I Bought A HISTORIC Vintage Modified Race Car! - Vice Grip Garage EP87

all right guys i am really excited right now i am actually on my way to look at a modified race car set up for the dirt track but not just any race car this one's got a lot of history and up here in the north there i say it's pretty legendary it's got a lot of history and she's got quite a few winds under the old belt buckle there i watched my dad do the round around dirt track racing when i was growing up and the west side tire and auto race team well they were a little rough around the edges but they had a lot of fun and that's where my love of vice grip started my dad came into pits yellen just gave me high gear well he got it and finished the main event with the vice grip as a shifter so since that day i decided you know a guy's going to go ahead and need a dirt truck car one way or another [Music] and i'm hoping we can maybe make a deal on this thing today i think it's just down the road here oh another two miles maybe we'll pull and see if we can find this [Music] [Applause] thing i think she's just up here around these corners up here well a guy found the place it's actually right down the hill first i wanted to show you guys this it's actually even in a book and if you've never seen old-school modified race cars this is what we're talking about right here i mean men were men back then and the car we're after is the triple seven of harry or luke mclean there it is right there 1938 chevy coupe clean sweep of the season there and there's another photograph of it here on the start finish line really really cool car of course there's another famous triple seven car marty robbins uh i think he ran like 38 nascar races they're all self-funded moses that's expensive but he ran like a belvedere or a charger something like that this is a smaller just two-door coupe oh i see it down here man this thing looks awesome so this was raced in the late 50s early 60s and then it was just put in a field rot basically like most race cars oh man this thing looks just mean [Music] so the original owner luke got it back again and then he restored it close as he could to the way he had it this thing looks awesome so the numbers were back here and the mobile was up here but that looks really sharp man this thing looks just insane there you go speedway there's luke there with the car this thing i wish you guys could see this in person this thing looks just menacing so there's a couple things that make this car really cool to me that stick out that are really unique one is this is on an original frame so most have like a metric frame a body frame so you have independent front suspension and some sort of linked ran like a four link or something like that but setting this car up you've got four leaf springs so you really just have your shocks tire width and height offset on the wheels and that's it the rest is driver technique and engine and then this cockpit setup is really unique the gas pedal is way over here then you've got your brake clutch over there and the shifter is actually between the driver's legs when you're running this thing and that's just the way he likes it and i don't even know if i'm gonna fit in this thing but to know that he won that many races in this thing is just mind-blowing and he went into the superior hall of fame in 2002 as well luke mclean did and you could see this thing back in the day they just take a car roll it into the barn and they just build it with whatever they had laying around this might be drill pipe i'll try to verify but just off the oil rig they just bent it however they made their own shock mounts that's just a chunk of angle iron i don't even know what this side is just a bunch of whatever steel added onto the frame there this is just the way it was back then guys i mean the men back then just they had some brass tell you that looks like a couple stacked bumpers in the back welded them together and i think on the front yeah they just took one and snipped her off there and there some of the original photos he had a bar coming across here not sure why he ended up getting rid of those so i show you the other thing that makes this car really unique and it's going to bottle your mind all the way up give me a second to get this hood open and i'll show you so typically engine sits in here radiators up here look how snipped back he's got this engine she's just tucked way back in there so the front of the engine's here in relation to the front tire and he did that to get the weight back on the wheels i'm not even sure if this would pass even vintage modified class rules today but that's a really neat and then that brake pedal he put the master on the passenger side which is normally over here but how he has the steering shaft set up and the steering gear box made him bring the brake over here which is why he's got this swing arm brake pedal thing going on over there so there was some ingenuity put into this thing for sure everything's pretty well tucked in there looks like he might have ran a battery up here for a little while and then i'm sure updated rules batteries under there now we've cut off and all that and then the fuel cell is back here i'll get that open so this will surprise a lot of you but this is actually a 283 and back in the day these 283s and 307s they packed a lot of punch i mean they still do if you build them right and the biggest thing that this thing needed apparently was just rpm around the track and this is what he went with was a 283 looks like a wind intake edelbrock carburetor not seeing any casting marks i'm familiar with on the heads it's got headers i don't know what the internal stuff is on that thing but 283 small block got to check leg yeah there's fuel cell looks like plastic uh fuel gauge looks like she's a 10 gallon unit okay if it works it works basically just cut out the floor back here you don't need any of that stuff a little separation wall and that is pretty much it back here inner webbing in the trunk lid was taken out so this thing can't weigh much of anything i mean basically this is just a frame and a small block and by the way this is a three speed transmission not a four speed and i'll crawl under it here in a second but it's got some unknown rear end in it right now i'll have to spend some time and try to figure out what that is but kind of just looks like a rear truck axle he did an axle flip so the axles on the top that brings the rear down and then he's got a homemade traction bar system in here and that keeps the axle from wrapping or bouncing but i mean all this is homemade fellers he just put this together however he thought it would work well and apparently it worked really well because he just kept winning and winning and winning kind of hard to see but looks like a solid trans mount coming all the way across here and then another one back here and then it's straight piped out this side snips out right