Welcome to my blog. Several family and friends requested that I keep them up to date on my kit car project so I thought I'd put this together and update it from time to time. I figured it would be a good idea to include some bio in case you wandered in here from some random google search and have no idea who I am. Skip the rest of this post if you already know me. It's mostly BS anyway.
I am not a mechanic. I have very little idea what I'm getting my self into. I'm operating under the possibly mistaken assumption that a person can learn enough from the internet, books, magazines and life to pull off a project like this. I attribute that to my dad. He never met a project that he felt he couldn't do. If something broke and it might be worth my dad's time to fix it, he did, and I was usually assisting. He and my mom even designed and built their own home, mostly because the builders they talked to weren't up to snuff but also because my mom and dad figured they could.
I'm not one of those OCD types that has done months or years of research either but I have done a little and I have had some mechanical and electrical experience. I helped my dad work on our cars when I was young. We had one problem car in particular that I learned a lot on. It was an '83 Cadillac Sedan de Ville that my dad bought my mom for mother's day or her birthday or something. My favorite story about that car and one that describes our experience with it pretty well was that one day after work my dad went down to his parking place to discover that the Cadillac had been stolen. I wasn't there but I always picture my dad fluctuating between anger that someone had stolen his car and delight at the thought of some stupid crook having to deal with it now. In any event the car had other ideas. The police found it several blocks away where it had broken down. The thief apparently threw a tantrum when he couldn't get it going again. There were shoe prints all over the interior as if he had been trying to kick start the car from the inside. The Cadillac's interior stubbornly refused to yield (as the engine had stubbornly refused to restart) so he ripped out the CB handset and took it with him; I guess as a consolation prize.
My first car was a '73 Mustang convertible (if anyone has a picture of it forward it to me and I'll post it). It was a great car and it rarely had any problems that weren't directly attributable to the driver (my brothers and I wrecked it several times and I put diesel in it once - I remember thinking, 'man, the green pump is really cheap!'). I chose a 351 Windsor engine for my kit car project because that's what was in my Mustang and I'm pretty familiar with it. It's also almost identical to the 5.0 Mustang engines of the 80s and 90s. My college roommate and best friend Russel had a 92? Mustang convertible that he was always hopping up (Seale, I know you have a picture) so I got to work on that engine a lot. For about a year in college I discovered that I could turn a quick buck buying and selling cars and motorcycles from college students. There was almost always some minor work involved so I got some more experience there. When I moved backed to Houston I took a job as a generator mechanic specializing in electrical troubleshooting and repair for about three years before going back to school to get my electrical and computer engineering degree. I'm now the R&D engineer for an emergency vehicle manufacturer. I'm very good with electrical systems from a theoretical point of view but in practice I'm probably just above average. As far as engines are concerned I'm just a shade-tree mechanic. I have some basic fabrication skills. I've never worked on a transmission, never done body work and can't paint.
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