'69 Firebird Debut

Today on muscle car, how not to do a prebuilt test drive. Our Firebird gets

a Subra swap and a ride in a hurst old.

Hey guys, welcome to the show.

We're gonna take a little break off our 61 and Paula here and start on a brand new project. The 69 Firebird. If you're paying close attention earlier in the season, you might have seen the teas that year one gave us with the rendering. Now we promise we're going to build the scene this season. We're gonna keep that promise.

1969 was the first year for the Trans Am and that's how year one got its name.

So we're partnering up with them to turn this 69 Firebird 400 into a one off tribute car, a modern corner carving convertible version of the classic Trans Am. We're given in an updated drive train and suspension, but sticking with the original styling, it'll have the best of both

eras, modern drivability and classic looks.

Now, one thing that's different about this car versus most of the cars that we've had a muscle car. This one actually runs and drives. So before we tear it down. We're gonna take it out. Tear it up.

Yeah,

this one actually runs and drives. So before we tear it down we're gonna take it out. Tear it up.

Hell, yeah.

Started working on this thing.

Oh, yeah,

crank up

some,

you know, we spend a lot of time cooped up in the shop. It's nice to get out and drive one of these cars that we talk about all the time.

Not to mention,

that's a good excuse to have a little fun.

And it'll be nice to see what we're going to be dealing with. Once we tear into this thing, you never know what you're getting into when you're working with a machine that's pushing 40.

That's a long time in car years.

Just like most of them we work on. This one's got its ups and downs.

You know, what the hell is that

mostly?

Yeah. Damn. It's gonna require new hood,

new paint,

probably new top.

Hey, uh,

Clint, the training just went.

This part of the process can tell you if you're going to wind up shelling out for stuff you didn't think of. It

looks like we may be writing a check for a new heater. Well, good thing. It's a balmy 38 degrees.

This bird came from the factory with a posi

rear

end. So, hey, we got to see if it still works.

A,

that s,

that really sucked actually.

All right. Now, this may not be the best way, but it's definitely the most fun.

Now, of course, the big trick with the so-called

rebuild test drive

is that you can create problems. You didn't even know that you had. Uh,

oh, no,

we're overheated.

Yeah.

Oh, it's dead.

Oh, that ain't good.

I think we killed it.

Bondi II

is real steel dude.

Holy crap.

It sucks.

It was worth it. Pushing up hill is lame. Sometimes you gotta swallow your pride and call for help.

Now, she may have laid down on this before we got back. But hey,

at

least we got the radio to work.

I remember that thing I was saying earlier about this woman uh running and driving.

Yeah, we kind of took care of that, but that's all right. We got to tear it apart. Anyway,

the original four hundred's been lurking under the hood for a lot of years. Now. They weren't real high

revving engines, but they were notorious for creating a lot of torque. Parts are still available for these. And there's a lot of options on how to build them. Drain the radiator. But since we're looking for modern performance in our trans Am, we're going a whole other direction. We'll show you our plans for that later on in the show.

Well, someone put quarter wrench on one side and metric on this side.

I don't have the right wrench for it, dude. This is a muscle car.

You ain't got no metric wrenches around here,

we're going to keep in track of all the shins,

mark them

left and right.

Since we're going to reuse most of the original sheet metal, we're drilling alignment holes. Now, it'll save us a lot of trial and fitting down the road.

Next, we can pull some trim,

knock some folder loose

and drop the front bumper with a little persuasion

and with the cooling drained out, we can yank off the front end,

come

river loose.

The easiest way to get rid of this junk exhaust is just take a saw to it. Then we can see what surprises the bird has in store for us.

Look at the floor pants,

dude, this car is a lot worse than I thought. Yeah, man. That ain't no joke.

But note, he,

he bought new floor pans,

new floor pans and laid them in over the top. That's the new floor pan. That's the old one there.

Oh, that's why we couldn't get no reception, dude.

They use the radio for part of the floor.

I'm sure you've heard of guys using F body and Nova sub frames and grafting them onto various early model projects.

Now, here is why

just four bolts you can roll out the sub frame. A fleet with engine mounts, tranny mounts, power steering,

everything in one neat package.