there pretty awesome and then only the passenger door opens so this is how you get into the thing this thing is just it's so cool to be climbing around in here and just knowing all the different race tracks that this thing's been on and one i think i'm gonna drop the wheel and see if i fit in this thing well i'm sure thinking this guy was a lot shorter than me got a little bit of room yeah so this pedal setup is really unique my legs are just i don't think i can go any more backwards though it's going to be a problem but really unique pedal setup for sure shifters down here and that's a three speed must have been a bear going from first to second and this is pretty sloppy she needs she needs tightened up for sure very cool so this is my view you've got old school oil pressure temp gauge and the volt gauge those are obviously updated at some point got the sunpro attack up here set to just about six thousand and we got ignition over here and then the pedal setup brake throttle shifter so i guess we might as well just fire this thing off huh yeah i like that wish you guys could hear this thing in person it just sounds really mean i mean i don't know what you guys are thinking but i'm thinking i gotta own this thing so i'm gonna go have a wobble pop with this guy see if we can come up with the number and figure out how to get this home which i don't have a trailer so a good family friend was able to get the car and he's had it for 17 years now give or take really really nice guy he's been really good working with and we were able to come together on a price so vice garage officially owns this beautiful machine now my shop's about i think i'm 10 miles 10 12 miles i'm actually relatively close i don't have the trailer on my truck so i think i'm just going to do the right thing and just drive it home the trailer's in town which is an hour drive one way and that's got another revival sitting on it now i don't have time for two hours this and that so we're just gonna go this route the tires can't be but more than 20 years old i'm going to run these uh lincoln goggles they work great for plasma or torchwork even better on your motorcycle or if you got to snip your race car down the highway they also work really good for that i was trying to think of a time that i had a worse idea not really coming to mind this shifter's now we got a bad shake what was that i'm not really in a good spot to pull over well let's go see what we got it's almost like a tire was coming off got logs there got bugs man i don't know what that was had a side to side oh i bet i know what's going on uh 26.5 815 so 26.5 high circumference and this one much older no that's 26.52 i thought maybe if it had a locked rear she was dragging a tire you can definitely tell it's locked rear though that tire is dragging but i'm not sure what that was we'll just have to keep the speed down i guess i don't have any idea how fast i was going but it couldn't been that fast so basically i'm just going to pretend it didn't happen and just jump in and keep going well here's take two as long as we don't lose the tire i'll be okay with everything else oh here comes traffic lots of traffic why what are what are they even doing there's absolutely no way i would not get pulled over [Music] everything's fine so far there's that shake again [Music] i gotta keep it under 3 000 rpm i got great oil pressure it says it's charging count gauge doesn't work it says 100. man this thing sounds so good i want to open it wide open so bad but i'm sure it just ripped me off the road yes this is freaking awesome best game ever it is in the front [Music] so if i swerve i can feel the front jumping i'll have to take a look at that i'm sure it probably didn't do it in the dirt because it's sliding got some sort of weird noise electrical shorting sound over here by the ignition but i'm just going to pretend i didn't hear that i've only got maybe another mile we made it this is my turn oh that was just barely pepperoni this thing's a rocket idle set really low oh we made it that was one of the funnest things i have ever done in my life seriously minus the whole almost being ripped off the road thing that's slightly inconvenient i need to get this inside case hill sheriff sneaks by was it me [Music] the more a guy sits here and thinks about it i bet it's got to do with the alignment and see how this wheels kind of toe out and if you look at this one she's definitely diving down so what he was probably doing if i were to turn this left and guy were to look at it this tire here is going to be toe out or diving in or pointed down the track and what that does for a feller is it helps go left and probably even so that's a 26.5 i'm wondering if this one isn't taller uh where is it at even all right there 27.5 so inch taller so i think that's probably going to be it i could play with that alignment but basically inch taller on the drinker side and he had this thing just to dive left so it's fine i think i'm just going to leave her be assuming that it is the alignment but she's not made to drive on concrete hard clay and stuff like that it would do just fine if you're seeing something obvious that i'm missing here or have any suggestions on something that i should be looking for or trying bleep bloop that down there in the comments for me and also if you have any history on this car photographs anything like that can point me to any books or websites really appreciate that and then also if you have any ideas what we should do with this thing originally i was thinking about maybe racing it once or twice just to bring her back but it's in really good shape i'd really hate to ball this thing up so we keep it as is do we try to make it street legal somehow use it kind of as a rat rod i do want to really kind of preserve the history so i'm not going to paint it or anything like that but yeah if you've got any ideas or suggestions put that down in the comments too and you guys will definitely see this on the channel more next time we'll get it up on the lift maybe and see if we can figure out that shake and then just really go feed this thing some onions but thank you guys for watching appreciate it very much see you next time [Music] guy's on his way back to get the pickup this way seems fine [Music] it's gonna be a long ride [Music] you

Channel: Vice Grip Garage

Views: 537,467

Keywords: motortrend, roadkill, vice grip garage, vise grip garage, vgg, vintage, imca, hobby stock, nostaligic, race car, dirt car, modified, stock car, coupe, chevy, vintage race car, vintage race cars, vintage race car build, race car build, modified cars, modified race cars, dirt track racing, 604 crate, 3 speed, 283, challenger, charger, cuda, camaro, chevelle, corvette, street stock, vintage dirt track racing, street legal, master delux, street machine, race cars, dirt race cars, dirt race

Id: tD5JpHovYMg

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 26 2020