Hemi Gremmie! 1975 Gremlin with 426ci Hemi | Roadkill | MotorTrend

[Music] i was gonna say pigs are flying hell is frozen but we haven't actually accomplished it yet yeah don't don't get cocky i mean we're here but we haven't done anything no and we can change our minds once again on the hemi gremie we've started and stopped this project so many times it's been a scheme of mine since way back when i first bought the thing it's a 1975 amc gremlin with an inline six-cylinder engine that i bought running and driving for only 700 bucks way back when and the first time that you saw it was in the episode where we had that whole disaster with the prius versus the gremlin and we ended up spinning off the road while we were flat toeing the prius with the gremlin and then we ended up running over the prius with a tank it's an epic episode you've got to see it and then the gremlin was in episode 25 of roadkill which really tells you how long we've had this thing the hemi grammy one of those cars you've got to build because you got the name you got the grimy and you got the hemi which is a genuine 426 gen 2 hemi by the way so there's two things that make it so that we're finally going to make this happen first of all we're going to use this 426 hemi that i've had since about 1997 when they first came out with the mopar performance crate engines i've dyno tested it recently and it's like the weakest hemi ever it's got stock heads a tiny camshaft nine to one compression it makes about 530 horsepower but really this is going to be about the profiling more than about the speed and the second thing that really is going to make this happen is we abandoned the concept of fabbing suspension onto the gremi and moved on to dropping the thing on a complete drag race style model a chassis it was custom built by my buddy sam strobe who did the whole chassis on my model a hot rod if you've seen that it was long enough to fit a model a but it's been shortened to the wheelbase of the gremlin which is 96 inches and what's hilarious is when it was shortened the ladder bar and the front hairpin got really close which is super ridiculous looking but that's what i'm going for this thing is a street freak not an all-out drag car and i want it to look ridiculous and i want it to sit high and that's why we've got a straight not dropped tube front axle on the thing and in the back it's got a nine inch rear end coilovers panhard bar and of course these absurd ladder bars right now i've got the 15 by 10 craters on the back with the n5015s my protrac tires didn't show up for the front so that's something we're gonna have to work around a little bit so because this is just a straight frame we're going to be able to take the gremlin which is a unibody car cut a bunch of stuff off of it plop it on here and my hope is that we're going to be able to make body mounts just like a jeep cj7 would have a lot of people are going to want to call this car a gasser because it has a solid front axle on it it really isn't gassers are called that because there was a drag racing class in the nhra and other sanctioning bodies that started in the late 50s and it was like one step up of modification from being a stock class car and so it was called gas and so gassers were the cars that raced in it and by the mid 60s when they saw the height of popularity that's when people started putting solid front axles under the car to trim weight and to set them high and to set the nose high for weight transfer that was needed at the time now fast forward into the 70s and guys started taking that look and applying it to muscle cars and they weren't really drag race cars they were street posers and they sat really high and they were really gnarly and they usually had crazy paint jobs wild engine swaps and the magazines were all over it street freak was the thing this is a street freak not a gasser i'm building this to be absurd to do burnouts to do road trips and to be very roadkill i don't really care that much how fast it is on the drag strip which is weird for me but we're going for cosmetics this time all right it's sitting on the chassis unless you want the monster truck look we're now cutting the floor of the car unfortunately it still sits too high off the ground and so we're not going to be able to make body mounts like a jeep to mount the body on the frame instead we're going to channel the body over the frame which means we're going to cut slots in the floor and drop it over the frame and then weld it to the floor this is when we find out if we got the slot cut in the right place we just did about a foot and a half of the floor to go over the frame oh yeah oh yeah like a glove nailed it oh dude that's so much better yeah that needs to go down an inch or two so the top of the frame about even with the rocker this is gonna look so cool yep [Music] this looks good nice work fellas that was sweet good cut they got it so that the frame like perfectly fits the body there's a couple of gaps here and there but nothing that can't be filled with weld this is cool i think we can get rid of this don't need a wiper motor when you have a hemi just drive faster than the rain this is going to be a huge moment getting rid of these ugly wheels and tires and putting on this the krager ss and the protrac 235 60. and the key to it is two and a half inches of backspacing so what i'm trying to do there is move them outboard see how this is too sucked in this is also too short part of the key to figuring out our stance on the car is going to be getting the taller tire on there which is going to pick up the front of the car and then i'm going to be able to add some leaves to the leaf spring to pick up the front of the car and find out if we've got it as high as we need it to be [Music] ooh barely clears there yeah if you can turn that one and hits there a little bit of fender rubbing we'll fix that [Music] here we go taller tires yeah oh i kind of like the rake i got to be honest that's cool looking it's a way better wheel you might be right the wheel definitely saves it because that axle was too narrow [Music] how's that for a wall hanging looks like a miniature hood ouch this is quite a diet you put it on look at that i'll have to cut those braces back this is better than carbon fiber look how light it is back front look at that wow that is a lot of hemi that looks good dude yeah nailed it that looks good that is really cool okay i admit one sort of embarrassing thing here is that they're not dominators but what can you do lucky to have carburetors yeah there you go that's what you get with the hemi grammy dude [Music] it's perfect it's pretty great the stance yeah the motor really happy with the hood cut i'm glad we have some structure back