--- Project Green Monstah --- 69 Nova SS ---

[zdiesel]

Been plucking away at this project with my father for the past few months. When we purchased the car locally we had only intended on using it as a parts car (we have 2 other 3rd generation Nova's already), but once we hung the front sheet metal back on the car, we realized the car really wasn't in that bad of shape and so the wheel started turning. The car was last stickered in 83 and had been sitting in this guys barn ever since so I guess you could call it a barn find that we found on craigslist haha. The car is going in the direction of essentially a pro touring style rat rod if you will, or as we've come to refer to it as pro rat. The outside appearance will not be changed, but everything mechanical will be touched and brought back up to speed. Here's what we started with.







The car definitely needed a new floor pan and firewall, so we ordered up some AMD replacement panels and got to cutting.







After the floor was in we got to work on the firewall.







At this point we were working full tilt on the car, and as you can see the shop was a complete mess. Made for a good picture however, this is when we took a break from fitting the firewall and floor to something easier and more familiar which was doing a very mild clean up on the 350 small block that will be powering the car for now. It's a motor we pulled from another nova parts car with only 49k on the clock, was stuck when we got it but after being freed up, it fired up without a hiccup after sitting for 25 years. Good compression in all 8 cylinders so we plopped a comp cam, set of lifters, and double roller timing chain we had kicking around in it and called it good enough for now. We left everything grungy for good measure.



Here you can see our clean room where we do all of our high perf engine work.







After taking care of that we went back to finishing the firewall and floor pan install.



All seam sealed up.







We also cleaned up the stock subframe, gave it a little reinforcement welding and coated it with POR-15.



Some stitches on the bottom.



Seams welded up on top.



Cleaned up some ugly factory welds while I was at it.



Painted up.



Next we got to the fun stuff, ordering parts! Here's some of the goodies we got.
DSE Solid subframe mounts



Last summer at Goodguys East Coast Nationals we met some of the guys from ridetech out there at the show and shot the **** with them all weekend. We had a blast, they gave me some tips out on the autocross (I had dragged out my L33/T56 swapped S10 Xtreme for All American Sunday) and were just a great group of guys. My Father and I had always wanted to do some crazy suspension setup on one of our cars and after talking to the guys from ridetech that weekend we were sold. Nothing but respect for the guys from Ridetech and excellent products and service. So if one of the ridetech guys is looking at this (as I know there are a few on this forum), A+ work, keep it up. /endrant. ANYWAYS, we called them up and ordered one of their Level 2 Coilover kits.





We ordered up some dynamat and laid it down all over the floor, also got a new carpet.