We're replacing this front Subra and everything on it. So this thing is out of here now, stick around because we're gonna keep ripping this bird apart. Plus we get to check out a new drive train

coming up. The bird gets its feathers, paws and rick shakes things up. Cocktails. Anyone?

Hey, welcome back. We got the gas tank out in this one leger 10 bolts history. So now we're gonna start ripping out the interior and finish tearing apart the body.

After punching a couple more alignment holes, we can go ahead and pull the doors off.

Now, sometimes the seats can be rusted right into the car, but these came out pretty easy.

We're looking here, Richard.

Yeah, good times, man. Nothing plays those eighties hits like a realistic speaker. I'm gonna miss this thing

before we can get the carpet out the console

sill plates and seat belts. All have to go

this blue carpet with its lovely brown tint sure is nice, but we're gonna replace it. So I'm just ripping it out

with the visors removed. We can tackle the windshield trim.

We have new trim ordered, but we're going to keep this just in case. So we got to be careful not to bend it up.

The header comes off next. Then we're breaking out the welding wire to slice the windshield out.

Now, you can buy a windshield wire to do this. It's spiral wound designed to cut through the hard urethane,

but this is soft urethane. So welding wire works almost as good.

Now, any time you work on an old convertible like this pretty much guaranteed to find a rust. But I was a little surprised to find a rust up here, whereas there's nothing on the dash, but that's all right. Just one more little spot to fix. Meanwhile, I gotta get all the rest of the stuff off the firewall.

You know, just about the time you think you got everything off. That's when you discover a few more bolts. Now, eventually you're going to run out of stuff, but we still have a lot more to go,

man. These clusters are attached in about 9000 different places. So it takes some patience to get them loose.

Now, if you're recycling yours, be extra careful and keep track of what plugs and where

we're replacing the dashing wiring harness. So it's not really a problem here.

Now it's time to pull the tail feathers off this bird that means deck lid,

tail lights,

bumper

and those cool firebird shaped trim pieces.

Now, here's something that you're only gonna see on first generation F body convertibles. They're called cocktail shakers and there's one that was put on each corner of the car. They're designed to dampen the vibrations caused by body flex.

These mystery cylinders are filled with fluid and spring loaded weights.

They're harmonically tuned to oppose vibrating frequencies. They serve an important purpose. So they'll be going back in

cocktails. Anyone,

if you're looking to buy a convertible to restore, you may want to think twice. There's a lot of extra work involved here. That's why I couldn't unscrew it,

there's missing screws.

There's a lot of different ways to remove a top. But the main trick is to keep it together as an assembly.

There's a lot of small parts that no one makes that can get lost or broken.

Now, this is a power top. So the hydraulic lines of the pump need to be disconnected. Also,

our friends at year one gave Detroit speed and engineering a call and they sent us a whole shipment of stuff.

We got shocks Subra

connectors, a four

length set up engine mounts. But the coolest thing, this complete Subra

this thing comes pre assembled with everything we're gonna need. It has C six spindles, tubular control arms, hydro form frame rails, even rack opinion steering. This thing has everything but wheels and tires, well that and an engine. But we got that covered too. Check this out

like what you see there, Rick

here.

Yeah,

it's an LS seven

LS seven

GM performance set us up with this beast. It comes with Titanium rods and intake valves, CNC ported heads with offset rockers and a dry sump oil system with a cam swap and headers. This thing is capable of 600 horse even on pump gas, a

duds header set us up with these ceramic coated babies that will clear that aftermarket Subra

Once all this goes under the hood, we're going to have one bad bird

and technology has come a long way and these drum brakes here, they were standard back in 69 and they worked ok for the performance that was available back then. But that LS Seven is going to require a whole lot more stopping power.

That's where bear comes to the rescue. These rotors are so massive. These suckers actually showed up in pizza boxes. These four piston calipers over here are going to put the bite on them now stick around because coming up, we get to start mocking up our drive train

up next. The car that put Olds at the front of the Indie pack.

Today's flashback, a 72 Hearst Old Pace car

in 1972. It didn't matter how fast you were making laps around Indy,

nobody was getting around this baby.

