great repair has been made where this car's had quarters put on it but that's not the sandblaster's fault where it does come into play is on these big old panels you use the wrong technique or too much pressure you can actually warp it up and screw it up this is why we use these guys they understand how to get it down to the metal without hurting it which can be pretty tricky you see when you hit that metal with a bunch of high velocity media during the blasting process one of the issues you can run into is creating a bunch of heat which you want to keep to a minimum the warping that people are worried about that it could do is due to the heat also the shot painting effect it relaxes the metal which causes it to stretch and then you get the ripples one way to prevent that heat as much as possible is to approach the surface of the metal at about a 45 degree angle instead of attacking it from a 90 degree angle this will alleviate a lot of that friction and keep your metal from getting warped but when you're talking about more delicate things like an aluminum body or say a corvette you want to move to this plastic bead here what's really great about it is it'll take all the paint off but you don't have to worry about it blowing through vance and the guys did a really great job here on our frame for our chevelle here at blast from the pack like we said before we had dropped this off earlier and they blasted it and powder coated it with a matte black finish now we need to get it loaded up and back to the shop [Music] good looks good check it out here's our frame now we've got it back in the shop and it's ready to just have some things bolted to it now normally we don't like farming stuff like this out but with a frame something this size it's a no-brainer we're not getting too crazy with our suspension so we decided to keep our frame rails completely stock we went with a semi-gloss black finish it looks great and will complement the underside of the car not to mention the powder coat is super durable but we're not going to jump on this thing today in fact we've got a bunch of parts ordered that we're going to bolt to this thing that's going to have to wait until next time what we're going to do is start cutting up our body and repair where all those 10 worms have chewed on this old bow tie we knew this rod was going to need both rear quarters inner and outer wheel wells and was hoping not to need a roof turns out the roof is in good shape i guess you could say we had our rose colored glasses on regarding the floors in this old car because whenever we pulled the carpet out we knew we had some rust and rot but we didn't think we had this much yeah when we sent our chevelle's body off to be stripped we called up auto metal direct to order up some sheet metal now we ordered these floor halves with the anticipation of cutting them up and using bits and pieces of both to fix our floor but now that we've got it stripped we see there's more damage than we anticipated so we're gonna have to go a different route this is our new plan of attack yeah it's a giant piece of metal but in all reality this thing can save you a whole lot of work if you factor it in cutting out five or six different places and then coming back and finishing them out to make them look like the floor has never been cut up or anything well this is a smarter choice we're gonna bust out our esaob rebel welder and start bracing up the car this is the first thing we'll do because that big floor pan functions as a structural component and if we cut it out without bracing it it can bend and the whole car will be out of shape and boy we don't want to have the food with all that [Music] hey guys welcome back now we've got the body of our chevelle all braced up and it's time to start cutting on that floor to make it a little easier we're going to use a plasma cutter and cut it all out in one big piece we'll just come back later and drill out those spot welds and clean up those [Music] edges we're going to make sure that all of our cuts are just a bit inside where the panels are welded together because you don't want to cut into the panel that we need to attach our new one to it's okay to get close so make sure you leave a little room [Music] so detroit muscle presents back to basics tips for the beginner gear head [Music] all right the next thing that we're going to have to do is address the perimeter of this giant hole that slick back there just cut into our chevelle now originally that panel was attached by these pinch welds or spot welds and what it did from the factory is there was two big electrodes that squeezed the two panels together and fused them together now for us we don't have that type of equipment and we're going to have to use some rosette welds to kind of duplicate that now cutting this thing out there's probably going to be about 900 000 of them stupid spot welds in this car but there's a couple tips for you to show you how to cut them out now the one tool that most everybody's going to have in their toolbox that you can make work in a situation like this is just a plain old drill bit normally whenever you're trying to do that you want to just drill through the top layer and to do that when you lay it up there well you kind of have to wallow it around just a bit so that the edges will dig in and cut just that top side the other thing you can do or buy is one of these purpose-made tools that's kind of like a baby hole saw and it works pretty similar except for you don't have to wallow it around one other thing you can use is a plasma torch now this thing will make short work of a lot of that stuff but in all reality it's kind of like fishing with a grenade you can make a mess pretty quick so if you're not as skilled at operating that thing a better choice would be the slower two now whenever you're doing sheet metal like we are here on the chevelle you kind of have to assess the situation on panel to panel bases if you will now right through here we're going to be able to take that plasma torch and cut out all those spot welds to remove this piece because we have this thing on a rotisserie if it wasn't on the rotisserie what you want to do is drill through this piece and not through that one because you're going to be welding this thing from the top with us rotisserie it's going to save us some work [Applause] this handy little tool is called a panel knife and it's perfect for separating these pieces once the welds have been cut that piece right up there went pretty darn quick i have to say but down here on the bottom we've got a little bit different story we're going to be removing this piece but we're going to have to save this outer rocker and we tried that well we just mess it all up so we're gonna have to take that slower approach use the drill bits or worse a grinder [Music] you can use an air hammer to buzz these panels apart but just be careful you don't get into that metal you don't want to cut into we just finished grinding and prepping the body of our chevelle for our new floor now tom's down there grinding some of the e coat off so we can weld to it now we just need to lift it up into place which can be a little awkward but then again so are we so i think we got this these auto metal direct panels fit nice with the floor you just got to set it in the hole then move it into place there you go [Music] we'll use some clecos to hold it at home roll that big old chevy over then grab that esop rebel again start pumping rosette welds into this dude [Music] [Music] a little bit of welding later and we got ourselves a brand new floor today on detroit muscle learn how to convert a classic chevelle chassis into a modernized monster that can turn and stop with the best of them the guys have all the goodies to make it happen so stay tuned [Music] hey guys welcome to detroit muscle now when the term muscle car is tossed out there for a lot of you at home the first car that comes to mind is a chevelle same for us we actually have one of our own here and we found it in a barn this 72 model hadn't seen the light of day in a few decades but we got her loaded up on the trailer then gave her a bath then she went to the blaster and after that we put a new floor in her with that done the next thing we got to do is get this thing back together because i've got to cut them quarter panels off that body and i can't do it with an owner rotisserie so that whenever we get this car back together and make it a little easier to move it around in the shop we got to get some wheels under this thing to get our chevelle's chassis where we need it to be we're going to have to do some serious suspension upgrades all this stuff you see out on the tables here well it comes as one kit from qa1 all of this stuff bolts in the factory location starting in the rear with these tubular lowers adjustable uppers and adjustable trailing arms it even comes with these polyurethane bushings that bolt into the factory housing for the front the kit also comes with these tubular a arms both upper and lower which are equipped with qa1's ultimate ball joints now those are adjustable for both preload and to help you set your alignment which is pretty handy now to keep our chevelle flat in those turns the kit also comes with these heavy duty sway bars all the mounting hardware bushings and sway bar end links of course the kit wouldn't be complete without qa1's double adjustable coil overs this is for 68 to 72 gma bodies which means it's not just for the chevelle it'll also fit your el camino gto 442 or even buick gs first thing we're going to install is lower a arms [Music] we're going to apply some silicone lubricant to the urethane bushings to make installation a bit easier once it's applied to all the outside surfaces the a-arms can be installed with the help of a dead blow hammer [Music] using the included hardware we install the bolts and install the nuts hand tight these upper a arms there's actually two ways to install the cross shaft on the shallow side this is a stock location now the other side this is a deeper cut out it actually gives you eight inch more which gives you more adjustment for negative camber we're actually going to use the one with the stock because this is going to be a street car the cross shaft installs in the stock location using the included bolts [Music] it's time to start assembling our front shocks the first thing to go on is this lock nut we're going to run this all the way down until it's at the bottom of the threads no farther than that the next thing is going to be the spring seat now that's not where they're going to be at ride height anyway those are actually going to be too low so now's a good time to lubricate those threads with some anti-seize this is a really important part because if you don't lubricate these threads it can cause galling on this aluminum shock body and that'll void your warranty on your shock and that'll be bad because you won't be able to adjust your ride height another thing is we're using a nickel based anti-seize here and not a base that way it blends in with the shock body and looks a lot nicer than the copper wood we're also going to put anti-seize on this thrust washer here now we could just use the thrust washer and then put the spring on top of it we're actually going to be using a thrust bearing as well so the thrust washer goes on first then the thrust bearing then will annie sees this other thrust washer and it goes on as well that's where your spring sits the shock gets its upper mount bushing and after we slide on the spring the assembly slips into the stock location and gets attached to the frame with the bushing and nut [Music] the lower mount on the coilover gets attached using this adapter bracket it bolts to the lower shock mount and gets dropped into the pocket on the lower control arm four bolts attach the adapter bracket to the a-arm and get cinched down like we said earlier these ultimate ball joints from qa1 they are adjustable for the preload and they come pretty loose so we need to get some preload adjusted in here comes with all the tools you need to do it and the first tool is a spanner wrench here we're just gonna loosen this lock nut [Music] first it also comes with the hex key here and we're going to insert it open in down that's what's actually going to make the adjustment for the pre-tension we can usually just tighten it enough by hand to get the pretension we need if a race car or something like that you may want to put a little more pretension on that then we just hold the hex key and tighten that lock nut [Music] the next piece to our puzzle that needs to be installed onto our new chassis is the spindles now our plan was to reuse the old ones but after inspecting them we got a little bit of an issue now if you look here on the top you can kind of see where the bearing was but the problem is whenever you spin it over you can see that the spindle is blue what's happened here is that bearing got loose and it spun on the stub and if you try to reuse this thing well that bearing is going to have a roar to it so you need to make sure to just swap them out for some new ones for replacement spindles we just called up summit racing and they had exactly what we were needing we went ahead and sprayed on a coat of that dupli-color cast coat to keep this thing from rusting now one thing to keep in mind before you install this spindle is to index your ball joints that may not sound like much but doing this little tip can make it a lot easier to get that cotter pin in or out later down the road these new spindles are just like the originals and slip right onto our ball joints starting with the lower we attach it with the standard castle nut which gets tightened and secured with a cotter fin the same goes for the top just tighten that nut and install the cotter pin to keep it in place up next learn how to measure and set up an aftermarket brake system as well as adapting brackets to accept a beefed-up rear end hey guys thanks for coming back to see us while you were gone i bolted in the sway bar but i'm gonna have to wait to put the link on it until we get this thing sitting on the ground because i need that control arm to come up just a bit but that's no big deal so the next thing to do that we need to put some brakes on this thing and mr mark over there he's got something he wants to show you since our chevelle was originally equipped with drum brakes all the way around we decided to upgrade to aftermarket disc brakes so we turned to bare brakes for one of its bear claw pro plus kits this is a 13 inch kit so it comes with the 13-inch drilled and slotted rotors these are two-piece so they have an aluminum hat makes them more lightweight it comes with their six-piece six-piston compact calipers in your choice of colors we chose black and it also comes with the pads the best thing about this kit is that it's designed specifically for 68 to 72 a bodies comes with everything you need to install it like the brake hose all the mounting hardware and this hub that mounts to our stock spindle first thing though caliper bracket this aluminum bracket is side specific so make sure you have the right one the bolts slide through the bracket and the spindle followed by the steering arm those can then be tightened up because they're not going anywhere the adapter plate is next which can be tightened for now but we'll need to shim it up later the hubs come fully assembled with pre-packed bearings already inside it's followed up by the castle nut then a trusty old cotter pin and a fancy aluminum dust cap the rotor can then go on and be held in place with a lug nut or two the caliper sits on the adapter plate and gets snugged down for now [Music] as you can see here there's more gap on the inside of the rotor than there is on the outside so we need to shim that caliper out just need to take some measurements to see how far we need to shim it we'll take a couple of measurements on each side and get an average the first measurement is 751 thousandths followed by 765 on the other side 563 with about 200 thousandths difference we're going to remove the caliper loosen the caliper adapter plate and install a hundred thousands of spacers between the caliper bracket and the adapter plate those get tightened and with the caliper back in place we can check our measurements our new measurements range from 651 thousandths to 665 thousands so we're good with the brakes buttoned up we're gonna move on to the steering so we went to year one and got us a quick ratio steering box this has got a 12 to one ratio it'll turn from lock to lock and two and three quarter turns what that means is that'll help us so chevelle whenever you start snatching on that steering wheel i'm gonna go ahead and get this stuff bolted in see you on a few stick around and we'll get our new rear end plugged into our chevelle chassis hey welcome back while you were gone we got our brand new rear end busted out of the crate and we've got it here in the paint booth check this thing out this is curry enterprises bolt in rear end for the a body so it's got all the provisions and mounts to bolt directly into your chevelle el camino gto or any other a body of that era we got ours with the fabricated f9 housing and back brace 35 spline true track differential of course 35 spline axles and the provisions for those bare brakes now when we ordered ours we ordered it bare because we weren't sure what color we were going to go with at the time so now we just need to get this thing cleaned up get a couple of coats of paint on it to protect it from the elements since the rear end came with the axles already installed we're going to pull those out first followed by the t-bolts and bump stops a little bit of brake parts cleaner and a scotch shop towel will clean off all the oil and residue that would keep our paint from sticking a little bit of masking tape will keep any overspray out of our housing and the same goes for the vent tube we also mask over the center section since it's done been painted to coat our rear end we decided to go with vht's high temperature roll bar and chassis paint now this is ideal for this because our rear ends bare and this doesn't require the use of a primer it's going to keep corrosion rust and chemicals from getting into that rear end housing the first coat needs to be sprayed on light and evenly to provide a good surface for the other coast stick too we're using our paint booth but you can use a well-ventilated area of your choice to do this job after a 10-minute flash time the second coat can go on this is a medium coat that should provide us plenty of coverage but we'll go ahead with a third coat just for good measure [Music] well mark's got that rear all shined up and it's ready to slide up under our frame i went ahead and installed our qa1 links and we're just about ready to install this thing but we're going to do a coilover conversion on this car and back in the day well they wasn't thinking about coilovers in any form or fashion now qa1 offered a set of these brackets that's going to adapt it for us and all we have to do is drill a couple of extra holes this bracket bolts to the original lower shock mount bracket on the rear end and after drilling a pilot hole we upsized bits to accept a 7 16 inch bolt just blow off those metal shavings drop in the bolt and cinch it down [Music] this bracket mounts to the frame and two of the bolt holes are already existing so we install and tighten those two first which helps line us up to drill out the frames for our third bolt dummy wind big guy all right let's try that the upper control arms slide onto the mounts attached to the