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Barn Find 56 Bel Air LSA w/ TR6060
Hey guys,
Now that the Chevelle build is wrapped up I'm getting around to building the 1956 Bel Air I picked up in January of 2020. I use the term "picked up" loosely in this situation because getting the car was actually a huge hassle. I purchased the car from a gentleman in New York in January for 2020 with an agreement that he would continue storing the car until I could come down and trailer it home. We planned on heading down to NY in April to tow the car home (the car was not running/driving). So of course now you may realize that some things happened in the world that prevented me from getting to NY to get the car. In March the border from Canada to the US closed due to covid so I was unable to get to the car. The plan then changed to we would wait until the border opened back up enough that we could drive down and pick the car up. We were expecting the border to be open in a few weeks or possibly a couple months, that obviously didn't happen so I had to start looking into getting the car shipped.
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Getting the car shipped is where I really started to run into problems. New York has a weird system of registering cars that are antique that I still don't fully understand, but essentially I went through about 4 months of back and forth with the seller, the border, and the brokerage company before I finally had all the required paperwork to import the car.
So rolling into August I could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and the possibility of seeing the car in person for the first time (at this point I had still only seen the car in pictures). The car finally arriver around the end of August. The shipper was very good with sending me updates and pictures!
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A little back story on the car, the gentleman I bought it from bought it from a guy in Alabama as a non running project, he then pulled it into a barn and parked it for 20 years. the car appears to have been either a drag car at one time or a car someone intended to turn into a drag car. It had slapper bars, open headers with collector extensions, a driveshaft loop and what appeared to be clearancing to the firewall to fit a big block and cut out distributor access.
So to flash forward a bit to current day, I "finished" the Chevelle build in the summer of 2021 (they're never really done) and started working on the 56 shortly after, so I'm going to be playing catch up on this thread. The original plan for the 56 was always to be LS swapped with a stick but I did plan on driving it as it was for a couple summers (spoiler that didn't happen). In the end we decided that it wasn't cost effective to get the car running as it sat and I just parked the car from when it arrived home until late summer 2021.
I did some looking at what transmission and engine combo I wanted to use and was originally planning to do a high RPM solid roller LS deal with a jerico or faceplated doug nash transmission.
A little backstory on that plan is that it is essentially based off my dad's 56 which he has had as long as I can remember. It has a high compression (borderline race gas) 355 and a face plated doug nash trans. He used to race it when I was a kid, full weight, stock suspension, stick shift and ran a best of 11.31 before the track told him to slow it down or put a cage in it. I grew up in the back of this car, sliding around the back seat. Lots of good memories, and really that car is the reason I'm building my car now.
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A couple pictures of my dad's car (he used to tow it with a 56 chevy truck to the racetrack).
When the car arrived home I basically washed it, cleaned up some parts, checked out what all had come with the car and then took out the drive train (327 and a th350) and parked the car.
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I knew going into the build that I wanted the car to be low, have a fairly big tire on the back and to be loud. I essentially wanted to build a more modern version to what my dads car was in my eyes.Attachment 198331
I ended up stumbling upon a good deal on a low mileage (50k kilometres) tr6060 out of a smashed camaro. I picked up the trans along with the clutch. This started to slightly shift the plan of the build towards what could be described as a more user friendly combination. I was still planning on the solid roller high RPM deal but I was starting to consider something maybe a little more modern.
