I'm curious about the bulges in the floor, I was expecting it to be flat. Are those pieces from passenger cars welded into the frame? How does it look from below?
Reading the schedule in the petty racing experience website, they do events in speedways only. Are you planning on modifying the suspension to turn right before attending autocross or track days?
This thread has been both informative and entertaining, please keep the updates coming. And congratulations for the wedding!
In reply to 2_3 :
I feel like I read somewhere that the floor pans are based on some 50s Chevy floor pan or some such thing and were basically a rules requirement for stock cars. However, I can't find that source so take my words with a heavy dose of salt. I don't have any good pics of the underside of the car but it's got a pretty beefy perimeter frame with cross bars for the massive truck arms and other stuff to mount to.
The suspension is not set up for circle track right now, though I haven't taken any measurements to know exactly where everything is alignment-wise. But a circle track car has crazy positive camber on the driver's front wheel and negative camber on the passenger side, and this car is pretty much straight up and down on both sides. Everything looks pretty symmetrical to the eye, but once I get it back up and running suspension tuning will be high on my list.
Thanks, and thanks for reading!
This project isn't dead! After 6 months of living away from the car my wife and I moved back to my old town, and after settling in I have finally touched the car again! Progress is slow, but it's still progress. The current task - reattach the oil pan and put the engine back in the car. I bought a new oil pan gasket from Oreilley that I thought should fit, but when I went to put it in the car, I encountered this problem:
(sorry for the poor picture quality, my new phone's camera is terrible)
It's hard to see in the pics, but the gasket at the front appears to be too thick, so the pan is pinching it and can't be pushed up against the block. Unfortunately I don't have the old gasket to compare the new one to anymore - it came off in a million pieces and had crazy amounts of silicone sealer holding it in place. I took this new gasket out and discovered that I had somehow managed to ruin it in my installation attempt:
I must have pinched the back corner near the flywheel pretty hard. Good thing I took the pan back off.
So now the task is finding an oil pan gasket that will fit. I believe the gasket I got was from a '94 Dodge Ram 5.9 Magnum. However, this engine block has a tough-to trace engine casting number:
From my research, it appears that this is eather a 1992 or 1993 engine, which was apparently a transition year (great).
Most of this seems to deal with internal differences, no mention of oil pans. I guess the next step is to take the broken oil pan gasket back to the parts store and see if it differs from the pans from a 1992 0r 1993 truck engine. If anyone knows these old Mopars I'd love any thoughts.
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