rear end and bolt into place [Music] detroit muscle presents back to basics tips for the beginner gear head when you're doing a full suspension install like we're doing on our chevelle there's a lot of things to take into consideration one of those is the type of bushings you use and your control arms the first type is rubber stock style bushings these are good because the ride quality is really nice and you don't have to lubricate them but over time they like to dry rot and crack and there's a lot of deflection built into those especially in a high performance application on the other end of the spectrum are solid mounts like this solid rod end here these are great because there's absolutely no deflection built in so this is good for like a race car the problem is you're going to feel every little bump in the road so there's got to be something in the middle that's where these urethane bushings come in they have all the benefits of a stock style mount but without all the deflection you got to make sure you lube them up because if you don't when you install them they're going to make some noise and that's why they get a bad wrap [Music] with our lowers bolted in as well all of our control arms can be tightened [Music] now it's time for our rear coil overs to mount to those brackets that we installed earlier [Music] the rear sway bar is next and with a little bit of persuasion bolts to the lower control arms and gets tightened down we added the bare brakes and our rear is ready to roll still ahead we'll take a look at how to mount brake lines for great looks and reliability hey guys glad you made your way back now we're just about to the finish line with assembling our chassis for our 72 chevelle project the next task at hand is going to be installing the brake lines now to save us a bit of time we went to year one and got us a full stainless steel kit for a 68 to 72 with it being stainless steel you don't have to worry about it rusting or anything like that and it's going to stay looking good for a long time the kit includes both of them for the rear axle the line it runs from the front to the rear of the car both up front left and right and the ones that run down from the master cylinder now we're not going to worry about installing these quite yet because we're going to have to install an adjustable proportioning valve but we'll cross that bridge later down the road the first line we're going to install is the long one that runs along the frame rail from the front to the back of the car to strap it to the frame we're tapping out the existing holes so that we can fasten the lines with a cushion clamp and arp hardware [Music] we'll do this all the way down in the same locations that the original mounts were located then we'll give the rest of our lines the same treatment when it came to wheels and tires for our chevelle we wanted to go with something with a stock look but with a twist so we went to year one for a set of their exclusive 17-inch magnums these are reproductions of the originals but in a larger diameter they're available in both eight and nine inch widths they actually offer a staggered kit with both sizes which is what we went with kit also comes with center caps and all the lug nuts for installation as for tires we called on our good friends at summit racing for a set of mickey thompsons up front we chose the street comp which is an ultra high performance tire that will give us the traction and handling we need but in the rear we decided to go with mickey's new et street ss drag radials this is a super sticky tire that's going to give us the traction we need on those launches but it's also d.o.t compliant now the reason we went with these is because we've got something special planned for the underhood of that chevelle but you're gonna have to learn about that later of course we pre-measured for these very wheels when we ordered our brakes so we don't have to worry about any clearance issues here well that does it for our chevelle's chassis and i have to say it looks really good from that freshly powder coated frame to that bulletproof rear end and all those new suspension components that hold them together yeah we still have a whole lot of work to be done on the body itself we got the rust repair we have to still do not to mention all that sanding and bodywork and paint but that's gonna have to come a little later down the road but i have to say the chassis turned out super sweet what do you think i think it looks great let's leave it under the lights for a while all right buddy today on detroit muscle we'll begin the interior rehabilitation on our 72 chevelle when we first found our chevelle we dragged it out of a barn after almost 20 years of rest and gave it a long needed bath she made a trip to the blaster to reveal the condition of the sheet metal and we stuck a new floor in it right away then while the chassis was off we upgraded the suspension we've got a couple of things going on with our chevelle today and one of those is obviously the interior and we called up original parts group for basically everything we need to redo the interior of our 72 chevelle and best part most of this stuff comes under one single part number which is great because it comes with all the normal things you would order like a dash pad sill plates and visors but it also comes with things you may forget like all these clips and trinkets and ashtrays and pedal pads heck it even comes with window cranks door handles of course it comes with all the normal things you would expect an interior kit to come with like the headliner trim panels arm rests it's even got door panels the part of the kit that we're going to be dealing with today though is going to be the seed upholstery so while he's busy bending up some hall greens i'm going to do a little bit of sheet metal work now a few of you out there may have noticed that our chevelle is missing a few pieces kind of like the quarter panel the tail panel and this other quarter but you know i guess you could say i've got my work cut out now i'm going to keep after this thing and do what i do and go ahead and get busy now obviously since we've still got a bunch of sheet metal work left to do on our chevelle we can't be putting all that interior in just yet but there are some things you can do away from the car on the bench that'll help you advance your project along or maybe you just need a break from doing the bodywork one of those things is going to be reupholstering the seats now these seats have seen better days this is our front seat and it's uh well it's got some stains and rips and tears and it doesn't smell very good either now those hog rings that tom was talking about earlier well this is them right here what they do is they clamp through the upholstery and hold it tight over the seat frame sometimes it clamps the upholstery to itself and other times it clamps it to the frame either way we've got to get those out of the way to get the upholstery off now they may look a little crude but this is the way that upholstery was made back in the day and even though you really don't see it on oem applications anymore anytime you're doing a restoration or even custom applications this is the way to go first thing we need to do is get these seat backs off of the seat frame it all starts by removing this clip that holds the seat back to the bottom then some wiggling will free it up [Music] after that you have to rotate the back around to detach it from the base see when you're tearing an old seat apart like this you never know what you're going to find like an old gas receipt somebody bought a couple quarts of oil and what do we have here like chain something uh oh oh it's a skull pendant with an eight ball tom will like that one with all that stuff removed from the top we can flip it over and start detaching the old upholstery there are dozens of these old hog rings on here and they're really what holds this thing together [Music] as you get each group of them removed you can start peeling the cover off [Music] we'll save these seat belt channels to be reused later then get the old foam pulled off now that we've got all of our upholstery and foam stripped off of our seat frame we can take a better look at it and figure out there's anything wrong and what we need to do to get it ready to put everything back on and this one looks really good it is dirty and there's a little bit of surface rust on it but overall it's in good shape looks like none of the springs are broken or missing so we just need to get it cleaned up one thing we notice while we're tearing this thing down is that the tracks are frozen and won't move we'll grab some wd-40 specialist rust release penetrant spray and soak the mechanism along with the rails [Music] after it sits for a bit we'll see if that got our slide working again we'll go ahead and repeat that procedure on the other side then articulate both back and forth to get them loosened up looks like we got everything working [Music] again well we've got our seat frame all cleaned up and we've got the tracks working and all lubed as well now there's still some rust here so we need to do something about that and what we're going to do is we're going to use dupli-color's rust fix now we'll just spray this onto the surface and it's actually going to transform the rust into kind of a black primer something we can paint over it's going to get rid of the rust we have and keep rust from coming back [Music] this stuff will save you a ton of work preventing you from having to crawl all over this thing with a wire brush or [Music] wheel as it starts to react with the rust on the frame you can see the color changing then after it's dried out we're good to go we'll go ahead and paint it with some black dupli-color enamel and let it dry [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] coming up see how this puzzle of a seat goes back together to make for a comfy ride hey guys while you were gone we went ahead and got our seat backs all stripped down and reupholstered with the new foam and covers and i have to say they look really good there are a few wrinkles in there but the heat gun will take care of those when we get it all together for now we're going to jump back onto our seat bottom frame and get it recovered but before we put the foam on we're going to take a preventative measure with this burlap here just going to put it right on top of the springs and the reason we're doing that is because over time these springs will wear into the foam cushion of the seat bottom and besides they did it this way from the factory looks good well here's our original seat bottom foam as you can see it's all broken down and nasty and really doesn't have any support at all well our new one on the other hand it's nice clean and new smells a lot better and we got this from opgi and what it's going to do is not only smell better and look better but it's going to allow our new upholstery to fit nice and tight get this fit on here looks pretty good now here's a good example of why you don't throw anything away until you're finished with the project this old seat foam may smell bad but it's got these notches here for where the seat belts come through and the new foam doesn't because it's for 68 to 72 some of those didn't have seat belts so just going to set this up here make some marks [Music] if you've got one of these body saws they'll cut through this foam like butter and give you nice edges as well with that done it's time to start thinking about putting our fabric over our foam now we got these seat covers from original parts group with the rest of our interior and they've got the vinyl construction with the alkyd styled inserts just like they would have had from the factory but we can't go slapping them on just yet something we need to do first see on the underside of the cover they've got this loop of fabric sewn in here and this is what the hog rings will attach to now you could just put the hog rings right through this and onto the seat frame but it still could pull through instead just like the factory we've got this rod that goes into here and as we fish it through you'll see it's going to provide a nice little spot for that hog ring to grab onto [Music] you heard us talking about the hog rings and the hog ring pliers well these are the pliers and this is the hog ring and it just goes right here into the grooves and the pliers here and the spring-loaded pliers will actually hold it to get it where it needs to be and then crimp it down [Music] don't let anybody tell you that upholstery guys don't earn their keep because it takes a lot of tugging and grunting to get a good set of covers on the factory frame has these little eyelets which will tell you where the rings are supposed to go [Music] on the other side they clamp around the springs themselves you want to pull all of these really tight because your cover needs to fit as tightly around the foam and frame as possible [Music] we'll also cut a few reliefs for things like this post well there you have it there's our seat we've come a long way from where we started get the heat gun after it get those wrinkles out later but it's ready to go on the car as soon as the car is ready hey guys welcome back now we're working on the interior of our 72 chevelle and we've run into a bit of a snag see our kick panels here will they come paint to match and the interior is going to be this medium blue here so we need to do something about that but before we can just paint or dye our panel here we have to take some things into consideration and the main thing is to make sure this thing's prepped properly there's a few things here we need to look at one is this texture that's built into this panel if we don't scuff it right well the paint's not going to stick another thing is since this is brand new there's probably some releasing agents that are on here and if we don't get those off the paint won't stick either we're going to start with the clean and scuff sponge move over to the plastic adhesion wipe and then finally the advanced plastic bond this all comes as a kit called the plastic prep system and we got it from single source in nashville it's made by ppg the sponge does a couple of things the green side is abrasive and it helps scuff the surface for a tooth that the paint can stick to the solution helps wash away any unwanted chemicals that could be on the surface we'll wash it and wipe it off then move to the next step that's going to be this wipe which is soaked in a solution similar to waxing grease remover but designed for plastics with it dried you can hit it with a plastic bond which is an adhesion promoter while that's drying we're going to go ahead and get our paint mixed up to spray on now we went to single source and told them we had a 72 chevelle with medium blue interior they got us a paint ready and all we need to do reduce it down spray it on a couple of coats will get you fixed up and you've got yourself a painted panel [Applause] well there you go and after two coats you can see here it matches really well now this isn't just for new pieces if you have old pieces that may not be available brand new you can clean them up paint them just the same today on detroit muscle it's how to fit new sheet metal on your ride and measure for new emblems when we found our chevelle it had been sitting in a barn for a couple of decades so the first thing we did was wash it off after a good bath she took a trip to the blaster which was followed by a new floor while the body was off we upgraded our suspension then mated the frame to the body for some more sheet metal work the car had some quarter panel issues in the usual spots right behind the rear wheels there you go we've got our quarters on that we got from auto metal direct it wasn't too bad and it's starting to look like a car again but we still got a few things we need to address and that's where this comes in we got a pair of brand new fenders from amd they're made from oem steel and come with all the factory mounting points well we need to get the rest of this front end bolted on so we can move on to the next step now before we cut that old quarter off we went ahead and lined up our door so that we'd have a reference point on how to line up this new quarter now this gap isn't what i'd call street rod nice but it's far better than some of those oems that i've seen out there now the next step that we're going to be doing is installing all that amd sheet metal on the front of this car and we've got to get it lined up as well we'll toss in a new set of bushings and start with the radiator support with that on the new fenders can come into place [Applause] [Music] like tommy said earlier we mounted the doors before we cut the quarters off so all the body lines are good from the front of the door back which means we can use the leading edge of the door here to adjust our fenders now you might say this paint stick right here is the industry standard for the thickness of a gap on body lines so we're going to use this to figure out where we need to put our fender all right as we stick this paint stick in here you can see here that the gap's way too wide up here and as we go down you can see it gets tighter and tighter until we finally get down here where it's just about right then it tightens up too tight down here so the top of the fender needs to come back and the bottom of the fender needs to go forward but another thing to take into consideration is where it lies here in line with the door it's actually sticking out a little bit here but the fender sticking out just a little bit isn't really a main concern of ours if this was a really nice show car something we were going to try to win an award with we might want to make sure that was nice and flat but actually a lot of these cars came from the factory with the fender sticking out a little bit or the door in a little bit to cut down on wind noise and to allow that door to go behind the fender when it opens but we are going to make sure that we get this gap just right but there's a few things to take into consideration when doing that when you see that the gap's too big here you may think you need to just push the fender back at the top but because this is one piece of metal what happens here is going to affect what happens elsewhere like at the bottom where we said the gap was too tight so the best way to remedy this is to make sure all the bolts are loose and then rotate the entire fender one good way to do that is get a buddy up front and watch the gaps while he gives it a wiggle help me out time a little bit just straight back all right down a little perfect and now we've got a pretty even gap throughout most of the door here but now that we've got it there we see that we got a new problem with the fenders lower than the door so we're gonna have to shim that fender up this is a pretty simple concept just loosen the mounting bolt enough to enable some shims to slide into place then check your alignment a lot better that looks pretty good all right well that gets our fender where we needed to be so now just need to get these bolts [Applause] [Music] tightened all right guys we got our new hood hinges and new hood from amd bolted onto our chevelle now we're ready to see where we're at because i'm pretty sure that we're not going to hit the adjustment first go around but there is something to keep in mind make sure whenever you're adjusting your panels to start from the back of the car and work forward if you start with the hood and then move around to the fender and door and you have to move those you don't have to come back and readjust your