Drive to Alignment Shop

A friend of my is a partial owner of a muscle car shop about 20 miles from me and they also so alignments so it was a no-brainier to use him to have my '66 aligned. One of the guys that works at his shop is a friend of mine too and he picked up his alignment knowledge from a guy that had done alignments for 35 years and has been doing it for some years himself. We both go to Sandals Church so he figured that we could just leave from there to drop off the car so that he could get started on it tomorrow afternoon. I had to swing by my parents house to pick up the car on our way to church. I had just put on the rebuilt Edlebrock 1406 (600cfm) carburetor yesterday morning, but hadn't had a chance to test drive the car. The old carburetor is on the right in the picture below. You can see the difference in size of the ports.

The electric choke needs to be re-wired as I put the hot side on the "I" terminal on the starter solenoid and it is causing the volt gauge inside the car to mis-read. I have to run it off of a relay that is fed by the positive battery post and triggered by the ignition switch. There is a great article about how to run additional keyed-hot posts HERE. The car started right up and drove great down the road to church (about 6 miles.) I had tweaked with the tie-rods on Saturday too in order to minimize the toe-in effect that they were causing the tires to do. Since I didn't test drive it, I was anxious to see how it drove since I was going to be driving about 15 miles to the shop and on the freeway no less. It handled like a champ.

My wife wanted to take a couple of pictures of me sitting in the car once we pulled in the parking lot at church.

She said that I look like a giant driving the car. I'm 6' 3" so I probably look a little ridiculous driving the car when people see me cruising down the road. We took it from here to my buddy's shop American Muscle Cars where it was locked up in the garage. We covered it with plastic to keep any dust off of it from the body work on other cars. The engine was still hot so it caused the plastic over the car to lift up like a hot air balloon.

I should be able to pick up the car either tomorrow or Tuesday afternoon. I'm going to pick up my custom California license plates tomorrow on my way home from work and I'll put them on the car once I pick it up. The mufflers are scheduled for delivery on Tuesday and I have an appointment to have the exhaust installed on Saturday morning. If I have some additional time I'll put in the new window regulator and the passenger door panel.