here pin that thing down look at that i've got hemi above the hood line above the fender line man that is a cartoon wow look at the organization right there yeah when the project is this huge it will not fit on an ordinary pizza box yeah there's a lot of really big stuff that needs to happen remember on the last episode we were working with the front suspension we had that transverse leaf spring that was collapsing well it's now actually bent all of its brackets on the front axle from being trailered to lucky's and back all the steering's going to have to change which is in the same list headers are going to have to get made wiring drive shaft plumbing oh just getting the intake manifold installed and all of the linkage and all the plumbing to that is going to be big i have to change out the transmission to a different one that gear star sent that's full manual valve body and everything else is just little itty bitty stuff tunnel ram time we're going to install the base for real i like this part looking good this manifold we're installing is an early 70s wind and you could get a lid for these that would take dominators but i'm using a couple of 4150s the smaller footprint carburetor magnesium would be cool one of the things about these hemi manifolds and also about windsor fords is because the angle of the manifold sits like this but the bolts are straight up and down you have to like tighten them really really carefully and you have to go around and around and around and around in circles just when you think they're all tight go around again okay we've got the leaf springs mocked up in here and we actually have weight on the spring by smashing it on the underside of the frame everything is supported on jack stands as far as the axle and everything so the ride height isn't 100 accurate right now but you can see it's way too high so we've been able to determine how much that leaf spring is going to squish and where we want to mount the top of the leaf spring to get our ride height to be correct okay matt just mocked up these outriggers that are hanging the leaf spring and we have the full weight on the car and the stance is actually really good so i think instead of doing more measuring and thinking and figuring and squaring we're just gonna weld it in because that's always the best answer so he's gonna zap and then we have to start worrying about shocks and steering and steering box and steering column and all that stuff now the leaf springs are hung we've got the axle centered this way in the vehicle just by taking a bunch of measurements and now we're setting the caster angle so if you're looking dead into the side of the car like that this is the kingpin you want it angled back like that that's caster it's kind of like if you have a shopping cart and one of the front wheels is like wobbling all around it doesn't have enough caster if you lay it back just the right amount it'll go in a straight line so it's the same thing with front end alignment so i think we're trying to eyeball about eight degrees into it unfortunately there's not a real flat spot to measure with a digital angle finder so this is going to be a little bit of eyeballing [Music] these guys made these in record time like happened in a day kind of had to nobody makes these to put a hemi in a grammy so those guys made them but we're going to have the glory of installing them is that what this is uh i hope you helped well you can tell where i helped that's a really nice header uh yeah the one you're holding that's the one andrew did this is the one i did okay you can tell yeah [Music] cool almost matching the blueprint see fire that's a huge piece of the puzzle done yep that was big i'll start wiring i'm excited about my full manual valve body thing's gonna bang muscle truck is great with full manual the gremio will be better that's it right i hear it i hear clunking please work this is the right trans right cause there's two of them yeah okay up up it's gonna there we go the snout is in now we need to tilt this side needs to okay we're on stop it's really gonna happen it's really gonna happen finally oh next fail the snout's keeping it from pulling forward it's either hitting those bolts or it's bottoming the snout one or the other okay coming back out the torque inverter is hitting the bolts that are holding the flex plate to the back of the crankshaft now whoa pouring atf all over myself awesome we got the transmission all the way up in there and seated against the back of the bell housing and unfortunately the converter wouldn't slide forward because it's hitting the bolts in the back of the crankshaft so now we're solving that there you go assemble android ground uh corner off every flex plate bolt took a lip off the converter and we think we have our clearance now here we go again up up there we go all right that gets bolts in once we've got it squared the converter turns freely and we've got about an eighth or three sixteenths of pull forward we did it cranking [Music] that's bad fuel you have fuel in the squirters yep okay plug it in i'll fire it up and watch the oil pressure okay all right this is gonna be it did you plug in the distributor i did should run get after it water pump ignition start [Music] hey it runs dude it runs it's loud [Music] wow that's a bumpy road actually rides pretty good it shouldn't be worse it's a little jolty it's very jeep like how's the handling what are you doing it's not built for curves homie oh my goodness i want to live to actually do more burnouts okay i was like that's a corner why is he accelerating what if it's great it's definitely not it's passable oh this is the old ridge route yes [Music] wow this is a mountain right here i am surprised how drivable it actually is it's a pretty darn good car for being built in like 10 and a half days with a bunch of wrong parts that should not be working together so i really wanted three things from this car which was look amazing which we nailed yep be pretty drivable which i think we've already proven it is oh yeah and two hellacious burnouts we have not proven that yet sir that's what we haven't proven yet but we will and what's the priority here after all smoke hit it [Music] [Music] oh my god dude it serves its third purpose [Applause]

Channel: MotorTrend Channel

Views: 367,448

Rating: 4.9176583 out of 5

Keywords: motortrend, motor trend, motor trend channel, automotive, auto, amc gremlin, roadkill full episodes, amc gremlin v8, amc gremlin drag racing, motortrend roadkill, gremlin, hemi, hemi gremlin, hemi engine, gremlin car 1970, roadkill garage, gasser, street freak, 426 hemi, street freak 426 hemi, street freak cars, hemi 426

Id: C2I7SnrpGCo

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021