hood let's see where we're at yeah we're off first thing you can see the hood's a little bit twisted it's hanging over the fender and it's got a big old gap back here in the back now over here on the passenger side now the hood's sticking up about that far it should have plenty of adjustment let's just see the rear hinge bolt is loose so that doesn't help but we'll loosen the front and lean the whole thing back then we'll tighten them to check the fit yeah we're flush now we're in pretty good shape except for we need to slide the hood forward just a little bit the overhang here is a little bit excessive loosen these bolts that hold the hood to allow us to slide this side forward then tighten them down and check it yep that should do it up next how to make those pesky hood emblems look right hey guys welcome back and we just finished up installing and adjusting some sheet metal here on our 72 chevelle and we're just about ready to start priming and prepping for paint but there is something that we need to address first there's a whole bunch of shiny stuff that's going to get bolted screwed and clipped to this thing once it's all painted up and if we don't pre-fit this stuff ahead of time and we try to install it at the end after it's all painted we risk messing it up a good example of that is door handles mirrors and trim but there could be the occurrence that you're trying to eliminate something if you look at our door here it's got a whole bunch of holes down the middle of it so that tells us apparently at some point in time this car must have had side trim on it and we're not running that stuff so we're gonna have to weld those holes up to fill them in and then sometimes you may be adding something to it now we got this fancy cowl induction hood and we want to be running both of those emblems right now is the time to be drilling into this hood not whenever it's all buffed out because nobody likes cutting into that nice pretty paint for all that shiny stuff we were talking about we went to original parts group they offer just about everything you need to restore the interior and exterior of your chevelle or other gm muscle car they've got moldings lenses bezels and trim all this stuff is made to oem spec and is designed to be a direct replacement for your original parts now they've got a bunch of different options as well like these ss badges a lot of you guys out there like converting these chevelles to ss clones there's nothing wrong with that we're not doing it on our car but they've got everything you need to do that as well as a bunch of other stuff like those cowl induction emblems all right guys the technique that i use for installing emblems may be a little bit primitive but it's effective and you can use this whether the car is painted or not it's got some pretty simple tools tape sharpie drill let's get started i'm going to start out by laying down not one not two not three but four layers of masking tape then we'll grab our emblem you want to figure out where you want it high or low we'll put a dot on there using a paint stick will keep the line consistent this will give us a reference point to keep the emblem straight then we'll bring our emblem back in and get it where we want it then we'll put some pressure on it to mark where we need to drill the holes this is why we have four layers of tape we'll use an eighth inch bit which matches the size of the post on the emblem [Applause] you can mark the edge of that one to tell you how far to put the other one from it then we'll repeat the procedure on the second piece with the tape removed we can blow off the shavings and install our new emblems you can pretty much use this technique on just about any emblem that you'll run across just take your time don't get no big hurry and you'll get it right today on detroit muscle the boys are gonna make the dust fly while they get in some quality time with our chevelle's body learn some tips and tricks to make the panels on your ride as smooth as glass hey guys we're back on our chevelle project today and we're going to be working on the bodywork now this oftentimes is the chore that is let's say the most dreaded and by far the most labor-intensive but this is where all that hard work of redoing your ride gets the shine son let me tell you now your paint job is what gives everybody the first impression of your ride now you don't want it to be bad because that'll get you a lot of attention but not the kind of attention that you're looking for so today we're going to slow down just a bit and give you a few tips and tricks and some insider information on how to do a few of these things properly first thing we're going to start with is working with new parts like this hood you want to make sure that you clean everything thoroughly because there's oil and contaminants that can be on the surface that come from the manufacturing and shipping process that can come back to haunt you what we're using is some wax and grease remover because the substances that wind up on these panels are often oil based and this will do a good job of removing it be sure to keep using clean towels to avoid spreading any contaminants to apply cleaner i prefer using it in a spray bottle instead of what a lot of guys do out there which is take the lid of the jug off and put your rag over it and slosh it onto it problem with doing it that way if you have anything on that rag it's going to get inside of that container this way you don't have to worry about it the next thing you want to do which is a good idea is a surface test you want to make sure this black coating that's on the sheet metal is true e-coat there's some sheet metal out there that you can buy that's got a black primer on it but it's really just a shipping coating and what it's designed to do is to keep that part from flash rusting during transportation now we got our hood from amd or auto metal direct and we know it's got the e coat but the test is relatively simple okay we've got a cup of lacquer thinner here and a rag what you want to do is take the rag saturate it and then just simply set it onto the panel you want to let it cook for just a minute if you have any black on the rag it's not true e-coat you're going to have to sand it all off if you're like we are you're good to go all right guys the next thing we're going to be doing is prepping for some primer depending on your paint manufacturer they may have different recommendations some of them out there say once the surface is clean you're ready to start sealing and then you can move on to paint or you may have to scuff it lightly if it's exposed to direct sunlight now we're going to go ahead and scuff ours down with some five to 600 grit paper here on the big flat surfaces and then follow that up around the curves with this red pad [Music] you want to keep a light even pressure on the d.a sander because with an aggressive tool like this you could gouge down through the e-coat into bare metal [Music] now you don't really want to sand the e-coat off you just want to knock a shine down try not to sand through it you need to make sure to be extra careful on the body lines and where the panel is curved these spots are easier to mess up if you get into a hurry don't be afraid to grab an abrasive pad or sandpaper and do those places by hand a lot of people might not know but da stands for dual action and when we slow the video way down you can see why the pad doesn't just spin like a grinder or a buffer would it also moves diagonally in both directions creating an orbital movement pattern that is very effective at removing material [Music] with the main body of the work done we'll bust out that red pad and scuff down the spots we either couldn't get to or wanted to be a little more careful with by using a scuff pad to scuff these edges here guys make sure to pay attention while you're scuffing you ain't careful you'll run off slip off and cut yourself on these edges it's a good way to make a quick trip to the emergency room [Music] well we showed you that one panel but there are several more that have to be dealt with before we can get in the booth [Applause] cleaning off the surface once you're done is important so get you a blower and some cleaner and make sure that thing is clean as a whistle now we can start getting ready to prime we'll jump in the spray booth with our newly prepped panels and get this brand now you can spray on one coat or two coats i'm gonna spray on two just for good measure with those sprayed we can move on to the body we ran out of blue primer but that's okay we can use black since this won't be the primer coat that goes under the paint this epoxy primer is designed to be sprayed on bare metal or other primer and will function as an ideal surface to apply the filler we'll be using make sure your fitting is screwed in the gun real good that way you don't wind up looking like a snake wrangler [Music] hey guys welcome back now we got the epoxy primer sprayed on the body panels of our 72 chevelle and it's time to move on to the body working process there's a few things we need to consider before we just start slapping some mud on here one is the amount of this primer we put down if you just put one coat a couple hours you can go ahead and start this process but if you put a couple coats on like we did you want to wait several hours or even overnight which is what we did other thing is you got to figure out where you're actually going to put the filler now in a situation like this where you can see a ding well that's pretty easy but there may be spots on this panel that you can't see with the naked eye and in order to find those we're going to use some 180 grit sandpaper on a rubber block the idea with this is to keep the strokes light and apply even pressure you want to change the direction frequently using an x pattern to do the work one thing to keep in mind here is with this epoxy primer is it'll spall up on the sandpaper and you want to keep that from happening as much as possible even though we're keeping a light pressure on the block it's still going to do that a little bit because this primer hasn't completely cured so you just need to make sure you keep an eye on that pull that off get your fresh piece on there [Music] now blocking on this panel with the 180 has revealed all of the imperfections you can see the low spots here where the sandpaper didn't touch it was are pretty minor but they do need to be addressed now we'll get on those a little bit later with some high build primer but those deeper spots well they need to have some filler put on now as a general rule of thumb i don't like to have filler any thicker than 3 16. now depending on the manufacture of it some of them say you can stretch it out to a quarter inch thick maximum but you just don't want to use no more than you have to this stuff isn't a glue isn't any kind of reinforcement but you can use it to shape the panel if you have to get it thicker than that you need to resort to a hammer and dolly or to get it closer so you don't need as much now when you're mixing this stuff make sure to fold it over don't be acting like you're making a bunch of mashed potatoes out of it because you don't want to mix it incorrectly or you're going to wind up with a bunch of air pockets you want to make sure the surface is dust free so just wipe it down good with this primer being relatively fresh we can go ahead without sanding on it [Music] now if you look at the filler this stuff is starting to kick don't even try to apply this you'll run into adhesion problems while you're doing this you also don't want to send off the blue primer or your epoxy primer off in there because that's where you get your corrosion resistance from got a few imperfections right here where i didn't wipe enough filler at you can also see right there and right there is the hole that that emblem goes in you also want to come back with some compressed air and blow out all this stuff because there's sand and dust that's inside this filler and you want to open that up you can also see right here is an air pocket you want to make sure to look for things like that because if you were to prime over top of it when that stuff shrinks down there will be a dimple there well that one's fixed up i got a few more i need to do some dough work on after that this deck lid will be ready for some primer hey guys welcome back now we're going to get back started on the body work of our old chevelle and we're ready to spray on a different type of primer detroit muscle presents back to basics tips for the beginner gear head now i'm sure you've heard a whole bunch of different terms whenever it comes to primer so we want to slow down and explain your basic options now the first thing we're going to talk about is lacquer primer now this stuff is very economically priced because it's old technology it was widely used back in the day but that's really about the best they had now the viscosity of the stuff is pretty thick it's like a high build primer but it's only a 1k meaning all you need to spray it is a thinner to mix in with it now a lot of guys still use this stuff but it's on implement and farm tractors and that kind of thing and that's why it's still around today now this stuff is a high build urethane primer it takes an activator to make it cure now at first glance you would think that it's not as good because it's a lot thinner but this is a completely different animal since this is a 2k it takes an activator to make it cure and that greatly increases its lifespan over top of that lacquer primer but this primer also takes a tie coat to make it stick to metal because you can't spray it straight on and then you have a super high bill primer this is a polyester primer and often times it's considered a sprayable form of filler but it takes special equipment just to spray it on because it's so darn thick now you can use this stuff if you've got a panel that's got waves in it heck i've even seen it used to remove hail dents before we get much further i want to talk about shrinkage now all primers shrink to some form or fashion because they have a thinner or reducer in them to make them a sprayable form and once that stuff evaporates out that material causes it to draw up and that's the shrinkage but all of them do it at a different rate so i created a little experiment here with three different materials same amount in each cup just to show you how much they shrink the first we're going to talk about is polyester now by far this is the most stable because the talc in it is a lot greater in size than the other primers and it has a lot less reducer in it next up is the 2k urethane primer now this stuff has the talc in it ground a little bit finer than that polyester but it also has activated resins in it that help keep it from shrinking up as much but you can definitely tell that it's got some solvent in it next up is lacquer primer at first glance you'd think it didn't shrink that much but actually it shrank a bunch here it's a lot thinner and it started actually pulling apart by far this is the least stable of the three now these two primers are a 2k primer and they take an activator to make them cure where the lacquer primer it just simply dries now i'm not going to recommend this but you could take lacquer primer like this big old plug sand it into a powder pour it into a cup pour a little thinner with it mix it up you could actually re-spray it where if you use these other two you just have dust and some thinner we're ready to start spraying on our poly primer now i took the needles out of both of these guns to show you the difference in the two if you look at this hole here it's a lot bigger that allows you to spray that thicker fluid where this other one is a lot smaller and it's more for stuff like paint and clear since we're using it to help smooth out any minor low or high spots left in these panels we're going to use that high build poly primer which you follow up with a good amount of time with a long board well we got our panel sprayed with some primer and it's just about cured enough that we can start that labor of love called sanding you excited so excited not only do we have a lot of sanding to do on this stuff but we've got a lot of priming and sanding left to do on the rest of the car so we need to get to work well mark's busy hammering on that old mopar i'm gonna get to scratching on this old chevelle now this is gonna take i guess you could say several minutes because this bodywork stuff well it's kind of a labor of love and just so you guys know the people that you see on the power nation well those are the guys that get to work on these things there aren't a second or third shift here it's just us oh this ain't gonna be fun now we just about got our old chevelle ready to start spraying on some color and i sure am glad all that blocking is just about to end now we've got one fender left to do so i thought we'd slow down and give you a few tips on sanding and if you're around this stuff long enough well you'll hear the term hand sanding but there is the right and wrong way to do it first thing you want to do is take a piece of sandpaper and fold it into thirds we're going to slap on a little bit of guide coat to show you what we're talking about next when you go to sand you want to use the meat of your hand not your fingertips and here's why when you combine the irregular shape of your fingers and the pressure from them you're going to be sending grooves into the surface if you do this over the entire panel you're going to have a mess on your hands but you can fix it it just requires a sanding block and some more guide coat simply re-coat the panel and sand in a cross pattern you will see the guide coat being sanded off the surface before the grooves and just keep sanding until they both go away shouldn't take a bunch of effort but it all depends on the depth of those grooves it's usually a better idea to use a sanding block on the bigger flatter surfaces but there are the occasion that you won't be able to use a block unlike up here on the top so this is how you'd want to do it using the bigger part of your hand apply nice even pressure you will want to sand in a back and forth pattern with long straight strokes you don't want to sand in a circular manner if you do it can cause sand scratches and a wavy surface that will be seen once painted it's also a good idea to sand in the direction of the body lines for best results doing sanding like this is pretty common especially with odd shapes like the top of this fender and whenever you do it correctly there's nothing wrong with it another tip for you this black stuff that we're spraying on the side of this fender it's called guide coat it's not paint and this is why you'd want to use that type of thing i'm going to start sanding on this side that'll spray the guide coat on first then go over to this side and you'll see the difference in the two [Music] now if you look here on the bottom of the block all the powder is all crumbly when i sand this side that's not going to be it at all [Music] now if you notice this stuff is starting to cake up just a bit and that's because it's paint not that guide coat well i get the joy of finish sanding this fender but it's okay because it's the one last panel and then we get to paint that chevelle i'm kind of excited today on detroit muscle it's time to get our project chevelle into the paint booth and put some shine on it find out how a paint gun works and how to set one up for a great paint job plus a masking technique for soft lines and we'll get our chevelle body mounted back on the chassis hey everybody welcome