1967 GTO project thread

[Gil]

Very nice !
Your car is awesome
Gil

[Nicks67GTO]

Very nice !
Your car is awesome
Gil

Thanks Gil!

[birdsandbowties]

Awesome !!

so last weekend at goodguys i had this nice young lady ask to go along around the track. I didnt know it but her dad was snapping pics of the run with a nice camera. She ended up sending me a few pics. I think its a pretty cool shot.

[Nicks67GTO]

Awesome !!

Thanks!

For the record the steering column you built for the GTO is killer. Well worth the money and a fantastic product.

[eric1967]

Nick you have an awesome car. I was at Des Moines. I should have introduced myself. I will catch you at the next event. Very cool car.

[Nicks67GTO]

Nick you have an awesome car. I was at Des Moines. I should have introduced myself. I will catch you at the next event. Very cool car.

Thanks Eric. Did you end up in second place for the event? The top 3 spots were pretty tight.

[eric1967]

Thanks Eric. Did you end up in second place for the event? The top 3 spots were pretty tight.

Yep I ended up 2nd. It was tight. Super happy to be running with Rich

[Nicks67GTO]

I decided to drive up to St. Paul this weekend for the Street Machine Nationals and was not disappointed. It was a great event with a huge turnout, even with the big showdown with Car Craft just a few hundred miles away. The Auto X was huge and pretty fast. We were all well into 2nd gear through a lot of the course. Although I didn't lay down any barn burner times, I had a blast. I took a video of a run and got a few pics on a couple of websites that covered the event. I also did pretty well at the speed stop competition besting some newer Mustangs and putting up a pretty competitive time so that was kind of cool. Anyhow I ended up putting about 700 miles on the old girl, got around 15 runs at the Auto X, 10+ runs at the speed stop and rolled 16.8MPG on the way home! I had one electrical gremlin strike and I think I have it narrowed down to an ignition switch.

I did learn that the higher speed showed a clear weakness in my tire selection {Nitto555} and my driving ability, so both will clearly need to be corrected....haha

Packed the car...



Encountered a ton of rain....




Got up really early...



Beat on the old girl pretty good...


{click for video}





Headed home!...

[analyte]

Looks like a great time!! Nothing better than driving the wheels off the rides we built.

Kerry

[SSLance]

Looks like a successful weekend of wheeling to me!!

[Motown 454]

Glad to hear you had a great trip. I hope the Gremlin is an easy fix.

[Nicks67GTO]

A few weeks back I took a trip to St Paul for the Street Machine Nationals to Auto X. While at the track, I encountered a guy with a g-body that had a SC&C chassis like mine. He had pony'd up for the SC&C HD Chassis brace. This is a very common upgrade for G body guys. It triangulates the front frame rails and apparently even GM recognized there was an issue because they used a stamped version on the performance G body cars.

I had kind of scoffed at it a bit at first but then talking to this guy about his, he was very impressed and he said the difference was instant and very noticeable, even over his stock ones he had removed. Marc had talked about how the front frame rails on these cars move under load and that the steering box takes all the abuse under steering conditions. This brace triangulates everything, ties it all together and distributes the load and A body cars really could have used these and really benefit from them...

So I bought one. $217 shipped. It looks like about maybe $30 bucks worth of material if you wanted to hack one together yourself. This one is nice though and has bends where they need to be and it has a nice coating so ok.... Ill be the guinea pig.

I will say I'm impressed with how much of a difference this made. My G body guy was right, it made the car much more snappy and athletic feeling. I had about 3 hrs installing it and the difference was pretty noticeable from the first corner I turned even at slow speed. I'm not sure how the frame rails move that much under load? You would think that they would wreck body panels with that much movement but they must, because the steering feels much more responsive.

Here it is





The instructions say you have to center the piece, drill 2 3/8" Holes in the frame rails and 2 5/16" holes and tap for 3/8x16 in the engine cradle. That didn't go well for me. I ended up stripping the tapped holes in the cradle upon final TQ....so I got a 1.5" hole saw out and made a little room to get some nylocks and washers on the back of the bolts that go in the cradle. Oh well, at least its not some numbers matching frame and there was a hole there anyways so....



I also ended up having to use .195" washers to space it down a bit to miss the swaybar. It says in the instructions this might happen so I was prepared. Inside the frame I had a buttlap weld right in the middle of the hole I drilled leaving a very uneven surface. This was leaving my bolt angled. I tried to get away with just tightening it down but I snapped a bolt off upon final TQ inside the frame rail. I used on of the thick washers to take up the difference inside the framerail and leave a flat surface for the nut to snug up against. Just a bench grinder and file was all that was needed...



So I got that all done, TQ'd it down to 35 ft lbs all the way around, checked for interference and took it for a drive....this gentlemen is a great picture as to why you don't buy hooker super comp headers...

[67goatman455]

Sweet! ill have to make one for mine. Looks like your steering box has seen better days sir.

[lucky13firebird]

Wow, thats cool, now thats one more thing i know i need... glad to see you out and about driving that beautiful gto around

[Nicks67GTO]

Sweet! ill have to make one for mine. Looks like your steering box has seen better days sir.

What are you seeing that im not? It is a 100k+ Jeep Grand Cherokee box so it's on my list of stuff to replace

[Nicks67GTO]

Nothing too cool to report other than I weighed the car now that its in its first finished form. There will be plenty of refinements, i'm just logging this here. I'm not really seeing anything too obvious that I could trim out to kill some weight other than maybe an aluminum center section and some forged wheels and aluminum heads. Oh well priority #1 is streetcar...

