Sport Fury Project Update

Well,,,the last time I posted something on the Plymouth we had run into some problems that involved PISTONS—we could not find any!! As I continued the search along with the guys at Kenyon Machine shop in San Diego we all pretty much came to one conclusion–start over with a block that gives me more options. Yes, I wanted to stick with the stock block, but we needed pistons, and to get the type we needed we have to get custom forged and would have cost Big $$$.$$, like around $600.00-$800.00. Greg at Kenyon suggested that we go all the way and go with a 440 build and I was thinking of just moving up one size to a 383, but it would just depend on what we found in relation to our budget, so the search began. At first not much was showing up and then I went to Graig’s List and found a guy in North County San Diego that had a few blocks to choose from. He had a couple 383’s and a 440 short block (pistons, crank, and caps in it), but the 383’s were more at our target price being that they were bare blocks.

So we made the trip up and picked up one of the blocks that ended up having a crack in it, so we eventually had to go exchange it for another and this time it worked! I wish I would have had a picture of it because it was a mess and it even had a rats nest in it. The guys at Kenyon did a great job getting it cleaned up and bored it out to .40 over from the standard boar,,,yea, it was a mess, but she’s looking good now.

Next step was to find some heads that would work. We were hoping to simply rework the heads that we have and use those, but that’s not going to work, so again we had to go shopping for some heads that would work. I decided to go with some heads that will work best with unleaded gas and they come from the Casting family of the “452″ heads. And,,,actually today, the 10th of August they arrived at the machine shop, so hopefully soon we’ll know exactly what we’ll need to do to get them into shape.

We’ve been sanding on the the engine bay, but with as busy as we’ve been during the summer there just has not been much time, and the help has been hard to come by. Today though Deb and I finally had some time to sit down and get some of it done, and we even ate lunch outside next to Donas63. Right now we’re just sanding and priming, then eventually I’m going to wet sand, spay it with a good quality primer, and then paint it. We’re not sanding it down to bare metal, but we’re cleaning her up real nice like. We are hoping to have the bay painted by November or maybe even sooner than that.

Little by Little, bit by bit, Un poco un poco