to detroit muscle we've been working on our 69 dodge charger for a while now and most recently we upgraded the front suspension steering and brakes but it's time to move away from that project to another that's our 72 chevelle tommy's in here in the booth getting it ready for paint yeah after hours and hours of blocks sanding and bodywork we finally get to spray on some color you excited [Music] when we first found our chevelle we pulled it out of an old hay barn it had been in there for a couple of decades but we had big plans part of those plans included a whole lot of sheet metal work in addition to upgraded suspension wheels and tires oh and don't forget lots of sanding you may be sitting there thinking about our car the way we've got it taped up that it looks kind of odd and done in a weird way well we've got a couple of reasons why we've done that here on the inside what we're trying to do is prevent any debris from the inside of the car climbing out and getting into our paint job up here on the top side you may notice that the exterior side of the car is taped out well the reason we're doing that is we're going to be spraying the door jambs first along with the underside of the car now under here we are going to clear coat it along with the firewall because we're going to have to marry the car back to the chassis and then assemble everything back together well to do that there's a reason for that our car itself well it's going to go metallic and we want to make sure that all the panels match we don't want to paint it separately and then have a different colored quarter door and fender and hood so this is the proper way to do it we got just about all the taping down here on the chevelle except for around the door opening because we're going to be using a technique called back taping if you'll notice here on the corner of the rocker the tape doesn't go all the way to the edge now we're going to be spraying on a gray sealer and then base coat now doing it this way will help prevent a tape edge i'm going to use this small piece of tape here to demonstrate what i'm talking about now you just pushed it down here on the edge kind of like i've done there and then fold the piece of tape back then you can spray your sealer and the edge will be nice and feathered now after that dries you can come back and pull the tape out just a bit and then now you're ready to spray on your base or your color then after the base dries on that one you come back and then pull out just a little bit more you could clear it this technique would work the whole point of doing it this way is to prevent a hard tape line the first thing we're spraying is a coat of sealer this is ppg's dp50 epoxy primer that's reduced down to spray as a sealer now you can do two coats but one is plenty for us this will give us a solid foundation and a uniform colored canvas to spray on our base coat and since there's some of these panels that have raw steel showing we need a tie coat to give the base goat something to adhere to from the factory some cars have a texturized coating sprayed onto them in certain areas they use this both as a sound deadener and to help fill up body seams we're spraying a two-part rubberized coating to simulate that it may look a little primitive but we're going to spray body color over it and it will look really nice okay guys the time to spray on color is dangerously close but before we get too carried away i want to slow down and give you a few tips on how to set up your spray gun now a few of these may help you guys out there that's kind of new to the game and want to try your hand at painting but we're going to start with the adjustments of the paint gun the first thing is the pressure gauge now that's very simple you just got a knob here that you have to twist to make the pressure go up or down this particular unit is a digital and they make them with a needle and a gauge as well next is the fluid needle adjustment that's very simple you just turn this knob to allow more or less fluid pass through the gun now as i turn this thing you'll notice that the trigger is being pushed forward that makes less fluid pass through next is your fan air adjustment now what this one does as you crank it in or out it either dials the pattern in real narrow or real wide and you'd want that adjustment depending on what you're trying to do like if you're trying to spray in some nook and crannies you'll probably get it real narrow where if you're doing an all-over you'd adjust it pretty wide okay guys we're in the paint booth and we've got a little piece of paper hanging on the wall we want to do us a spray out to test our pattern now with the paint gun you've got the trigger and it's got two stages to it the first one that you pull onto just allows air to pass through where whenever you engage into the second one well it opens the needle and allows fluid to be passed through now doing this test you want to keep it about eight to ten inches away from the surface also you want to pull and engage just the air and then pull the trigger completely then instantly release it now this particular one is a little bit too fat here in the middle because you can tell that it tapers off on each end so we need to open it up a bit and to make that adjustment you just turn your fan adjustment knob then try it again now that's a lot better it's a little bit narrow just need to make another adjustment now to make that adjustment you just simply turn that knob a little bit more all right that one's a little light but looks good while tommy's spraying that bowtie blue figured i'd show you guys a little bow tie horsepower this is a sneak peek at the engine that's going to be going into our chevelle it may be a small block chevy but it's not your run-of-the-mill engine this thing is a 406 cubic inch small block with a dart block and an eagle rotating assembly it's got afr220cc eliminator heads bringing the compression ratio to nine to one but up top is where this thing really starts to work with a qft cfm carb with an f1a pro charger guys down in ninja power put this thing on the engine dyno and it made a whopping 993 horsepower at 15 pounds of boost now that's with 93 octane pump gas with a little bit of race gas added to it coming up we'll get started spraying the chevelle with some groovy metallic blue along with some more tech on gun setup and we'll finally get that body back on the chassis hey guys welcome back now earlier i showed you how to do a spray out so that you can test your pattern now we're going to spray a little bit further and make a couple of passes to make sure that this gun is operating properly now that looks pretty consistent you don't want to see any stuttering or sputtering that kind of thing because that would indicate a problem now there are some other problems out there that you can run into kind of like these now let's say your gun is spraying a pattern that looks kind of like this it could be a clogged air cap or spray orifice or even damaged parts in fact sometimes clogged or damaged parts can lead to a variety of odd patterns that can't be corrected no matter how much adjusting you do so make sure that puppy is good and clean okay with that done i've got another procedure that i want to show you on how to adjust the fluid needle and it's called the dump test it's pretty straightforward and now some guys whenever they go to adjust the fluid needle they pull the trigger all the way back and then they crank this knob until it kind of just touches up against it and what that does that allows them to use the trigger as a throttle if they need more paint they just pull on it if they need less they back off just a bit but the doing it this way is a little more accurate what you want to start with is 10 ounces of thinner [Music] to do this test what you want to do is pour the thinner into the gun hook up your hose and pull the trigger allow it to spray for one minute i'm using a stopwatch on my phone to time it out one minute almost all the money now pour your leftover material back into the cup and see how much you've used all right guys we used six ounces of material in that one minute test and that's actually on the fat side of things because what's recommended for spraying base coat is four ounces to six ounces so if you're a little more inexperienced you might want to tighten that needle up just a bit and get closer to that poor mark to help prevent running everything into the floor but if you're spraying clear coat the recommendation is actually six to ten so you'd have to back it out just a bit hope this helps you check out that color this is a custom mix that our friends at single source hooked us up with and we're calling it bow tie blue we're going to add our thinner and a small amount of activator and then we'll just stir it up you want to mix this stuff really well and then pour it into a gun before you get too carried away make sure to tack off the surfaces to be painted and don't forget pull your tape back [Music] finally we're able to start spraying on this awesome color and a huge step closer to the finish line with our chevelle this first coat doesn't have to cover every nook and cranny you're just looking for one nice uniform application we're gonna put three coats of base on here that'll do it stick around and see why the best way to get your body mounted to the chassis is with an 80s style montage all right we got our base coat sprayed on and now we're gonna have to do a little bit of masking because we don't want to clear coat the door jambs but we are gonna be clear coating the top of the firewall the firewall on the belly because we're gonna be marrying the car to the chassis [Applause] we're getting closer i love taping i love taping he he i love taping now you don't have to get too precise right around here because you're not really going to be blowing any clear up here you just kind of want to tape it up just enough so that all the stuff that's settling and floating around in here don't get on the top of this thing we're going to put on a couple of coats of clear we're starting on the top for no particular reason getting the firewall and the cowl first like the base you're looking for a nice even coat all about that bottom now oh yeah now there's some painters that say that you don't really need a fresh air but i'm here to tell you whenever you're painting something like this this is almost a must pay attention to how this stuff's gonna blow back into my face not only is this safer but it helps keep you a lot cleaner meanwhile back at the shop we assembled our chassis a while back and though we had the body on it for some of that metal repair it's finally going back on this time for good i have to say i kind of dig that color i like it i think we need to get some plastic on this before we get this thing on the chassis that way we don't get any overspray on that nice clear yeah that's a good idea i'm going to go ahead and get in the booth and trim out all the other pieces that way we can assemble the car and get the outside of this thing sprayed okay it's not going to do itself [Music] [Music] [Music] there's a lot of labor that goes into building an old car like our chevelle and getting the color on is a very special moment for us hey welcome back while you were gone we went ahead and got most of the body panels bolted back onto our chevelle and we have a good reason for that this blue color that tommy chose well it's got a lot of metallic in it yeah and we don't want this thing 10 different shades of blue so we went ahead and bolted it back together like he said so that we can spray the exterior at one time and so now we need to untape this thing so we can push it in the booth and get to spraying there's really no special way to pull this stuff off just get to pulling till you get it all off the smooth transition right here that's what we were looking for with that back taping technique and back into the booth she goes [Music] now what we're doing here is actually taping to where mark did at the bottom of the body and then we're going to tape this to the floor to keep overspray from coming up under the car now what we should have done is wrap the frame and plastic like we did the bottom of the car and we wouldn't have to do all this work like earlier we're starting with a coat of sealer it looks translucent but that's because it's similar to the color of our primer now it's time for some color we're spraying on a couple of coats of our bowtie blue and that will get us up to color metallic colors like ours can be a little tricky to spray in order to get the metallics to lay out evenly so if you're new to the game you might want to consider a more basic solid color now we're going to take it back apart so that we can clear coat everything individually this will allow us to clear coat the back sides of the removable panels as well as the door jambs and the exterior body that will prevent us from having to do a couple more steps of masking and save us some time we can't fit everything in the booth at once so we'll do the body first since it's taped to the floor well there you go she's all blue and all shiny now we could go ahead and bolt on the doors but it'd probably be a lot better of an idea to leave the front cap off until we drop that motor and train again that's right and while we've got everything off it's probably a good time to do a little bit of cutting and buffing i thought all the sanding was done hey guys we're still working on our old chevy we made some pretty good progress now a while back we was able to spray our chevelle and boy did it turn out nice it's made quite a transformation if you remember back we drug it out of a barn it got completely torn down removing everything that we could after that we added a bunch of hours of sanding and body work so that we could spray on a custom color that we're calling bow tie blue the next step that we're going to do to this old girl is polish it out now this step isn't really required but it can take a paint job that looks pretty good and make it look great now watching someone sand isn't a whole lot of fun so let me bring you up to speed to where we're at right now we begin by wet sanding this fender down removing all the orange peel that it had on it starting with a thousand grit and then moving up to fifteen hundred after that we use the da with some 3000 on it to help smooth it out a little bit more we're going to be using a foam pad to polish out our fenders now it's always a good idea to look at the service that's going to be doing the work because you don't want to find any hidden jewels look to see if it has any debris or trash stuck on it because if it does it can damage or scratch your paint you're trying to shine back up we're in pretty good shape so we can move on also take just a second and wipe down and clean the panel that you're about to buff just like that buffer pad you want this surface to be clean you don't want to mess it up by something being on it because you've been working so hard to make this thing look nice spray on some clean water wipe it down it's that simple with that done you're pretty much ready to start slinging some goo well kinda there isn't any real need to slather this thing in compound all you need is a couple dime size amount kind of spread out on the panel also you want to make sure that the area that you're trying to buff is about a one foot by two foot you get much bigger than that well the compound is gonna start drying out and that's gonna cause you some more work first like we said we'll put a few dallops of some compound onto the panel and slowly work it around you'll want to have your buffer set on a low rpm we have this one on 1000. keep the buffer moving if you stay in one spot too long you'll run the risk of rubbing through the clear and getting into your base coat this polish that we're using has a two-step process the second step is similar to the first but you use less material with the same technique so with a little quality time with your buffer and a bit of rubbing you can admire your work well that looks pretty good i got to polish up the rest of this fender and the rest of the car guess i better get to work now we're done abusing that old mercury for a tidbit so we drug the chevelle in here and thought we'd get back on it now this old car has came quite a good waste from the first time we picked it up a while back we pulled this thing out of a barn and after some cleanup the body and frame were stripped down we dressed the chassis with new suspension brakes and rear end and then after quite a bit of work gave that body some fresh blue paint now for our power plant for our chevelle we were kind of shooting for the moon we had engine power put together this 406 with a pro charger that makes almost a thousand horsepower now whenever you're making this kind of power it can be a little complicated getting a transmission now to hold up to a heavy foot and then you multiply that by wanting an overdrive now if this is a dilemma that you may be running into y'all go check mark out he's got the answer for you like tommy said when you've got a thousand horsepower you have to have a transmission that can handle it so we got this bulletproof 4l80e from level 10 transmissions shed some light on this we brought in pat barrett from level 10. pat this is a really common swap what makes your trans different than say a stock unit our bulletproof transmission is a combination of the torque inverter matching all the modifications to the engine the hardware to match all the horsepower and get rid of all the factory deficiencies and then we tune everything for all the shift points and everything else with the software the 4l80e transmission was designed for the heavy duty general motors truck even though it's a strong transmission it was never really designed for performance well cool if this thing started its life as a truck transmission that makes a lot of sense why people like to use these as a swap but if i did use a stock piece what would be the weak points there's a couple weak points one is the oil pump the other one is the shafts and that is and the other is the valve body they were never designed to uh be performance parts as for the torque converter it's a 3000 stall to match the torque curve of the engine the torque converter is a very important tuning piece between the engine and trans having the wrong torque converter could cause all sorts of drivability problems [Music] before we can get that new trans bolted to our engine we need to connect the dots with this sfi certified haze flex plate that we got from summit racing we'll use some blue permatex thread locker on some arp flex plate bolts to get it installed and torque them down to 85. don't know if you know this or not you're going to come up a little bit yeah [Music] okay we'll get the bell housing bolts installed followed by the torque converter bolts which get torqued to 40 foot-pounds [Music] well we've been working on trying to get that motor ready to drop into our chevelle but we still like a couple more pieces before we can do that so while mark's rushing them things up i'm going to work on spraying on some lizard skin here on the inside of our car the first thing we're going to spray on is some of their sound control now that's going to greatly reduce the noise that's on the inside of the car then we're going to follow that up with some of the ceramic insulation this will help control the temperature of the passenger compartment the first step to getting started well you got to prep the surface now the inside of our car has been primed and that's fine but it's been