Growing up in Chicago in the 60's

[kwhizz]

In the Drag Racing part of the cars history....when the Nova was first put together for racing....I had a Edelbrock Crossram on the car .......we had some issues with the car when we first started running it......It seemed as if i couldn't shift the car at RPM........we always thought it was the trans.....so....we had a local guy in the neighborhood by the name of Howie......you would place a order on Thursday and Friday you would have a trans sitting outside the garage door.....Humm!!....I wonder if he worked at a trans shop...LOL....anyhow he charged $100 for a trans, and I sold the one from the week before for the same amount....so , we just swapped out transmissions thinking that was the problem......No Luck.....When I got the Engine assy back from E&R I also bought one of their inhouse specialties called a "Rubber Drive" clutch assy.......basically what they did was to remove the springs from the Clutch "Disc" and replace them with blocks of rubber....after chasing the shifting issues for a couple of weeks ( and transmissions)....I pulled the Rubber drive out and put a regular disc in and all the shifting issues went away.....Imagine That!!
But......what I then did was to learn how to dis-assemble the trans and groundevery other syncro tooth off and I started running the car with a "Crash" Box in it......Now shifting was a non issue.....we got the car in this configuration to run a best of 11.73........But.......The next "Big" problem was that we had to run against Tony Christian ......The Nova would run 11.80's all day long.....but Tony (who was running his 57) was running 11.50's..........So.........We ended up taking the crossram off and we put a single Holley 3 Barrel and a Z-28 high rise.....with that set-up the car ran 12.10-12.15 all day long.......but....once you go fast(for the time), it wasn't much fun running slower.....but we ran a class called Top Stock and we won frequently.........But....Making $2.00 an hour and trying to race just quite didn't go together........But....It was fun for a year.........But....Like Eddie said.....Good Times.....

Ken