Larry Boughter's '62 Nova wagon

[Sales-TCI-Eng]

Getting ready for optima.......



Here's what the car looked like earlier this year.











Disassembly began








Then the thrash began to get the car ready. Larry already had our 4-link and old Custom IFS ready to go in.









Wilwood supplied the 13" brakes for the front and 12" for the rear. We changed out the steel rear shocks for our billet single adjustables. We swapped the rear track bar for a panhard bar. We also supplied the larger front mounted anti-sway bar to replace the rear mounted bar.







Here is Larry's new powerplant, he hasn't divuldged any details on it yet.






Here is what the car looked like as of yesterday morning. As you can see he has a long way to go. We secured a test-n-tune session on Sunday at Adams Motorsports Park. If he gets the car together sometime Saturday he is going to trailer it from AZ to Ontario so we get her dialed in. I will post up updates in here as I receive them from Larry.



-J

[RobNoLimit]

is this car in for optima already?

[Sales-TCI-Eng]

No clue how, but yep it is.


-J

[CA B4C]

I feel your pain brother

[Sales-TCI-Eng]

They are aligning the car right now and will be taking the car for the maiden voyage shortly.

-J

[Sales-TCI-Eng]

Well, the optima thing didn't work out for Larry and the Wagon. 1:00 AM the morning the car was supposed to be in Vegas he had an issue with the pilot bearing on the input shaft of the transmission. It was the straw that brokes the horses back so it didn't make the event.


Larry spent the winter fixing all the issues with the car and even made a few passes at the Scottsdale goodguys autocross. Fast forward to last week. Larry brought the car to us on Wednesday to dial in the suspension for Run to the Coast. The car needed a tune up real bad so we made a deal with the guys at Westech to drop it off Thursday morning. The car came in making 265 at the tire. After correcting a few mechanical issues and getting a good tune it left making 347. While the sun was setting we went ahead and took the car down to the local photo op place.










We spent the remainder of Thursday evening at our shop making some subtle changes. We changed the front springs from the old progressive 350's he had to a 400 straight rate. The car was a little low front and rear so we raised it up. The rear 4-link was put into a more neutral autocross position and we centered the rear axle. Then we set the anti-sway bar to have no preload with Larry behind the wheel. Next, we gave it a good street alignment, .5 negative camber, 3.5 positive caster and 1/8" toe in. It was approaching 10:00 PM at this point so we took the car for a spin and called it a night.

Since the car was ready for battle Larry decided to take the car out and enjoy it a little on Friday. He called a couple hours later to tell us he is having clutch issues. Fluid from was going MIA pretty much the instant it was placed in the clutch master. Yet, no fluid was dripping/leaking anywhere. Larry's son Dan was in tow with the truck and trailer so they loaded it up and headed to a friend's shop that was local. Once there they quickly realized that the shop was inadequate to properly diagnose the problem. By this time the RTTC cruise had begun so we told Larry to head towards the shop and that we'd meet him there. We headed back over to the shop as well hoping for the best (just needed a new clutch master). We had the tranny out sometime around 7:00 PM. This is what we found.

TOB destroyed itself










We thought that we were done for the weekend. But wait, we have two TKO600's sitting in the shop right now. Let's take the parts we need off of them and put them onto Larry tranny. Yeah, not so much. Shifter, input shaft, TOB were all different on each of the trannies. So we finally called it quits around midnight.

Larry and Dan came out to the event on Saturday and were just going crazy not having the car there. The thought at this point was let's just swap the whole tranny. Sal was fully prepared to let them use the shop to swap one of the trannies in but no one was around to let them in. All the keyholders were at the race. So we bided our time until Ed left, so I followed Ed and Larry followed me. Reeeeeealllllly long story short, none of the trannies were proper so once again the car didn't make it out.

Larry is resilient though so he will be back out there soon.

-J

[rustomatic]

That is a very cool sleeper--it makes me think of what I'll do once I've wrecked my Hardtop 2-door too badly...