several several weeks now with that being said we're gonna have to come in and scuff it now if you're working with a surface that's been sprayed within five to seven days it's okay to just go ahead and spray this stuff on as long as the surface is clean we've got a couple of hooks that we need to spray some primer on and then we can spray on our lizard skin [Music] we're using a red scuff pad to prep our floor a good once over is all that it needs we'll blow away all the dust so our lizard skin doesn't have any adhesion problems then we'll spray those rear seat hooks with a couple of coats primer what we're using is some dupli-color etch primer [Music] we need to get this thing masked up starting with the holes in the floor since we've already sprayed that pretty blue paint we want to protect it from getting any material onto it we'll get the jams masked off and then move to the firewall lizard skin can be wiped off with some warm water but this is more of a preventative move it's a good idea to use quality materials if you try to use newspaper and bottom shelf tape unmasking can be a real nightmare we're pretty much all taped up and this may look a little bit excessive but whenever we go to spraying in here there's a lot will be like some air floating around with some overspray in it and it'll get up here on the trunk or even on the top of the roof doing a little bit more masking right now can save you some labor well on cleanup when you start off mixing this stuff don't just throw the throttle wide open get the material moving and then throw her in high range you know you got the consistency right when it looks something like a milkshake cleanup can be done with plain old water and a bucket like this works really well to get it all off so that it doesn't drown to your mixer now all we need to do is pour in the material and we can get started there's no restorator needed but a dust mask is a good idea this material is very forgiving so it's super easy to spray on and that's a good thing since this floor panel is such an odd shape it may take a couple of cups to get it completely covered with this gun just keep it moving and you shouldn't have any trouble we've let that dry for right at 24 hours and we're ready to start spraying on our thermal coating now if you're going to be using both of these products like we are you need to do it in this order now just like our previous coating you mix it the same way pour it in the cup and then you're ready to start spraying the thermal coating is a little thicker than the sound control so you'll have to crank up your pressure just a little bit with both products you want the ambient temperature to be around 75 degrees or above but keep in mind that humidity will increase your dry times it'll dry to the touch in an hour but will completely cure in just 24 hours [Music] lizard skins that easy to install now we knew from the beginning that our old chevelle was gonna be plenty cool whenever we were done but applying this stuff well it's gonna take that coolness to a whole different level not to mention it's gonna make riding in it a little bit more quiet hey welcome back i've been busy trying to get all the components together that we need to get our engine transmission dropped into our chevelle now when you're doing a modern transmission swap like this 4l80e there are some hurdles one of those is if you're going to run a manual speedo like came from the factory you need to convert it thankfully summit racing has this kit here that comes with the tail shaft housing it's got the provision for the mechanical speedo gear comes with all the things you need to get it installed including the gear that goes onto the output shaft we also got this transmission mount also came from summit the driveshaft yoke seal needs to be removed so that we can get the output shaft gear installed a little bit of wd-40 will lube the splines and a brass punch and a hammer will drive it into place and then using a three thirty seconds hex we'll get the three set screws tightened which hold the gear to the shaft [Music] the new tail housing can go on and the bolts get torqued [Music] the speedo drive goes into the housing and it gets held into place with this simple metal tab another issue that you may run into whenever you're doing an automatic upgrade like we are with an overdrive in it well it's getting a cross member to fit up under your car but luckily american powertrain offers the x factor which will just about allow you to bolt any transmission up under it now there are a couple brackets that you have to mount here on the side and we're going to go ahead and do that so that we can drop that motor and transmission in and then we'll slide this thing up under these brackets bolt to existing holes in the frame we'll just get them started by hand for now it's finally time to drop this thing in and we're going to be really careful oh all right come on back slow and easy is the name of the game here because we're only going to do this one time and she's finally in place [Music] look at that looks like it was made for this chevelle now we can get our cross member in place and bolted to our mount [Music] well we made some progress on our chevelle today got the engine and transmission dropped into the hole and also got some lizard skin sprayed on the inside now we still got quite a bit of work to do and we'll stay after it that's right we've got to figure out what we're going to do with the plumbing for this supercharger got to get a carb on there some exhaust wiring cooling but let's not focus on all that stuff let's focus on the fact we've reached a milestone getting that engine in while mark's been busy pulling wrenches on that cadillac this is what i've been doing spraying on some fancy stripes on the tail end of our chevelle now what we're going to do today is spray some up here on the hood and one nice thing about the information that we're going to tell you if your car is all finished up and you want to jazz it up a bit you just need to apply what we're going to tell you first order of business we're going to have to do some sanding now you don't want to get too aggressive with your sandpaper because if you're spraying on a metallic or a pearl like we are well those strokes that you sand in there the grooves essentially can transfer through it and you'll see every stroke that you make but you also don't want to get too fine with your paper if you send it too slick well you'll run into adhesion problems what we're going to be using is some 600 and a whole lot of elbow grease it's always a good idea to soak your paper for a little while to let it soften up to help do some of this sanding i'm going to be using this soft flexible block this will help you to prevent cutting grooves and that kind of thing into your surface as you're sanding if you use your fingers well you may run into that all you have to do is wrap your paper in here grab you a little bit of water get [Music] started and whenever you're doing sanding like this i like to do it in like a grid pattern meaning you move across move back or forward and then back across and then so on and so forth what that does it keeps you from missing some spots the reason you have to sand is that this clear has had time to cure and the stripes won't be able to adhere to the surface unless you sand it down and you also want to paint on top of a flat surface so you're removing any texture or grain now we'll drag the hood into the booth and start laying out our stripes we'll tape up everything that we don't want to be white [Music] with that done we can mix up our paint and get the spraying [Music] we'll do two coats of white and two coats of pearl and clear base then we can unmask the whole hood in preparation for clear coat [Music] [Applause] we'll apply five coats of clear on the hood which would give it a nice deep shine and keep it protected well we got it clear coated and it turned out pretty slick now all it took was a little bit of clear coat some tape and some creativity you guys might give it a shot see what you can come up with today on detroit muscle we're gonna jump inside our baby blue chevelle and get the steering and dash ready to go hey everybody welcome to detroit muscle today we're jumping back into our 72 chevelle barn find project this is a really popular build nowadays because gm made a pile of these a bodies and if you had a big block it would have been at the top of the heap now this thing wasn't a big block car but that's okay because the aftermarket makes just about anything and everything you can imagine to build one of these things up one thing we didn't want to touch though was the styling we wanted to keep that classic look but couple it with big power and performance under the hood and to the wheels we pulled this thing out of an old barn where it had been sitting for about 20 years we got it all cleaned up and stripped down with the frame and fresh powder coat we dressed it to the nines after quite some time getting the body worked just right we sprayed on that beautiful bow tie blue now we're busy on final assembly now we've got a couple of things that we're wanting to do today to check off on our to-do list on that pretty little bow tie we've got over there and one of them is going to be installing and upgrading to the super sport dash that we got from opgi all this is sold as a conversion kit and as you can tell there's a whole bunch of pieces to this puzzle but before we can assemble all of it i got to do a tiny bit of painting pretty much whatever's on the outside of this chrome shiny trim all the way around here more or less out here needs to be painted a medium blue now while i'm busy doing all that spraying and such y'all go see mark he'll steer you in the right direction the first thing we're going to install in our chevelle is going to be the steering column but not this old one that we took out before that's because this thing is rusty dirty it smells pretty bad and plus some of the contacts and things inside the column once they've been sitting for a long time they get corroded and a lot of times it's easier to just replace the whole column than to spend the time rebuilding it so we decided to go with this flaming river column from opgi this thing is new and complete from stem to stern it's got a tilt feature which we didn't have on our other column you can get these things in bare stainless polished stainless or black like ours comes with the shaft the joints the bracket everything you need to get it installed and we also added this steering wheel with the bow tie horn button [Music] we need this bracket off our original column which doesn't come with the new one after it's blasted we'll hit it with a couple of coats of black paint [Music] this bracket gets mounted to the new column using the measurements we took off the original mounting point on our old one then the mounting bracket gets bolted to it and tightened down we'll slide the column into place and bolt it in using the original mounting bracket and firewall brace [Music] we've got our steering column mounted here where it's going to be mounted once we do final assembly and i got the joint here on the box just need to get this other joint onto the shaft of the column now this is our steering shaft and it's long that's because it's made to be cut to fit so we just need to get a measurement decide where we need to cut this thing okay looks like 15 and a half well this is our steering shaft that's going to need to be cut down but we can't just measure out our 15 and a half inches and make the cut because this is a collapsible column we have to make sure that when this thing's fully collapsed like this we don't cut any farther than here because this is a solid double d that slides inside of this hollow double d and this zerk fitting right here is what keeps all that lubricated in case you're in an accident this will compress rather than the steering column coming in and injuring the driver so we need to make sure this thing is extended out all the way and let's get our measurement well that puts our 15 and a half inch measurement right here in the joint so we're going to do something about that so if we move down to about an inch from our limit there that moves our 15 and a half inch mark well past our joint here and enough room to get this joint attached on here i'm clamping this into the vise onto the part that i'm going to actually discard because if i clamped it onto the shaft i'm going to keep not only would it mar it and make it hard to get onto the joint but it will also scratch our paint [Music] we'll bevel the edges so the shaft slides into the steering joint nice and easy [Music] well we've got our shaft test fit and everything looks good but there's one more thing we want to do before we install this thing permanently where these set screws go we want to put a dimple in there and there's two reasons for that one that's going to grab that shaft a lot better so that joint's not going to slip but the other reason is you can tell by this old shaft we've got here those set screws will gall the shaft and that makes it harder to get that joint on and off during assembly of the car but also if we need to work on it later coming up what is a printed circuit board and how do they work we'll show you well we got this thing painted and a few other pieces and it's all dry just need to get it untaped i'll meet you all over the table we can get that instrument panel all assembled now there's a lot of pieces to this kit that came with the dash now one nice thing about it is it's pretty complete and they all go together pretty much just one way first thing we're going to start with is the tachometer [Music] [Applause] these things just attach the housing using a couple of phillips headed screws before you install the speedometer make sure that you use a little rubber piece and the clip that holds the speedometer cable in place with it centered up the screws get cinched down then the clock gets installed and screwed in as well [Music] [Applause] [Music] the lens and housing get attached to our gauge assembly along with the clock knob [Music] our side gauges are next starting with the temp and fuel followed by the amp meter [Applause] [Music] now the next thing we're going to do is wire up our gauges now i know this doesn't look like a normal harness this is actually called a printed circuit board it's pretty flexible and they did it back in the day to try to save some money whether or not they did or not i can't tell you but they're not that complicated to install you want to remove the nuts [Music] slide this thing on there just start them for now and leave them a little loose [Music] pay attention to the circuit board some of these take just a simple screw and what that does is that connects the link if you will and gives it a ground source once we get all these connections lined up and started we can go back and tighten them down now we're ready to install the light bulbs that are going to illuminate our dash now it's a good idea to go ahead and replace them and not use the old ones because of the corrosion on those ovens could give you a little fit later down the road and they're really not that expensive you want to push your printed circuit down and be sure that the notches here don't catch onto your circuit i can kind of mess with the connection push them in that'll do it you got to install the brake warning lens as well as the headlight switch bezel then our whole instrument cluster assembly can attach to the dash from the backside [Music] up next installing modern air conditioning into a 45 year old car there's one more thing we want to address before we install that dash and that's the ac system now our car was actually equipped with ac from the factory and this is the evaporator case here now it is kind of clunky it's got cables and vacuum hoses and these things can be a little bit of a pain but you can restore them if you want a restored car but we decided to go with this perfect fit system from classic auto air the star of this kit is this evaporator case that comes with the evaporator and heater core both installed it's got a high performance spa fan and this thing is made directly to bolt into our chevelle now the cool thing about it is all of the servos are electric the heater valve is also electronic and controlling all of that is this ecu that's all plug and play of course it comes with all the wiring to connect the dots and we actually upgraded our kit to include this direct electronic replacement control head which plugs right in as well it also comes with all the duct work needed and some block off plates for the firewall as far as the under hood stuff goes it comes with all that stuff as well including this condenser all the hoses and fittings you need and then dryer one thing you don't see here that it does come with would be the compressor and the bracket but we ordered our kit without that stuff because that special belt drive kit we ordered for our engine came with it so we'll show you all that stuff later first thing we need to do though is get this evaporator case prep to go in the car [Music] we'll install this face duct assembly to the case it clips on then gets a couple of screws to keep it secure [Music] then we can install our wiring harnesses to the ecu by simply matching up the colors then the other ends of the harnesses attach to the unit this template is going to help us locate where the holes need to be drilled in the firewall for our fittings to go through [Music] we'll center punch them first then drill the pilot holes with our template out of the way we can use our hole saw to make the necessary opening [Music] now our assembled case can go in and mount to the firewall [Music] all right we've got our box installed and we've got all of our duct work roughed in inside the car it's just this flexible tubing it's really easy to work with now we need to modify our defrost ducting because we need to adapt this to this flexible tubing and we're going to do that with these little adapters here now the kit comes with these templates we just made a mark make the cut there and install these adapters [Music] these adapters come with the kit and are made to fit right onto the stock duct with the defrost ducts mounted we'll run all the flexible ducting to them and secure them with some zip ties we're cool now still ahead we'll put the cherry on top with this spiffy new steering wheel [Music] all right i got it i think we're getting the dash installed in our chevelle today we're getting close well with that done we're ready to move on to some of the finishing touches on the dash of our chevelle and the next thing we're going to do is going to be the steering wheel now we decided to go with this classic three-spoke wheel that we got from original parts group this is actually a factory option for the 69 and 70 cars but it'll fit right on our 72 now we're not doing a chalk mark restoration on our car so this will be just fine we're going to slow down a little bit here and show you how to install all of this with the horn and the hub and the first thing this hub now before we install this hub i want to go over some things on the column here this is actually an aftermarket column but the principles would be the same for a factory one this is the nut that holds the hub on so we'll get that out of the way first and then behind it is this ring right here this is actually the canceling cam from the turn signal switch that's what these little bumps are here but this thing serves another purpose you see this metal ring contacts this button or contact here that's what