Nicely Done. I may go the oldschool route for now, and cut the springs to drop the car, later on I may go with air bags, I'm looking for a good ride, handling, and dependability.
There's a couple of nice, reasonable priced Olds motors over at Classic Oldsmobile.com. Nice job - looking forward to the finished product.
I am also on that site as 442garage. Thanks for the info and the compliment. I have a 425 D block that will go into the wagon when I am ready. The included pic is the manifold I will be using.
My profuse apologies! I inavertently overlooked your question. Many years in a land far away, not in Washington state, I did some drag racing, but not with the cars that I currently own. I'm not sure if we know each other or not, but I would certainly like to meet you and acquire another friend.
If you want to keep the ride and handling, not to mention the safety, rather than cut springs, go with the drop spindles for the front and get the lowering springs for the rear. That keeps your front end geometry correct. better handling and less tire wear. Plus, hitting the bump stops mid corner does very not nice things to the handling.
Mike, I agree with you! That is my intent, eventually. I am deliberating on purchasing an Art Morrison frame, with dropped spindles, rack and pinion steering, 9 inch ford rear end, 4 wheel disc brakes, etc. The reality is I'm not able to afford that at present, thus my fall back plan of spring cutting. I will reconsider!
There's a whole lot of options between cutting the springs and an Art Morrison chassis. You know the saying "Speed costs money - how fast do you want to go?" You can adapt that to handling and suspension too. Get an idea of how much you can afford to spend now and plan accordingly. We'll help you spend as much as you'd like, and then some.
I really wanted to put bags on this car but up front the suspension set up left no room to mount them. The accumulators make it possible to mount the rams in the stock shock locations. On the rear some rearranging of the stock geometry was nessessary, but the set up has proved to be pretty reliable. The front has never leaked a drop (been in for 9 years now) the rear on the other hand have been re-sealed a few times, but tweeking the angles helped a bunch. I thought the cars insane curb weight would have been harder on this suspension but hasn't really been an issue. I do constantly check bolts, lines and brackets for any signs of fatigue however. I do at times miss the static drop I had before, but when I see her laid out in the parking lot of the local grocery store with four or five guys gawking at her, I like the jaw dropping stance for showing or just showing off. :2_thumbs_up_-_anima
