Patrick said:AWSX1686 said:jstein77 said:AWSX1686 said:Yeah, I'm in for the follow. Also curious as to what the other car is...
For those of you without a long history on this forum, here's a primer:
No, the other car...
The black one? That’s Darth Nader, the 62 corvair bodied 2000 corvette.
Yes. I've heard the name Darth Nader, but not seen it before. It looks pretty sweet!
Patrick said:mazdeuce - Seth said:I'm nine kinds of confused. The Wartburg is caged, right? Is the cage tied just to the body and not to the frame at all?
That was all cut out prior to me getting it, and it was all mounted to plates on the body. It was sold initially to a guy who was going to use it as a teaching device. they stripped it to bare and bagged things and did a number on the sheetmetal around the windows by gouging the E36 M3 out of it with a grinder, then gave up. Jim bought it back to save it from certain death and contacted me because i had expressed interest previously and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’ve somewhat secretly had the car since August 2016.
That's horrifying. I'm curious to see how your vision overlaps with the visions of the multitude of people that have laid hands on this car before you.
Day 2 May 29
we had a scheduled “clean out the work trailer and truck and take in scrap” day so I told my guys what to do and spun the frame around so the front was closer to the welder and shade.
Removed front suspension and began laying stuff out. All the brown 2x2 tube and brown angle came from a homemade auto body painting rack that my FIL bought on my behalf at an estate auction for $1. He also bought a pile of pallet rack cross tubes for me for $1 which are mostly scrap but have been salvaging non pitted parts for small bits.
Then the sun got to where i was working so I stopped to check the guys’ progress and send them to pick up sandwiches and some welding wire because i ran out of the sample roll that came with the machine.
Day 2(cont’d)
i wasn’t going to let the sun chase me away.
And by 7:30 i had something I could work with, so i put it on my shoulder and spun it around and slid it in place
At this point very little is finish welded and the plan is once everything is fabricated to strip it back to this point and flip the frame over and work not above my head because overhead welding sucks.
Awesome pics. Great welds. Looks Solid, Tight. Keep us all posted on your continued progress with any new progress pics or vid clips. Show us what you got man. Wanna see how freakin' awesome, fast, powerful and tight you can get it to turn. Thanks for the motivation.
It would appear that you are making room for... something... up front 
Probably something from GM with 8 cylinders, but I'm going to go a different way and predict that you've found some monstrous 2 stroke which would bring this thing full circle and make it front engined, oil burning, and therefore a very strange type of "original" again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoiWpJLokEc
Maybe this?
Andy Neuman said:Awesome pics. Great welds. Looks Solid, Tight. Keep us all posted on your continued progress with any new progress pics or vid clips. Show us what you got man. Wanna see how freakin' awesome, fast, powerful and tight you can get it to turn. Thanks for the motivation.
Patience is a virtue, young sir andy. This is an organic progression thread, not a “here’s where i am and a couple pictures of how I got there” one. I’m good at those, here i’m trying to tell the story of the car
Bump just so Andy Neuman thinks i added more pictures
here’s what’s happening tonight, took Colin to the Indians game
Yeah he stood us up to go to the Indians game. I did get to meet his mom and dad. Cool folks and a cool 48 Chevy. To be fair he offered for us to go to the game but I wasn't sure if we'd make it in time. Instead I'm watching 10 year old boy YouTube in the hotel and having a beer.
There are far worse choices than fat tire.
Day 3 May 31.
what I don’t have a picture of on day 2 is bolting the frame under the body and having the back end hang about 6” below the rear valence. All the measuring i did was in the x axis, and I apparently ignored the y axis because I literally had nothing to work from and no reference points like i had up front. The day between 2+3 was spent coming up with a solution, which ended up working for the best.
A pie cut was taken from the rail at the rear firewall and i pulled it upwards until the cut was closed and tacked it. At that point the back of the frame was sticking up out the trunk hole like a wing, so that was cut, 2x2 sections added behind where the suspension goes, and the cutoff section was added back at trunk floor level giving me a sort of tray for mounting things that hold fuels of the liquid and electron kind.
during the process i was too involved to take pictures, so you get the tacked together functional end version
Stampie said:Yeah he stood us up to go to the Indians game. I did get to meet his mom and dad. Cool folks and a cool 48 Chevy. To be fair he offered for us to go to the game but I wasn't sure if we'd make it in time. Instead I'm watching 10 year old boy YouTube in the hotel and having a beer.
Damn, I forgot this was when you were coming up. If I had known Pat was standing you up I would have taken you two to dinner. I assume you're on your way home already but if Pat ever stands you up again give me a call, I'm like 10 minutes from him. For one niner - nine ate niner - five for three six.
Side note, Pat picked a good game to go to, the stadium must have gone nuts when Frankie cranked that homer, pretty sure I woke up my neighbors daughter with my yelling, SWMBO came out in the driveway to make sure I didn't drop the hearse on my head.