actually sends the ground wire to the horn button and that connects here which we'll show you later the way this goes on the column is this thing can just go any which way but we want to make sure we clock it the right way because otherwise when you turn your turn signal on you may just turn your wheel just a little bit and it can cancel that switch so i want to make sure we have it aligned properly on a stock column there'll actually be a little groove there that keeps this thing in the right location and then line it up with the hole in our hub here and then another thing before we seat the splines of the hub onto the shaft as we want to make sure our hub is clocked the right way so that our steering wheel goes on straight so we have our front wheels straight and we know we need two bolt holes in the top lined up just like this for our wheel then we can seat the splines then the nut can go on and get tightened down [Music] the wheel is next and gets mounted using these countersunk bolts another tip too when you're working on a horn like this make sure you disconnect your battery so you're not sitting out in the driveway honking the horn like a maniac well our old chevelle is coming along pretty good piece by piece we can steer it now and we got some eye candy to look at whenever we're sitting in the front seat that oss dash sure does look pretty sweet and we've got quite a ways to go on our interior still but before we can throw carpet and seats in here we got to get some doors on and we got a bunch of other stuff up front that needs to be done as well but all that's gonna have to wait till next time today on detroit muscle the boys are gonna button up some details on our 72 chevelle barn find and learn how to make your accessory drive work around a big old nasty blower hey y'all welcome to detroit muscle we're back on our small piece of americana that we dug up out of a shed it's our 1972 chevy chevelle now we've installed some new windows sprayed on some bright blue paint got some interior pieces and a few shiny pieces out back now that shiny stuff's fine and dandy but when you got a thousand horsepower engine under the hood we want to hear this thing run we may not get that far today but we're going to get as far as we can we've got a belt drive we need to get on there carburetor and throttle linkage a brake master that needs to get buttoned up and even some headers now there's only one way to get to the finish line and that is to start now our power plant in our old chevelle made almost a thousand horsepower on the dyno and a big thanks to that is that hairdryer looking thing hanging off the block now we want that thing to run like heck but we also want it to be comfortable while we're riding around in it we want it to have power steering and ac and to run those kind of accessories sometimes can be a little bit difficult and thanks to procharger all that hard work has already been done this is their small block chevy serpentine accessory drive kit it comes with all the hardware pulleys and bracketry that you're going to need so that you can enjoy those creature comforts now first thing we've got to install is this short small block chevy water pump but if you notice all the way over there ours has got an electric pump on it so we got to do a little bit of disassembly first [Music] luckily a water pump swap ain't no big deal we'll run out the bolts holding the electric one in place then dab a little silicone on the water passages to hold our new gaskets where we need them for the mechanical pump with that done we'll slip our new pump in place and get it bolted down [Music] the next thing we're going to do is swap out this crank pulley with this new one the reason why we need to do that is because this pulley actually came with the supercharger kit and it has provisions for a v-belt accessory drive and because we decided to go with this serpentine accessory drive we need to run this pulley it did come with the kit just takes a little bit of work get that one off put this one on [Music] loosening this nut will release most of the tension on the belt then we can put a ratchet on it to free up the rest of it big belts like the one for this supercharger can be a little stubborn but we'll get her pulled off up next is that crank pulley with the main bolt off we'll pull the three small ones and get it set aside our new one reinstalls the same way just be sure you get it on straight before anything is tight [Music] we have to do a tiny bit of assembly here on our power steering pump before we bolt it over there onto the block we need to attach this bracket and then we're going to press on this pulley we're also going to be using some of this stainless steel hardware and whenever you're using stainless steel bolts it's always a good idea to use some anti-seize [Music] we're ready to press on our pulley now and i always like to spray in a little bit of spray oil that keeps everything happy and prevents any galling [Music] we're just about ready to install this main bracket here but we're removing this idler pulley first and that's because one of the bolts that holds this bracket to the cylinder head is behind it so we'll just set that aside for now but this bracket is really important because not only does it hold the ac compressor and the alternator but it also holds these idler pulleys and the tensioner for our serpentine setup now these pulleys aren't your run-of-the-mill plastic pulleys like you'd have on a late model serpentine setup they're either made of aluminum or steel here so these things are going to stand the test of time something else you may notice we're upgrading to arp bolts to stick with the theme that's already on the engine and also for the durability [Music] this setup mounts to both the factory locations on the engine as well as some of the procharger bracketry that was already installed by the engine power guys with the mounting bolts taken care of we can get our last pulley in place then we'll work on getting our ac compressor and alternator buttoned up as well then it's time for some belts first we'll take care of the serpentine that runs most of our accessories then we can get the supercharger drive belt put back in place and cinch down coming up learn how to attach those plug wire ends on a custom length set of wires hey y'all glad you made your way back now we're pretty much ready to start throwing some ignition components at our old chevy we went to protronix and got a full ignition setup this is their flamethrower distributor coil plug wires and this new digital hp ignition box now this thing has several features to it it has three programmable rev limiters for launch burnout and top end it also has an easy to wire up harness and it makes right at 30 percent more energy than most of their competitors now first things first let's drop in this distributor engine power needed their distributor back so we're just replacing this one exactly where the old one came out and now we can move on to the next thing we need to tackle with our coil we're going to mount it down here off in this hole and i know it's kind of hard to see but that's our purpose we're trying to keep the car to have as much of an original feel as possible and doing this it'll help hide it a little bit now we're not quite ready to make our spark plug wires yet because we don't have our headers installed just yet so we're not sure where they're going to route but we can make our coil wire because we have our distributor and our coil mounted already so i'm going to show you how to make these ends well the first thing we need to do is get the wire through the boot so we're going to use a little bit of dielectric grease here on the wire itself and also on the boot here it helps if you bend the boot a little bit like this get the wire through now you have to twist it it comes through like that this one's already stripped so we'll just take that off take your terminal here and fold this over and you want to make sure that contacts your terminal really well so you put it right in the middle we're going to use our special pliers here make sure it's good and tight just going to clean this little bit of fiberglass insulation off then you can pull your boot over you got to twist the wire to make sure that the open end of the terminal lines up and that's it now you may notice here my two ends are clocked about 90 degrees from each other and i did that on purpose because of the way this lays up against the firewall back here that way it doesn't bind now we got to keep making some headway on our old chevelle so we're going to move on toward the headers that way we know exactly how long those plug wires need to be so we got a set of hooker super comps they have an inch and three quarter primary and a three inch collector they also have the ceramic coating on them so not only are they going to look nice but they're going to reduce the under hood temps it comes with all the hardware and gaskets that you need to install them now i get to do that fun part hey welcome back we're getting our headers installed on the chevelle so that we can get our spark plug wires made and plugged into place all right so we've got our spark plug wires done and we've got our headers in as well and now we're going to move on get our carburetor installed but first thing we need to do get this plate out of the way [Music] we'll be using studs on this application and the studs are better than bolts because they're quite a bit easier to install plus we're going to be running some additional pieces like this spacer and lining those holes up for the bolts can be a real pain and this is a quick fuel 4-barrel blow-through car that flows 850 cubic feet per minute with mark getting the carburetor in place we're slowly but surely getting that chevelle closer to breathing some fire now i've got a table full of goodies that we got from summit racing that's going to take care of some issues that we have it's kind of like this oil pan dipstick we got a transmission dipstick an adjustable water outlet because we don't know exactly which direction we need it to go and a highly adjustable throttle cable and that's what we're going to work on next we've got to do a little bit of disassembly first before we get too carried away we've got to remove this cable and that's real easy you just take that set screw out and then slide this assembly off [Music] now we'll remove this little nut here and then we can slide this into the body now let's go to the car we're going to use that stock hole but if you notice it's a little bit sloppy so we're going to use a stainless steel washer and that'll fix this right up then on the back side i'm going to use a stainless steel washer and that nut that came with it hold everything in place up here on the other end of the cable is a very similar fastener that we use there on the firewall except for this one slides off now we'll just spin this nut off and mount it here in this hole on this fancy little bracket that i fabbed up now if you'll notice with the location of this hole it's on the same plane as the stud here that we're going to attach the cable now you don't want to mount your cable too high too low or even in too far out too far because what that'll do is it'll make it more difficult to pull throttle blades open [Music] this little fastener has got a lot of threads on it i like to kind of put it into happy medium that way just in case later down the road you need to adjust something you've got some movement if you will this cable is way too long so we're gonna have to cut this thing off you also don't pull this cable sheathing too tight leave it a little bit loose like i said earlier if you need to move something around later down the road you got something to play with open it back up taste with it cut you can push this collar onto the end of the sleeve and stick it in then we'll feed the throttle cable through from the inside up to the carb all right now we need to snap on our cable end to the stud here on the side of the throttle get marked to hold the gas pedal all the way to the floor and what that's going to do is simulate wide open throttle and we'll pull the throttle blades back and we can determine where we need to cut the cable all right marcus gas on it if you would here we go that's it i have to pull this thing back so we should be able to cut it about right there [Music] now we'll stick the end of the cable in this link and lock it down with the set screw work it see what it does oh yeah good now once we get the carpet in the car it may mess with our throttle just a little bit but with this adjustment back here we can dial it in but that'll be a little lighter down the road after the break making sure your brake pedal will work hey y'all glad you made your way back now the next thing that we're gonna do is work on the brakes now i'm sure you're thinking that we were gonna get this thing fired up but actually what we're trying to do is take care of things under the hood that are a whole lot easier to get to with the fenders out of the way and one of those is this brake master cylinder now originally our car had a big booster and master that stuck way out here and we were afraid that it was going to interfere with our air filter so we're going to run just a manual setup now with that it's no big deal but we are going to have to rework our brake lines and we're going to have to change the proportioning valve that we have so we're going to use this adjustable unit from bear it's got a knob that you just crank to increase or decrease the amount of flow and it also has an in and out that you need to be aware of it's also a good idea to mount this in an easy to reach location and luckily for us bear gave us a spot down here on the bottom of the master we'll use some arp bolts with some anti-seize on them to fasten our valve down now we need to do a little bit of plumbing now this is obviously going to feed the rear and we can run from here to there or here to there with this particular master cylinder both ports are the same there's not a front or rear now we're going to screw in a couple of fittings these here came with the kit down here on the proportioning valve but up here on the top i don't have the correct one this is actually pipe thread that's not the correct here but we can use it just for mock-up because you can see it starts about a thread deep that's right well we got the line fixed up and our other fitting to run toward the rear now let's go ahead and mount this up this part is real easy a couple of factory studs we'll mount it to the firewall now normally the next thing that you do is install this brake pedal push rod if you will that connects to the brake pedal and pushes on the piston of the master cylinder now to show you how to adjust that properly is really difficult right now with the dashing all in place so i've got me a visual aid here give me just a second now it's just got a pin that slides through and that holds a little clevis here now how you'd want to adjust that is you want to make sure that the pedal is further back here on the bottom than on the top and what that does is it allows you to push the brake pedal shoving this forward if you do it the other way what it causes is whenever you mash the brake pedal it'll cause this to go up and actually bind into the piston of the master and that won't allow you to depress it properly so make sure that you've got it leaning forward just a bit and you'll be in good shape well we got quite a few things done in the engine bay today and just about got the brakes so that we can bleed them i don't want to talk about all that we'll see y'all later today on detroit muscle it's a cooling conundrum that requires creativity on our 72 chevelle project as the guys have to make the supercharger intercooler fit the front of that big bad chevy hey y'all welcome to detroit muscle now if you've been following along with us you notice that our car has made quite some progress we got some glass in it got a whole lot of shiny stuff and the front end bolted on now today we're going to be doing quite a bit of work right through here and it's going to be pretty involved and the reason why it's going to be so involved is because we wanted some creature comforts like ac and you know 1000 horsepower but it's not just going to be a radiator install we've got to figure out where we're going to mount our condenser up here and we've got a big air-to-air intercooler that needs to go up here as well then we have to connect all the dots so pull up your bootstraps it's going to get busy now the first order of business is going to be installing our radiator we got this set up from summit racing now if you'll notice the cooling fans are already mounted onto it and that's going to save us quite a bit of work because get them to look this nice mounted up can be a little tedious it also has a cooler for your transmission and this thing is direct bolt in for a 68 to 77 chevelle so installing this thing should be a cinch now we're not going to hard mount anything yet with this radiator we're just going to kind of set it in place because we still got mock-up to do meaning with the ac condenser and the intercooler we're also going to have to run the upper radiator hose and our boost tube if you will so if we hard mounted this thing and made a big fancy bracket well we may end up having to change it all [Music] we'll go ahead and plant the ford radiator support brace which holds the hood latch and supports the grille then we'll sneak the ac condenser in front of the radiator well now that we've got our condenser mounted this would be the time where we would install this tube here this is the discharge tube and it comes from the compressor through the radiator support on the driver's side here into the top of the condenser this came with our ac kit and that's fine because normally the compressor is on the driver side of the car but our compressor is actually on the passenger side of the car because we've got a supercharger on the driver's side so we don't want to have to come all the way over here and then back over with a hose we want to keep everything on the passenger side so all we really need to do is connect the dots between our compressor here and our condenser here in front of the radiator support at the top so we're going to just make a hose for that later on but we're not going to do that now because we've got some other things we need to do first we got to mount an intercooler here and get all the big tubing through and then we can figure out where that line's going to go well now it's time for us to start thinking about mounting our intercooler this is actually just a generic intercooler that came with this supercharger kit this is actually the intercooler they use down in engine power to dyno our engine now we know this is going to be big enough to make the power but we don't know if it's going to fit if you look something like this if we didn't have our ac condenser there and that dryer in the way this thing would probably work just fine but if we move it down here to fit it's just going to come in and get in the way of our left hand headlight bucket and we can't notch out our headlight so we need to think about something a little different so we've come up with this one here now this is another air-to-air intercooler that procharger makes this is actually for a late model mustang it actually solves the problem that we have with our dryer there but the new problem is this is actually where our hood latch goes so if we were going to go with this one well we'd have to eliminate our hood latch and go with hood pins but