Although Oldsmobile didn't take the checkered flag, it was defiantly leading the pack.

This is a 1972 hurst olds, the official pace car of the Indy 506 129 colorless Supremes were sent out to hurst to be converted into Hurst Old.

They were all equipped with 455 cubic inches of Oldsmobile power

backed up by a turbo hydrotic 403 speed automatic

and a Hearst dual gate shifter.

A set of 323 gears took the tire shredding power out back to a set of

14 inch wheels.

Greg mckinley picked this one up in 1999

and since then he's done a complete frame off restoration.

But just because he's meticulously restored this old back to its original condition.

But don't think for a second, he's scared to drive it.

Since we've rebuilt the car, we've probably driven it 10 to 12,000 miles.

We take a view of it that it's like any other car. You know, it's been rebuilt once it can be rebuilt again

and that's half the joy of owner and it's been able to drive it.

Well said Greg well said

now besides having a monster of a motor dropped in him,

his cars were also given a rally suspension for better handling

and a set of power disk brakes up front.

The hood with its unmistakable style is held down by twist locks

and the scoops. Well, they're not just there for good looks. They keep the hungry 455 well fed with plenty of ram.

All the hurst olds were painted white and given a generous helping of reflective gold stripes that run the entire length of the car

along with the hood and rear deck lid.

Now, if that's not enough bling for you, the wheels, well, they were also painted gold to match

a thickly padded Landau roof, complete with the hurst Old's marking crowns. This classic

flag brackets out back are mounted to the rear chrome bumper that's complete with cut outs for the laned exhaust

up front. More chrome and four big head lamps are all set off with plenty of Oldsmobile badging,

classic old body lines are all wrapped with Indie Pace car details.

About 130 of these were made of convertibles and only 220 had the electric sunroof complete with an integrated wind deflector.

Now, these cars mean business inside and out.

The black interior is complemented by wood trim

and the driver rides in comfort and style with a set of bucket seats.

It's no wonder that Greg sees the 72 as his personal fountain of you.

Just getting into this car and starting it up makes you feel young again.

Makes you remember the years when, when they used to put muscle in cars on down the road with the windows open and, and your hair blowing, what's left of it?

It just brings back a lot of good memories.

The history books will remember the Hearst Olds as the first pace car not sponsored by an automobile manufacturer, but here's something for the rest of us to remember about.

Stick around because we got more muscle part for you after the break,

the LS seven drops in and the cross member drops down after the break.

Hey, guys, welcome back. We got our sub frame bolted in with no problems. However, it uses standard small block Chevy mounts and that means we're gonna have to use these adapters to get our LS Series engine bolted in

with the adapters mounted on the block. The motor mounts can go on,

they'll sit about two inches further forward than stock moving the LS back to its correct position.

TC is sending us a beefed up 465 E to go in the firebird and it's still on its way.

So for mock up, we're going to use this

GM unit,

it's the same type with the same dimensions,

time to stab it all in and see how it looks. But the adapters in place our LS should line right up, but it's still a tight fit. So we got to be careful not to scratch up the powder coating on our Subra

success

with the engine bolted in. We can see if the headers will clear the Subra

Doug's knows what they're doing because they dropped right in.

We decided to use the original cross number but to get all the holes to line up, we're going to have to modify it

first, I'm going to clean it up and blast it to get all the grease off.

We're checking the drive train

angle to make sure we have the four degrees we're looking for.

Now, once it's positioned, we can modify the cross member to match

the center needs to come down and back. So I'm slicing that section out,

then I'll bolt them back in separately.

We got our end pieces in our center section here bolted in and our drive shaft angle looking perfect. So now what we need to do is get some eight inch plate and fill in the gaps.

I'm tacking them into place first.

Then I can take the whole cross member out and weld it together.

The excess needs to be trimmed off and ground down.

Brent's cutting out some dusted plates to reinforce the sections we cut out.

Now, once these are welded into place and ground down, we can test fit it to see how we do.

Perfect.

You know, this part is every bit as strong as it was originally, maybe even stronger with all the gust in the welding that we added. But we do still have some clearance issues with this tunnel and that means that we need to keep carving this bird up, but we're out of time for now. So until next time we're out of here.