-3800 +/-20lbs with no driver. Weighed at the landfill

-All steel GM sheet metal 1967 GTO
-Stock frame, fully boxed with 1/8" steel and powdercoated
-1/3 tank of gas, stock tank
-PS, PB, PA, AC, stock glass, tilt column
-Iron headed 455 with an aluminum intake and Qjet and headers
-3" exhaust/dynomax ultraflo's dumped at the axle
-Aluminum radiator
-Kore3 Z51 13.4" front brakes w/ aluminum hubs and 02' F body rears with 9" DD power booster and 1" 2002 S10 RHD master cylinder
-SPC upper and lower A arms and springs
-Ridetech HQ shocks
-Currectrac RCA's
-Hellwig swaybars front and chassis mounted rear
-Stock spindles/tall ball joints
-Front HD chassis brace
-Richmond 5 speed, steel flywheel, lakewood scatter shield
-Moser 9" Housing/axles, Iron Yukon 3rd member
-Cast 18" Billet specialties Mag G's and Nitto555's
-06' GTO 8 way power leather seats and a full interior 1/3 covered in dynamat
-Radio and 4 speakers
-Vintage Air

[armourmark]

Great write up! Very informative. It's always nice to see other members and their struggle to find the right combo too. Every time I redo something or switch it out as budget allows, it always makes me think if I should have waited or did it different the first time (like your brake adventure). BTW, I'm in Cedar Rapids so I will keep an eye out for you.

[Nicks67GTO]

Great write up! Very informative. It's always nice to see other members and their struggle to find the right combo too. Every time I redo something or switch it out as budget allows, it always makes me think if I should have waited or did it different the first time (like your brake adventure). BTW, I'm in Cedar Rapids so I will keep an eye out for you.

If you get a chance this Sunday, there's a really good cruise in Waterloo/Cedar Falls on University Ave at Spicolis. I think it starts around 5pm. Its a show n shine then stop light to stop light 45mph crusing up and down uni till 9pm. Its a good one and gets a huge turnout.

[Nicks67GTO]

Back at Street Machine Nationals in StPaul I was discussing future events with a friend. He had mentioned that there was a hill climb in Waumandee Wisconsin. Fast forward to last Friday. I packed up the GTO and headed up to a spot about 3 miles outside the middle of nowhere to take part in a vintage hillclimb race. Your car has to be 30 years and older to run.

Friday night was homemade brick fire pizza and good beers on a farm with the rest of the field. Saturday morning 8:30 AM was the event and it ran until 5:30pm. The hill climb this year was a 500' ascent over 1 mile and no guard rails so there was definitely an element of danger though it wasn't really scary. The location had been moved from the last 3 years because that surface was unstable due to a recent recovering of the road. It's typically a 500' ascent over 2.4 miles on the original location and is supposed to be back there next year.

I have to say this event was awesome. Everyone was a great, pizza was stellar, scenery was beautiful and the race was a blast. I got to ride in some pretty cool cars when I wasn't running. The event is limited to 75 entrants though we only had 51 I believe. Its mostly older "British" type sports cars like Triumphs and Austin Healey's and such but we had a pretty good musclecar showing with a Fox mustang, 2 mid 80's G body's, a 66 Chevelle, 63 Chevy II, 68 Camaro, 68 Mustang and my 67 GTO. Next year if you're in the area and you want to get involved in a blast of an event that only costs $75 bucks, I highly recommend this one...

Directly below is a video of one of my runs. Click the small picture and it will take you to the video. Of course it looks slow because we're on video but I was probably in the 65mph range on one of the long runs in between chicanes. Just a heads up at the end of the video the passenger drops an F bomb right before I shut the camera off....I think he was just a little excited



Random shots of my drive there and the event. I think the drive there and back was just as nice as the event.

[Nicks67GTO]

I figured I haven't updated this thread in a few months so it was probably time. First...Merry Christmas to everyone. I hope all is well on your end of the computer.

This year has been a heck of a ride. I logged around 3000 miles on the car, ran my first 3 race events, multiple cruises and had a blast. During all of this I found some of the weak spots in the car. This winter will see some upgrades to address these issues.

So far at the house iv'e collected...

-UMI rear shock tower brace

-UMI driveshaft loop

-Fays2 Watts link. Im hoping to tame down the back end of this car a bit. Marc@SC&C says it will get it done. I guess we will see!

-Tanks Inc EFI fuel tank with sending unit and 400LPH walbro pump. Iv'e got to feed my planned EFI setup!

-New Aeroquip 8AN socketless fuel lines. The old stuff is worn out and time for new. I also sprung a fuel leak on the way to work one night. That could have literally burned the car to the ground. Replace your socketless hose as a preventative measure if its starting to look funny.

-American Autowire rewire update kit. I had some 48 year old car electrical gremlins last season and I was 300 miles from home. In retrospect it was something stupid but it cost me time at the track and a serious headache. No more!

-Used Dougs headers. My super comps are literally flat and leaking underneath. I had these on for a week and ruined them on a dip in the road and that was before i lowered the car. They are known as very low hanging headers. The Dougs should give me a bunch of road clearance needed for what i'm doing.

-Re-route the exhaust a bit due to the Dougs sitting much tighter to the floor and maybe add cutouts

With all of that said I decided i'm staying with a traditional Pontiac build as opposed to an LS. With the vibrant Pontiac aftermarket its no big challenge to put together a 550+hp/600ft lb 6500 RPM poncho anymore and I think cost wise ill probably be ahead given that im already setup for it. Iv'e been in contact with some Pontiac specialists about what i need to do to make the car run and it seems like this is the right path. Plus in a world of LS engines, it will be fairly unique. I also decided i'm going to go through FiTech EFI for my induction but i'm waiting to order. I'm not sure if i'm going to do the Meanstreet TBI system or use their new Multiport system that's supposed to drop in late January but that will finish up the touches for the year. Iv'e already started in on a lot of this stuff so be watching for updates if you're interested!