In reply to Dead_Sled :
We were so dead it was cool to just chill in the hotel eating Tostitos and drinking beer. Well Dr. Pepper for Lil Stampie.
Dusterbd13 said:I know a secret....
I know a secret also now. The garage door slowly opened and I noticed something I wasn't expecting and I said Ohhhhh (in a good way), then I noticed a second thing and I said Ohhhhh (also in a good way), and then a conversation Pat and I had a couple of months ago made sense as I noticed a third thing and let out a final good Ohhhhh.
Because throwback Thursday, this should give you an idea of what it took to pick it up. Across the front of the trailer are 3 subaru engines, behind those the original engine and transmission, behind those a dishwasher box full of parts, behind that the car filled to the window holes. There are parts strapped under the car, the bed was full to the top and the glass is in the cab of the truck. It took every strap i had, then I found i had a trailer taillight out. Hit advance auto parts at 8:50 in the hood in Delaware, bought trailer lights and swapped it out while keeping one eye on my back, one on my tools, one on my fantasy football draft, and one on the drunk guy who drove up and sat on my trailer and started musing about life.
Cleveland to New Jersey and back via york PA with about an hour nap at a rest area from 4-5am, got home and went to sleep as the sun was coming up
I’m also digging the corvair/ vette.....very cool.
Cotton said:I’m also digging the corvair/ vette.....very cool.
Believe it or not but in my brain starting from scratch was a quicker route to a finished challenge car.
Day 4 June 2 2018 was a scrounge through a circle track scrap pile day netting a REALLY E36 M3ty brake pedal with some scary frozen airheart master cylinders and another pedal welded on. While useless for sane racers, this is probably junk i can use because challenge.
So i can’t just call that day 4. Lame.
Day 5 June 4 2018. After work was spend de-bracketing and derusting the axial torque splitting conversion and multiplication device
What we have here is a 1970’s big lincoln/merc disc brake 9” that was torched out of something a long time ago and looked like it was stored in a swamp, that i grabbed for $35 at an estate sale. It has 2.LOL gearing and it’s too darn wide but only $4 per inch of ring gear for a rotor to rotor rear end is in my “take home now use later” price range.
I like the censorship. I also like measuring the cost of a rear end in $/inch.
Because I’m feeling generous, and nothing much happened for a few days because we rebuilt a porch on a 100 year old Cleveland house(that belongs to the owners or CLE Clothing company, shameless plug) here is what happened the next couple days.
nothing
check CL to see what my favorite small town questionable integrity tire guy has.
He has these
And these
So i go see him after work, hand him $300 and ask if he could write me a receipt. He smiled and said “nope, no questions no receipts” so I explained the challenge to him and told him I would take care of the documentation, hence the screenshots before he deleted them. Who am i to question a guy that has sold me 10 new stickered race tires in the last 9 months for $750. Seems totally legit that I would have paid around $2000 anywhere else.
Team Alavanche functioning like a well oiled machine firing on more than one cylinder
Go Team Alavanche!
Few days here since not a ton happened.
Day 6 June 7. I had gone to summit racing at some point and picked these up
So I mounted those shiny new front runners
Then we went to the track for Super Summit with the WRX and the Charger so Carli could get over her initial fears of being on a dragstrip while people watched. I took her down once, then let her run and she has confidence now, then I ran the WRX just to see what 243k miles does to make power go away. It ran 15.8. Not a drag car, but certainly a fun hoonmobile for snow.
Day 7 June 9
Dad was done with his $600 wagon. He’d driven it into the ground and taken the transmission for his sedan and been pushing the car around the yard with the tractor for 8 months. He called my buddy’s scrap guy who said $50 without engine or $100 with because he has a core buyer. Dad said i could have the engine if I pulled it, so I gave him the $50 difference because I don’t need anyone questioning my budget and pulled it out. If anyone balks at a 210hp tbi engine with 180k+ that’s crusty and has been sitting for 8 months that’s likely going to blow up when i try and go fast, then so be it. They can ask Evan who my dad gave a running truck to, or Michael who got a stupid cheap challenge engine from, or bobzilla who got a free engine from him.
Also on trailer - a pair of BOP pattern th400. One long tail, one loooooonnnnng tail, for $25 each with unknown converters from a body shop guy who was sick of looking at them for 20+ years “because everyone wants chevy pattern transmissions nobody wants these things.” Ok cool, hello summit racing clearance shelf!
Still Day 7.
Remember those guys with the jeep with the solid axle up front that won the challenge autocross twice? They had this under the jeep
But it’s like 9” too wide for a Wartburg 311, even taking into account the skinny fronts for drag racing. Any autocross tire setup is going to poke a foot past the fenders so I went with make it flush for my 15x4’s and go from there.
Warren(deadskunk) and I were riding to john brown’s house a few days prior and I mentioned plans and he had picked up some steel from the neighbors garbage that he thought would be a good size slug to use to help narrow the axle. Turns out he was dead right.
Cradled it with a big fat angle for keeping it straight to tack
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