we don't really want to sacrifice the safety of this hood latch so we ordered up another intercooler now we're sure we're going to have to do a little bit of modifying on that but let's just see if it all fits we don't want the intercooler hanging any lower than the bottom of the radiator support so i got these boxes and a couple of boards to give me something to set it on now with that in place our hood latch will sit somewhere about right here now obviously it isn't going to work because all this arm is hanging down too low but if we cut it off and then rework the arm it'll probably all work for us [Music] well it looks like we got a little bit of wiggle room down here now we're definitely going to have to make another arm so that we can release the hood but now it's time to make some brackets make this thing permanent up next we'll show you the step-by-step bracket building to mount that pesky intercooler for big power hey welcome back everybody we're in the middle of mounting our intercooler and down here on the bottom we've already got the bracket fabbed up it's pretty much a little t-shaped piece of aluminum it's made out of eighth inch plate and it should do just fine now we're going to set this up here and up here on the top it's going to take a little bit more fabrication mark's got it figured out y'all go check him out so like tommy said we got to get a couple of upper brackets made to hold that inner cooler in place and i actually made one already but instead of just copying this one what i decided to do was go ahead and make this one from scratch so i can show you how i made that other one this piece right here this is the tab that mounts to the upper radiator support and i want that to be 7 8 of an inch so i'm just going to take this here and mark 7 8 of an inch [Music] okay this tab is actually two inches by two inches so i'm gonna go ahead and make the marks for that [Music] that's where my bend's gonna be now i need to mark over where my cut's gonna be [Music] this is gonna be my tab and this is gonna get discarded well my next move is to connect the dots between here and here but i don't want to just make a straight line i want it to kind of curve to look really nice and i'm going to punch a couple of holes in here as well so what i'm going to do is hand draw my line first and then i'll figure out where i'm going to put my holes [Music] let's see how close that is well looks like the same hand drew both how about that [Music] i want to go ahead and get my holes drilled next and then bend my edges up before i do the dimple die but i want to use these to figure out where my holes are going to go and make some marks i'm going to use this die here to figure out where i want my hole to be and kind of split the difference between the edges here that looks good right there [Music] put this smaller one right here [Music] we'll take our bracket and put it in the brake we'll need to put a slight bend in it to get the angle right for attachment then we'll flip her around and put a 90 degree bend on the other side which attaches to the top of the intercooler [Music] with our holes drilled we'll grab our dimple dies and make the dimples on our bracket [Music] let's see how this thing fits that looks nice so all we need to do now is drill some holes get it bolted in place and then we can just clean up the edges here and maybe give these things a coat of black paint hey guys welcome back we're making some pretty good progress on the front end of our chevelle we've got the intercooler the ac condenser and the radiator where they're going to be living now the next step would be running some of this plumbing but before we get too carried away with that we're going to give you a couple of tips just in case you're doing this type of thing at home it might save you some effort and some troubles down the road now it's very common to see guys use tubing like this with a coupler and they just put them together and then put a couple of clamps on it the problem with that is if you're running a high boost application well the boost pressure can actually override the clamping force of the seal and push everything apart now let me show you a way to help prevent that we've got this cool little tool from vibrate performance and it's like a little baby bead roller and it's pretty simple to use you just simply put your tubing in there put a little bit of pressure on it and then get the cranking now as you're cranking you want to make sure to pay attention right here and keep everything nice and tight up against the surface if it pulls back some it's going to get a little wonky on you [Music] now that we made one pass crank a little more pressure on it a little more [Music] there we go this little lip here what it does is whenever you put that clamp on there and cinch it down well it changes the two diameters and it keeps everything happy and where it needs to be now if you don't have one of them fancy tools i have taken a welder and put a couple tacks here and there and that helps in a pinch but it's not as nice as this piece got another little tip for you regular old clamp no says i we actually cut a hole in here and it's for a purpose whenever you're trying to join two pieces of metal like this sometimes you need more than one hand use one of these and save you a little bit of work change that nut from a lock nut to a standard old regular nut and you can run that thing down gives you adjustability holds it in place and you can weld it hey tommy i got a tip for you why don't you quit yakking over there and get over here and help me do some of this tubing well we didn't get everything done that we were gonna do today but we made quite a bit of headway and hopefully by the next time you see this thing tommy will have finished all this plumbing me i'm gonna go order another 90. next up how to fix a big old drip in the middle of your clear coat hey y'all we're going to shift gears just a bit on our chevelle and jump over here on the hood now i guess you could say whenever i was spraying on the clear of this thing i kind of got in the mood and got me one of those flow indicators or a run if you will so today we're going to show you how to cut that thing out now this isn't a huge run right here but whenever i drag that cutter across it here in a moment you'll definitely be able to see it while up here on the front leading edge of the hood well that run almost dripped into the floor the first tool that we're going to use is pretty complex it's a simple razor blade and what i'm going to do is stand it up and drag it across it and that's slowly going to cut the mountains off if you will and fix our problem dragging this thing across here you want to lean it forward just a bit you don't want to do it this way because it'll cause it to dig into it you're just trying to skim over the top also you don't want to set this down real hard on either side of it kind of if you were getting in a hurry if you chomping it down like that that blade being sharp can actually gouge into the paint [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] there it is now up here on this front edge it's a little bit different story we're going to take the razor blade and kind of cut off these big pieces but since this is just a real thin spot we're going to come back with a sanding block to repair most of it now we're going to start sanding up here to final shaping all this stuff up nice and pretty now when you do something like that you don't want to use a soft block like this one here because if you notice it's forming to the whole lip and we're just trying to sand that hump out so what you want to use is a hard block that way you can control where you're sanding precisely you're just trying to sand it flat [Music] now up here on the top we've scraped it flat but we need to make sure everything's nice and flat with this rubber block now we're going to do this to the whole hood but that's going to be a little later down the road because i don't want to bore you with all that so we'll do just a section right here to show you the process whenever you go to sand and you want to keep the block moving and also pay attention to the sound that it makes sometimes whenever you go to sanding you'll hear this funny little ripple kind of noise and often times what that is it's a piece of trash under the bottom of the sandpaper between it and the paint [Music] [Applause] we're pretty good there let's change paper grits [Music] up here on this front edge we're just going to sand it by hand there's no need to use the hard block to do this sanding because we already have it flat we're just trying to move our scratches from 800 to 1500 so that we can buff now we get to rub on it to see how well we did now we've got a couple of compounds that we're going to have to use and our buffer of course now it's time to swing some material [Music] we've showed you how to buff before just keep this thing moving and use medium to light pressure on it we'll smooth it down and we can step over to the front lip pay close attention here and use slow rpms to keep from burning through [Applause] now we can swap over to the polish pad and use the same techniques you did earlier to get that sucker nice and shiny the compound we're using stays wet for a good while which allows you to work the shine back up you don't want it to dry out that can lead to swirl marks or even worse rubbing through the clear with it buffed out she's nice and smooth well you see it wasn't that hard didn't take that many tools but it looks a whole lot better but i still got a whole lot more work to do today on detroit muscle we gotta get some fuel to our supercharged chevelle's power plant and plug some exhaust into it so she can exhale hey y'all glad you could join us today we're continuing on our 72 chevelle project now we drug this thing out of a barn and i have to say it's cleaned up pretty good now we've been doing a whole bunch of work here under the hood and i have to say we've just about got it buttoned up but we're sick of working here i mean we've been on this for a while and besides we've got a couple of major systems that still need to be installed we've got to figure out how we're going to get a bunch of fuel from the back of the car up here to feed this thousand horsepower beast then we gotta figure out how we're gonna get all of that exhaust out the back because we're not planning on running open headers so to address that fuel system situation we were talking about earlier we're gonna start with this stock replacement tank that we got from original parts group this is a no-brainer because of the cost especially when you've got a car that's been sitting 20 years like ours rather than trying to restore that tank it's got the filler in the factory location and this is going to go with that clean factory look that we're going with on our chevelle now this is a stock style sending unit that we got from opgi this is a direct replacement for the original and if we had about a 300 or 400 horsepower engine this would be fine but that little tube right there it's 3 8 diameter it's not going to be enough to handle a thousand horsepower so we got to go with this dash 10 hose which is a half inch diameter that we got from earl's now we just need to figure out how to adapt it and since that stock pickup's not going to be big enough we decided to go with this hydra mat from holley this thing actually acts as a fuel reservoir and i know that sounds odd but what it does is it wicks up all the fuel that's in the tank and allows it to be sent through this port here it also acts as your 100 micron pre-filter now these things are great especially if your vehicle does any hard cornering accelerating or stopping these are available in a bunch of different sizes and configurations depending on your application another cool thing doesn't matter any part of this thing is touch and fuel it's going to make it to that port you guys might have noticed we've had a big change around here which is our new two post lift from danmar it's got a ten thousand pound capacity and the design makes it a lot easier for us to get in and out of the car while it's on the lift we got ours at gesusa.com i went ahead and put the tank in place and the reason for that is we need to figure out where we're going to be able to put these dash 10 bulkhead fittings in order to feed those big lines this tank is really tight to the floor here all the way across so looks like we're not going to be able to put them in the top we need to find a solution well now we know we can't put these bulkhead fittings here in the top there's just not enough room so we could notch it out drop the top of the tank down a little bit to make room or we could just pop them in the side of the tank here but i don't really want to do that so what i think i'm going to do is i'm just going to cut it out at about a 45 degree angle here on this edge and that'll leave us plenty of room another thing too we want to make sure we don't interfere with our regular sending unit here even though we're not going to use the feed and return we're actually going to use the cinder itself that way our fuel gauge works i'm just going to make a couple of marks here just to some rough guidelines of where i want to make my cuts i want to stay away from these angled pieces here that way when i put my new piece back in here it's easier to weld in place [Music] once we get the big piece cut out we'll go back and straighten it up a little bit all right we've got our tank ready here it's all cleaned up and we're getting ready to start assembling this stuff i went ahead and made this piece here and this is going to patch that hole got some reinforcements on the back here because once we get that welded in we're actually going to take this plate here that's got our bulkheads attached to it and that is what's going to seal the hole there and that way you can service it if you ever need to pull this out or get the hydra mat out for whatever reason but we can't fit the hydra mat in that hole it's got to go in this bigger hole so we need to get this out get the hydramat in hey guys glad you can make your way back i've been busy up here doing a little bit of plumbing on this hair dryer oh mark well he's got a big hole in that tank and about ready to slap in that hydra mat y'all go check him out [Music] this hydra mat needs to be rolled up really tightly so that we can fit it into the tank [Music] it takes a little finesse to get it inserted but once it's in you can unroll it and lay it out flat [Music] we've got these little magnets that we're going to stick inside the tank and those are going to hold that hydra mat down to the floor of the tank [Music] now we're at a point where we can get our plate burned in to seal our tank back up with it welded in our outer plate can be attached as well this is going to get screwed in instead of welded so that if needed it can be removed to service the interior of the tank now we can attach the other fitting onto the pickup hose which is already married to the hydra mat we'll attach that fitting on one of our bulkheads which will be the feed with a homemade gasket attached we'll cinch it down and move on we've got our sending unit ready to go in the tank you can see here that we cut and pinched off our feed and return lines because we don't need them anymore and we don't want them to leak we just need to get this in the tank and we get the tank in the car well we got our tank mounted up back here in the back now it's time to mount up our fuel pump now there's a couple things that you want to keep in mind whenever you're doing something like this wherever you pick make sure it's a solid location meaning that you've got a solid foundation to attach it to we're going to mount ours right here on the side of the frame we're going to have to make a little bit of a bracket to use these rear two bolts but that's no big deal another thing wherever you mount this well you want to make sure to keep it out of harm's way now this could possibly get a few rocks and that kind of thing thrown at it so we'll probably end up making a cover for it with us running that boosted application we need a pretty serious pump so we're going with this holley vr1 setup it'll pump 170 gallons per hour and it also pump at 130 psi constantly now another thing you want to keep in mind whenever you're mounting your pump is you don't want to mount it any higher than the tank either go the same or actually below and it's also a good idea to mount it as close to the tank as possible that way you don't run into any kind of starvation problems when this thing turns on and tries to suck a fuel out of the tank now it's no secret that the ford 9-inch has been the go-to differential for whatever you're working on whether it be a street rod race car or even a muscle car now used to you'd have to go to the salvage yard dig you one out and then carry it home and do a whole bunch of fab work to get it to fit under whatever you're working with well that's not the case anymore thanks to curry enterprises they have a whole line of bolt-in crate rear ends you can simply roll one under your ride and attach them using the stock suspension or if you've got a custom setup they can help you with that as well tommy's just wrapping up on the fuel system and we're getting ready to move on to the exhaust what we're going to use is this complete system that we got from hooker blackheart this kit is constructed of mandrel bent 304 stainless steel it's got a merged x crossover and it's got hookers stainless steel tig welded mufflers that have that nice throaty sound on acceleration but give you that quiet idle this kit comes with all the hardware necessary for installation and fits with most suspension systems now this kit is actually made for ls swapped a bodies and since we've got a small block chevy we may need to make some adjustments it's okay we're just going to start in the back and adjust it in the front if necessary well i got the factory hangers installed well the ones that came along in the kit now it's time to hang some pipe [Music] this is a three inch system which is going to be plenty big enough for our thousand horsepower small block the mufflers fit in the same place as the factory so we get to keep the clean look we want and avoid modifying anything [Music] well we're ready to connect our headers to our exhaust pipes and we've got this stainless steel collector here that we're going to use now we're going to have to modify this pipe just a little bit we're going to have to shorten it up that's no big deal this is pretty much par for the course but we're going to set our collector in place and give it an eyeball kind of figuring we'll cut that pipe off about right there that way we can turn this pipe up and do a little more measuring later well let's see how close we got put a couple of these arp bolts in there well i believe if we weld that up might work just fine we'll use the tig welder to keep things nice and clean and get these buttoned up to finish up the exhaust what do you think saw system looks good man i like the welds i guess we can go home now i'm tired i'm exhausted hey everybody welcome back we're gonna switch gears and jump back onto a project that we've been working on for a while and that is our 72 chevelle barn find now this thing has come a long way from where we started this thing came off the frame and we've put a thousand horsepower engine under nice paint job and it's almost ready to hit the road but there are some things that still need to be done but since you've seen it last time we've done a lot we've tidied up a