You know how it goes; some weekends you’re on fire, getting tons of work done on your project car, marking off all sorts of things on your (hopefully shrinking) checklist. Then a couple weekends sneak by as life gets in the way, and BAM! you’ve got cobwebs collecting in your car’s windowsills before you know it. While we’ve got a bunch of irons in the fire over hear at powerTV, we were amazed at how time got away from us with our g-machine ’71 Nova “Swinger.” We’ve gone through the same sort of thing, but have made great strides since we first started [1].
[2]
Tired of pushing Swinger around the shop one a set of casters, we picked up some pretty cool Forgeline SP3P Gun Metal Gray rims with Diamond Edge with brushed outer rings. It took some looking around, but we found theperfect rubber to wrap these rims in; namely BF Goodrich’s G-Force235/40/ZR18 T/As up front and 295/35/ZR18 T/As in the rear. These big ol’ slabs of trick-grooved rubber will undoubtedly keep our big Nova glued to the road course, street, or probably the ceiling with the company’s “Unidirectional” tread patterning, which was designed to for maximum traction in wet or dry conditions with minimal road noise.
[3]
Tired of pushing Swinger around the shop on some industrial casters, we figured it was time for a change and contacted BF Goodrich who hooked us up with a set of all-weather meats.
[4]
Next item on our “To-Do” list was getting these BFGs mounted on our monstrous 18×7.5 and 18×10.5 Forgelines. Careful not to mar our rims’ shiny edges, we carefully fed the tire onto the wheel.
[5]
All dressed up and ready to roll, we got these back to the shop as fast as we could.
At the same time, we were hard at work trying to figure out a solution to a clutch problem. Swinger is scheduled for a pretty cool powertrain, a supercharged LSA yanked from a Cadillac CTS-V mated to a Tremec TKO600 6-speed manual. Unfortunately, the aftermarket is pretty much dark when it comes to performance replacement clutches. Besides using a stock clutch and flywheel with our setup, we were pretty much screwed. So, we called Red Roberts over at McLeod Racing. Red prides himself on being sharp on the LS-market and quickly fabbed a flywheel and clutch beginning with their tried-and-true RXT/RST racing clutch packages. What made the LSA so special, you ask? Well, it turns out the LS3, LSA and LS9 all share the same bellhousing, but feature different bolt patterns (specifically, the LS3 has 6 bolts, the LSA 8 and the LS9 has 9 bolts).
[6]
Starting with McLeod’s RXT race-style clutch, McLeod custom fabricated a high-performance flywheel and machined an adapter plate to fit the LSA’s 8-bolt pattern. Since the RXT uses dual discs, we’re pretty excited to get Swinger on the road and test it out!
Obviously, this is just a teaser of what to expect to come rolling from the poiwerTV garage, so stay tuned for a far more in-depth review of everything that went into making this one-off McLeod clutch a reality.