Author: patman

When I first installed the Scat/ProCar Rally seats, the seating position seemed at least 2-3″ taller than the stock seats. Granted, the stockers were pretty worn out, but the seating position still bugged me.

I finally got around to lowering the seats on the brackets.

There’s 3 positions available on the seat brackets. Unfortunately, there’s not enough clearance between the floor bracket and the floor to use anything other than the bottom (tallest) position on the seat bracket. In order to use the shorter positions, the seat bracket has to be cut.

/

I went all the way and cut the bottom two positions off of the seat mounting brackets. This puts the seat as low as it can possibly be. Reinstalling the rear bracket bolts was a big fight, as the slider mechanism hits the floor bracket when it’s installed in the shortest slot of the seat bracket.

The result is that the seat is about 1″ lower than it was originally, which is an improvement. I’d personally like to see it drop by another inch, but I don’t see any way to make that happen. I haven’t driven it yet with this modification, so it may be fine already.

I uncovered a chin spoiler in my parts pile that I had purchased early on, but had gotten buried in other things in the garage. The spoiler is from OER, and is plastic. I also purchased struts and a fastener kit for it.

The top edge of the spoiler attaches to the lower edge of the front valence panel with several bolts. The center attachment point uses the lower hood latch support bracket bolt. That part went very smoothly. The problems started with the struts.

There are 3 struts in the kit. When I was working out the installation, I did some reading and found out there is conflicting information about the struts. The center strut was pretty straightforward. That goes from the front center of the spoiler to the front of the skid plate in the middle of the subframe. The two side struts are where the questions come in. Some things I found said that they should go to the lower front fender edge. Others said they don’t really go there, and if you hit a curb with the spoiler, that will bend and damage the fenders. Another theory was that the struts work with the stock GM spoiler, but don’t work with the reproduction ones. Yet another writeup described running them straight back and attaching them to the bumper brackets.

In the end, I decided to only install the center strut. I drilled a hole in the skid plate for the bolt, and left the outside struts off. It’s solidly mounted, and seems ‘good enough’ for now.

After weeks of sanding, buffing, and polishing, the car was finally starting to look a little shiny. While I know the black accent color on the rear panel is supposed to be slightly matte finish, I decided to hit it with the polisher anyway. The results were really good, except that the gas cap looked really shabby by comparison. As with the other RS-specific parts on the car, I’m pretty sure the gas cap is an original GM part, so I decided to spruce it up a bit.

The first step was removing all the old paint. I used a few rounds of brakleen to get rid of most of it.

The rest of the operation was pretty much the same as what I did for the rally rim center caps. Spray everything black, wait for it to dry a little, then wipe the raised areas clean with a paper towel sprayed with brakleen.

The finished product:

The paint on the car has good points and bad points. The D90 stripe stencil and black paint was applied fairly well. The yellow base coat has a giant run in it front and center on the hood. The clear coat is very uneven, puddled in some places, and was barely fogged on in other places. Overall the car had a matte look to it, as the clear dulled everything.

Figuring I had nothing to lose, I started experimenting with ideas to get some shine back. I first started with just paste wax, that turned out to be far too gentle. Next I tried polishing compound, which was also not aggressive enough. Same for rubbing compound. The problem was the clearcoat was very thick in some areas, and had not adhered in others, leaving a blotchy, dull look. The only answer was to take as much of the clear off as possible.

I ended up having the best success wet sanding with a 1500 grit sponge sanding block, followed by polishing compound applied with an electric buffer on a medium pad, and finishing with paste wax on a fine pad. Not perfect, but a lot better than it had been.

Even after working on it over a period of several months, there are bad spots, such as this pool/drip on the top of the LH front fender. The dark splotches are what’s left of a puddle of clear that was there. I’ve also pushed this as far as I feel safe, you can see where the yellow has started to wear through to show the darker paint underneath at the outer edge.

The final (for now) results are far from perfect, but they are a lot better than I was expecting they would be

There’s still more work to do, and I’ll keep picking away at it, but I like the results so far.

When I replaced the distributor, the new one did not come with a new coil. I reused the old one. Although it’s been working fine, I wasn’t happy that it still was using the old coil. I bought a replacement and installed it. Not too tough of a job, but it’s good to have new parts in there.

I also replaced the generic terminal on the end of the distributor power wire with the correct terminal and shroud. Now it plugs in just as intended.

The engine that came with the car is not original, and it’s old and tired. I decided to buy another old and tired engine to rebuild so I have less downtime for the car. I spotted a likely candidate on Craigslist, and picked it up.

The engine came on a storage dolly, but I needed to attach it to a work stand instead. I didn’t have an engine hoist available, so the tractor got pressed into service to lift the engine so I could put it on the stand.

After I got the engine on the stand, I picked up the storage dolly to move it out of the way, and all the ball-bearings fell out of two of the casters. Not the best quality piece, but it held together long enough to get the job done.

I lucked out, I gambled on this being a decent core to work with, and it turns out it has 4-bolt mains, which is good.

The engine had been given a ‘craigslist rebuild’, a quick shot of orange paint. There is paint in all the exhaust ports and on the valves. One of the pistons even has some orange on it because the spark plugs were out. Looks like someone started to “chrome” the valve covers, but lost interest.

K07 15 TXD works out to:
K – St Catherine’s Ontario Canada assembly plant
07 15 – July 15th
TXD – 1973 350 for a C20 through 3500 truck, 4bbl, originally 165 HP.

Once the heads were off, it was time to check out the wear ridge at the top of the cylinders

The ridge measures 0.007″ according to my trusty bore indicator, which is right at the edge for a re-ring vs an overbore and a full rebuild.

While I like the look of the original seats, they just are not very comfortable. They’re in decent shape…for 50+ year-old seats, but they are worn out. After looking at a bunch of different options, I decided to go with ProCar/Scat Rally seats.

I installed the passenger seat first as there was more room to work without the steering column in the way. The first step is installing the floor bracket to the floor using the original seat bolts.

The next step is attaching the sliders onto the seat bottoms. After that, the seat sliders are bolted to the floor brackets.