“restomod”

The Keed

This ain’t the bluster-boy’s car, but nearly identical.

The November 2007 issue of my Car & Driver magazine treats an interesting concept: the “restomod.”
It’s a response to the utterly valid criticism muscle-cars of the ‘70s are such douche-bags compared to what’s available now.
It’s a criticism that makes sense to me after motoring around in, and driving, my brother Jack’s rumpeta-rumpeta.
Here we are, quaking and shaking down the highway.
“People used to street-race these things,” I thought.
Way too much motor in a blowsy old chassis about as sophisticated as an aluminum ladder — and about as flexible.
The bedroom in our house on Winton Road in Rochester fronted on the main drag, Winton Road, a north-south street.
The house wasn’t air-conditioned, so during summer we had to sleep with the bedroom window open.
One night about 3 a.m., a mighty 454 Chevelle blasted up the street at about 75 mph with open pipes. (Winton Road is a city-street; speedlimit 30 mph.)
He was going up the street to the expressway on-ramp. Later we could hear unmuffled muscle-cars winding out in the distance.
There was no way you could sleep through that. The bellow was enough to wake the dead.
About 20 years ago I rode along in a ‘55 Chevy with a 400 Small-Block and Four-on-the-Floor.
Such a car was my dream all through high-school and college.
I had driven to it in the Faithful Hunda, and my reaction to the ‘55 was “what did I ever see in this thing?”
The Faithful Hunda was slower, but would run circles around it. That ‘55 was loud and flimsy.
Sure, throw $35,000 at it, and it would still be a ‘55 Chevy.
The restomod answers the most severe criticisms of the Muscle-Cars; namely unsophisticated chassis, lack of stiffness, and harrowing brakes.
Apparently others are doing it too, but this restomod builder is XV Motorsports of Woodstock, Ontario, Canada; and they do mainly MoPars, because most others don’t.
Gone are the wimpy drum brakes, replaced with six-pot calipers with discs in the front, and four-pot in the back. —Finally the old sucker can stop.
Also gone is the leaf rear-suspension, replaced by aluminum swingarms (that do a much more precise job of locating the rear axle), with an adjustable Panhard rod and coils.
I think what they presented, a Dodge Challenger, is unit-construction like the Nova, with a sub-frame up front.
But they added body-stiffening, which adds weight, but makes the old turkey handle much better.
They also redid the front-suspension. Corvette parts attach to an added-on aluminum sub-frame. The power-steering is current Mustang rack-and-pinion.
Beyond that they also levered out the old 340 and installed a hopped-up version of the new 5.7 liter Hemi. The tranny is five-on-the-floor. They also installed more modern and supportive bucket-seats — in place of the stock bench-seats.
For comparison they had a stock 340 Trans-Am Challenger, and the restomod halved the braking-distance.
The restomod was also much less frightening at speed — like ya wouldn’t loop it into a tree when floored. The writer noticed the stiffness as soon as he slammed the car-door: the XV car ker-thunked, and the stock Challenger crashed.
A 454 Chevelle is impressive, but after driving my brother’s car, I prefer more recent cars. If I want performance, there’s always the new Mustang. It wouldn’t be quivering and quaking. I feel like I could punch it without it punishing me.
A 454 Chevelle is now just a show-car. No matter what people say, cars are much better than years ago.
I was afraid the bluster-boy might “show (me) what she’ll do,” but thankfully he didn’t. (I didn’t wanna end up impaled on some phonepole.)

“The bluster-boy” is my all-knowing, blowhard brother-in-Boston Jack, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say. The “rumpeta-rumpeta” is his classic 1971 454-cubic-inch Chevrolet SS Chevelle, a monster.

The first house we had (about 1974-1990) was “on Winton Road in Rochester.” We moved out here to West Bloomfield after that.

A “400 Small-Block” is a 400-cubic-inch version of the V8 motor Chevrolet introduced in 1955 at 265 cubic-inches. The Small-Block revolutionized hot-rodding. It ran so well, and responded to modification so well, plus was cheap, it replaced the Ford Flat-head V8 which was the original engine-of-choice for hot-rodding. Pretty much the same, yet much improved, it’s still being made. “Four-on-the-Floor” is a four-speed floor-shifted standard transmission. “Four-on-the-Floor” was introduced early on in the late ‘50s by Corvette. Many hot-rodders swapped to Four-on-the-Floor, since such trannies were quicker than a column-shift (on the steering-column).

“The Faithful Hunda” was our 1989 Honda Civic All-Wheel-Drive station-wagon, by far the BEST car we ever owned, now departed (replaced by our Honda CR-V). (Called a “Hunda” because that was how a fellow bus-driver at Transit [Regional-Transit-Service in Rochester, where I once worked], pronounced it.)

“Drum brakes” were used clear until Detroit began switching over to disc brakes in the ‘70s. On drum brakes the brake-drum would expand as it heated up, expanding away from the brake-shoes, so that drum brakes faded away with heavy use. Disc brakes were less likely to fade, and have gotten better over the years. At first only one piston would activate the brake-pucks. This was increased to two, and even to three, evening and increasing brake-force. Usually the brake calipers only have pistons on one side, which activates both sides by moving the caliper toward the brake-disc. A six-pot caliper may actually only have three pistons. But it’s the equivalent of six things activating the brake-pucks. (Then too, it may actually have six separate pistons; with the caliper solidly mounted.)

The “leaf rear-suspension,” commonly used at that time, was two parallel leaf-springs to which the rear-axle was solidly bolted. Those leaf-springs could wobble and bend, steering the rear-axle. “Swingarms” are much more precise at locating the rear-axle relative to the car-chassis. A “Panhard rod” (a long arm connecting the rear-axle to the car [or chassis] underbody) makes rear-axle location even more precise. “Coil”-springs are used instead of leaf springs. They too can be more precise. (Detroit cars at the time used coils mainly at just the front.)

“Unit-construction” is the opposite of “body-on-frame construction.” With body-on-frame construction a separate body is fitted atop a frame. With unit-construction the car is essentially frameless — the car-body acts as the frame. But quite often a unit-construction car had a small front sub-frame for the motor, tranny and front-suspension, to isolate road-impact, etc. from the passengers.