bunch of stuff under the hood with belts hoses and wiring we've actually got the interior put in and we've got it up in the air checking everything underneath to make sure it's tight and safe to drive but there is one thing major that we still need to do and that is the ac hoses so we're going to do those today well now all we need to do is connect the dots and we've got all these hoses here that came with our kit and they come long that way you can just cut them to fit your application perfectly the kit also came with all the fittings that we need and typically they come like this this golden silver color and that's fine but if you want something a little cleaner you can get that too we got these from resto mod air and they're just like the gold and silver ones but you can actually hide them a lot better make your system look a lot cleaner that's all fine and well except we've got to actually get these ends crimped onto the hoses and that's where a lot of guys at home will draw the line because either they don't know how to do it or they don't have the right tools and that's where this tool comes in that we got from summit racing it's an ac hose crimp tool and it comes with the crimper as well as different size dies for the different sizes of ac hoses now this thing will set you back a few hundred bucks but it could save you at least that much money just the first time you use it because if you take your car to a shop to have them make the hoses for you and charge the system could cost you up to about a thousand bucks now before we just start cutting and crimping we want to do some mock-up first and there's a couple of reasons for that we want to make sure that the hoses are the exact length that we want that way it looks really nice another thing too is we've got these charge ports that we have to integrate into the system here we've got a high pressure and a low pressure and that's what we need to hook into to charge the system so we have to make sure those are easily accessible and if they're accessible now they're going to be accessible later so that's another reason why we waited until now to install these hoses first one we're going to do is going to be the suction hose which routes between the evaporator core and the compressor now we could just put a hose straight from the compressor here to the firewall and connect the dots just like that but i'd like it a little cleaner so i've actually run this hose in behind the fender here i think if we put another 90 on here we can just connect the dots here but that's going to take a little more [Music] mock-up [Music] with our hose cut to length we'll reconnect it to the ends and make some clocking marks on them to make sure we crimp them together in the same configuration as we mock them up then we can pull it all out and get over to our crimping tool that suction hose is a number 10 so we get our number 10 dies [Music] with our dies in place we'll insert the hose into the fitting being sure to match up our marks then start crimping it down [Music] and that's all it takes to make an ac hose up next installing the hoses and charging the system hey everybody welcome back while you were gone i got the rest of these ac hoses cut and crimped and i got them installed all but this one suction hose here which is the one you saw me crimp the ends on a little bit earlier i just need to get this thing fished back into place and we get it attached now unlike a typical hose in that we would use on say a fuel system this thing is not tapered it's actually an o-ring type fitting so the end of the fitting goes into the evaporator core here but there needs to be an o-ring that keeps that sealed so we need to put that on first there are different o-rings for different size fittings and this is a number 10 you have to make sure you use the correct o-ring for the fitting don't stretch it over to make it work with the o-ring installed we'll go ahead and put some lubricant on here this oil actually comes with the ac kit it's just an ester oil want to make sure you get the o-ring lubricated all the way around and we'll install it make sure that the o-ring doesn't get pinched make sure it fits right in there perfectly like that [Music] snug it down [Music] well we've got them all tight now the next thing is going to be to charge the system but i mentioned earlier this was the suction hose and there's a few other lines that play a role in the ac system and depending on their location well they have a different job to do in case you don't know how an ac system works check this out it all starts with the compressor which is driven by the belt and draws in the refrigerant through the suction line it then compresses that refrigerant and sends it into the discharge line which dumps into the inlet on the condenser the condenser is like a small radiator its job is to condense that hot high pressure gas into a liquid it does this by cooling the refrigerant down via ambient air passing over the fins and tubes from the condenser this liquid refrigerant collects in the dryer which also acts as a filter for the system from there the refrigerant travels through the liquid line to the expansion valve this valve meters the amount of refrigerant that is released into the evaporator core this is where the magic happens as the refrigerant begins to expand from a liquid to a gas it rapidly cools the blower motor in the passenger compartment pushes air across the tubes and fins of the evaporator and is cooled as a result at this point the cooled air is blown through your vents and into your interior hopefully that got you up to speed on the basics on how an ac system works now we've got our system all sealed up now and all our hoses are tight and we need to get some refrigerant in there when you got some r134a here but before we can do that we need to get all of the air that's trapped in the system out as well as any moisture that may be in there as well which we're going to do with this vacuum pump here but in order to tap into the system we're actually going to use this ac manifold gauge set we'll get the high and low side hoses connected to our system then get our vacuum pump hooked up as well [Music] once we crack open the valve the pump will pull a vacuum on the air conditioning system [Music] welcome back before the break we hooked up a vacuum pump to our chevelle's ac system so that we can get the air removed from it well now we've got our vacuum pulled the low side gauge stopped moving so we know that it's reached maximum vacuum for this pump and i went ahead and turned the pump off and i closed the valves because i wanted to isolate our system this is really important because i don't want to waste my time spending 45 minutes to vacuum this thing down if there's going to be a leak this is a really good way to check for a leak i'm just going to watch this gauge for a couple of minutes to see if it moves at all if it starts losing vacuum then i know i need to stop and go back and see if there's a fitting that's not tight or something else wrong with the system well we've let this sit for just a few minutes here and the gauge hasn't moved at all so we're just going to hook it back up and vacuum it down for about 45 minutes while he's busy working on that i'm going to start reviving a couple of these ted light lenses for our chevelle now first step to doing this we'd have to get them clean but i've done that so we can move on to buff it what's going to be doing majority of the effort is this little wool buffing pad here now you can use a foam but i prefer this one here the reason is whenever you go to polishing these strands here on the side will reach into those corners now there's several different compounds out there you can use but if any of them say to take out thousand or coarser grit scratches you're in pretty good shape a little dab of compound will do it and we'll spread it around a bit then start buffing just run at low speeds and keep it moving so you don't generate a bunch of heat then we'll clean it up she looks like new it's amazing how much better this one looks as opposed to that old dingy one it didn't take a whole lot of effort just a little bit of compound and some time and you can do this at home well we've let it vacuum down for about an hour now which is good 45 minutes is actually enough but a little bit of extra doesn't hurt so now we've got the system all cleared out it's under vacuum so there's no moisture and no air in there as well so now we just need to get our refrigerant in we're going to do that by disconnecting this hose and attaching it to the can [Music] we've got this special fitting that punctures the top of the can once you screw this tap down [Music] and with that done we can hook it up to the lines running to the ac we'll open the valves to let the refrigerant into the system and let it empty this can [Music] our setup will require a couple of cans so we'll shut the valves and swap them once the first one is empty and with the valves open back up we'll get it up to about 57 pounds and call it good well that's all there is to it this system calls for 24 ounces which is two 12 ounce cans so we put that in now all that's left is once we get the engine fired up get that compressor moving start blowing cold air today on detroit muscle our barn find chevelle finally hits the road [Music] hey everybody welcome to detroit muscle today is a big day for us here because we're gonna get our 72 chevelle out on the road for the very first time yeah this whole thing has come a long way since we dug it up now if you remember back when we found this old thing well it was sitting inside of a barn we found this old chevy in a hay barn in rural tennessee it had been in there for about 20 years or so when we first laid eyes on it so we tore that sucker down and got her media blasted then started replacing the sheet metal we upgraded the suspension rebuilt the interior body worked and painted it and got her back together there is one last thing that we need to do on our chevelle and that is install a headliner now this isn't really my cup of tea or marks back there so we brought in a friend of ours chris with kiwis classics and customs yeah these old suspended headliners and the muscle cars can be a challenge yeah but we'll get it done today we've had our replacement headliner from original parts group laid out for a little while is there anything else we need to do well laying it out for a while is great it lets everything relax smooth out next step is the bows now tommy thanks you numbered them as you took them out that's really important they're all a different length or a different curve very important they go back in the right place now do you want to install them down here do you want to do that over them i think we do that up at the bench okay [Music] kiwi's going to take the bows and starting with number one install them in the loops on the headliner little white fabric loops we're gonna trim those back a little bit just so we can expose the little hooked ends on the bars okay they'll clip into the roof [Music] so i'm putting the sun visor screws in which probably seems a little odd but one thing you'll find is once the headline is in it's very hard to find the holes where the sun visors go so you put the three little screws in they poke down through the headliner that's your spot easy well the next step that kiwi said that we needed to do is take some adhesive here and spray it all the way around the perimeter how far in do i need to spray this stuff about six inches from the edge will work on this all right now this just doesn't really seem right because it seems like it'd be a little hard to keep all that glue off the upholstery when you take this piece of material in there well that's a mistake a few people make this stuff is contact adhesive so you spray it on both surfaces and let it dry to touch dry then you put it together and it sticks so once it's dried no mess no fuss well all right i guess i'll spray it down okay you don't have to drown it in glue a little bit around the edges will do the job using a piece of cardboard will keep the glue off the rubber and glass kiwi's going to go ahead and get the rest of the roof spray [Music] [Music] you comfortable or uncomfortable starting at the back you'll install the bows that hold the headliner up against the roof [Music] then he'll use some small clamps to hold the material in place on the seams and we'll start putting the trim pieces on that hold the edges [Music] he works his way around some trimming is required to help it fit and get rid of the excess material the edges have to be tucked into a channel that runs around the roof cut and then finished up with some trim pieces that we got from original parts [Music] group we'll also be reinstalling pieces like this which we refurbished [Music] all the trim installed she's a done well i have to say kiwi that headliner turned out spectacular and i have to say also that that's the easiest one i've ever installed it don't fit it was and i don't know if it was just really and truthfully not that much to it but you made it look really easy well it's one of those things it's not that hard when you know how but you get to know how by trying just give it a go i guess i'll abstract there you go hey everybody welcome back we've got our chevelle complete now and it's ready for its maiden voyage now we have a special road trip planned for this thing and before we get it out there and start having issues or safety problems we wanted to double check everything just to make sure since we had this car completely apart down to the bare frame so we took it out put about 40 or 50 miles on it let it get up to temperature and everything seems to be okay but we brought it back in here and let it sit and let it cool and now is the time we want to get everything a once over yeah you pretty much want to start whenever you're doing this type of check with your basics anything that holds fluids or can plainly come loose safety is important so let's check the brakes first now here on the master cylinder you'd obviously want to check the fluid level man open mark tightened it down pretty good pretty much topped off you'd want to check this on the front and back if your master cylinder doesn't bleed across from one port to the other next thing you'd want to check is all your lines and fittings simple way to do that is just take your dry finger and rub across the bottom of it and if you get a little bit of moisture on there well that means that things kind of seeping you'd want to repair that for sure but ours looks good it's also a good idea to check all your other fluids of your vehicle now you have to check the transmission fluid with the car running and we did that right before we shut this thing down you'd want to check the motor oil and your radiator coolant now make sure that you take this cap off with the car cold if you take this thing off and it's hot well you're probably going to get burned and there's a good chance you might accidentally create you a geyser and you want to check your power steering fluid if you got that option another thing you can do is take a look under your car we've let this thing set overnight and if we had any leaks will there be evidence of them down here dripping on the floor that's dry so we're in pretty good shape now the next thing we're going to check is a little bit more mechanical but has something to do with your cooling system what happens is after the car runs a couple of times this rubber well the heat on it softens it up just a bit and then you need to come back and tighten your clamps down i've seen this a whole bunch of times the next thing i do after checking all them clamps is check every fastener that has or is connected to a moving part your belts your tensioners your throttle cable all type of things and it all depends on the car and its options and i tell you this can take a little bit of time but it can save you a whole lot of heartache now the next thing we're going to check is our lug nuts and i know that seems really obvious but that's actually one of the things that a lot of people overlook now if you were my high school ag shop teacher billy michael you'd say you use the four way to tighten those you're going to get a referral so make sure you use a torque wrench and check your wheel manufacturer for the torque spec all right looks good well we got the lug nuts checked on all four wheels and all the tire pressures are good as well so now i'm going to get this thing on the lift and get it up check all the suspension bolts and nuts make sure they're torqued to spec also check to make sure we don't have any fuel leaks make sure the rear end's full we'll be ready to hit the road hey everybody welcome back well we had enough fun in gatlinburg so we decided since we were in the neighborhood to come out here to the woods near the north carolina tennessee state line on u.s 129 better known as the tail of the dragon now that's 318 turns in 11 miles and with our old chevelle you know we upgraded the brakes the suspension and all that good stuff and us being this close we had to come check it out the drive from gatlinburg to deals gap north carolina was no joke because to get here we went down the dragon itself it's super popular with the motorcycle and sports car crowds and for good reason this stretch of u.s 129 is nestled in the smoky mountains which is a beautiful area to visit it's a heck of a combination the great outdoors and some sweet rides so we figured this would be a great place to break in our 72 chevelle she's come a long way from that barn we found her in a couple of years ago so why don't we hop in and take her down the dragon raar [Applause] this is a nice place i'll definitely be back here [Music] [Applause] so mark what do you think about the twisty turnies here i think it's great you wouldn't think a chevelle would be able to handle stuff like this but it does surprisingly well yeah i know sitting on this side you know turning on the wheel it's almost effortless really and trivially the car takes what you want good riding good driving it's got plenty of power just got to make sure you have plenty of gas yeah there's there's not really that many gas stations either out here so topping off before you get here is probably a good idea yeah the thing about a car like this it is plenty capable of going out if you want to take it to the drag strip you could or go out and hammer between stop lights but i think out here is where it really shines because it is such a great cruiser you can just cruise around and just keep it low throttle and take the curves or you can hammer it hard if you want it'll take it well i sure hope you guys enjoyed the chevelle build because i know i did now this thing turned out pretty nice and being able to come out here on a stretch of road like this and put it through its paces well it's a whole lot of fun that's right this car is gorgeous tommy did a great job on the paint the whole build was great top to bottom and not only does it look good but it handles just as well out here it was a blast even though i was in the passenger seat the whole time it was still a lot of fun well i guess it's time for us to head back to the shop see you guys later

Channel: POWERNATION

Views: 144,952

Keywords: Car, PowerNation, howto, how-to, diy, automotive, cars, trucks, automobile, do it yourself, automobiles, auto, powerblock, chevelle, barn find, chevy chevelle, 1972 Chevelle, full build, chevy, classic car, muscle car, detroit muscle

Id: DrJcWQ2sdUI

Length: 190min 21sec (11421 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 25 2021