MotorTrend's "Pure Power Pony" Drag Car Powered by Amazon! | Episode 3

John nice to see you man. It's good to be back Steve. Today we're over at Fully Torqued HQ. We're going to be working on this 67 Fastback Mustang because it's going to be going on Hot Rod Power Tour West coming up pretty quickly here. Last time I saw you. Right. We were in this bad boy in Pontiac, Michigan. Right, Roadkill Nights. Yep we got to run it down the strip. You know now I know today we got to get this thing ready for our next trip. Yeah. Luckily we didn't have to drive it out to Pontiac. Right. But we did ship it. Right. In the process of that. Right that whole saga happened. It got destroyed. So I figured let's pull it out. Let's measure everything. Yeah. You know we'll order what we need for the exhaust. Headers, piping, mufflers. We'll kind of redirect how we want to run it. First step for today. We're throwing this Mustang up on the lift. We're going to put it in the air. That'll give us a clean area to kind of really evaluate what we need to do on this Mustang. As you can see the exhaust is really low in this car because of all the bracing and the stabilizer. Subframe stuff and all this. And coming off the trailer, right? Right. The exhaust basically ripped off the car. You can see where it hit and scraped also all in here too. You can see this line where he dented the piping which it's pretty hard to dent piping like that. It's like quite impressive what they managed to do. I've seen worse damage but yeah it was kind of a feat to be able to rip that weld apart. I'm thinking that we need to do something different with the exhaust. That'd be cool. Yeah I think we could get some smaller mufflers too to find a space somewhere you know around here maybe some smaller mufflers to make it just easier to route and then the exhaust isn't hanging so low anymore. You know even like around like a bullet muffler or straight through or something like that. That would be cool. I think you just hit the nail on the head. We could figure something out. Bullet mufflers tend to be kind of a race part but they'll fit in a smaller space and I think it's going to work really good for our Mustang. You came up with the good idea about the circular mufflers. Yeah. Let me grab the tablet. Let's go on amazon.com and let's see what we can find. So it looks like here John we have quite a few options. I know this Dynamax one popped right up. This performance muffler the round one that's about 14 inches. I think that's the move. All right so we got those added but now I know we need stainless steel exhaust piping. First thing that pops up DNA motoring. Okay. We actually put their seats on the inside. Yes. That's why it probably sounds familiar. Yeah. Nice quality stuff. It's got prime shipping. That's perfect right there. There's nothing holding that on. That's funny. It's about to come right off. That is an actual sheet metal screw hole. That's awesome. The hanger to the floor so. All right there you go. And now you have straight pipes. Yeah. So now we know we're going to do for our exhaust but I think our next big thing is the linkage. So you know as you can see we have these zip ties here and that's not originally how this linkage was run. It was over the stabilizer. You can tighten this and then we'll have to run through all the gears and just make sure we've got every click that they're supposed to be there. I know Dorman actually makes a new shift linkage kit. Okay. So what I'm going to do is I'll look for the part number on this. That's cool. I think that's the best way to do it because we know this part works. Right. But we need to see if there's something in comparison that's shorter. We know we need to order for our exhaust. Same with our linkage. So I mean now it feels like we're hitting somewhere. Yeah we are. We're going to get some progress. Now that we've deconstructed our next step will be the reconstruction. So we have a fun day today. I know. I can see. We've got some stuff. All this stuff got delivered. Yes. So we got Magnaflow. We got DNA motoring. We got our brand new Dorman shift cable. I mean we pretty much have everything we need to get this Mustang all tightened up. What do you think? What do we want to jump into? We can just start eyeballing this exhaust system together and see how we want to run it under the car. What do you think John? That looks way better. One of the problems we were having, I know you know this, was the you couldn't feel when you were moving the shifter in the car. No you'd have to wait for it to engage. Right and then you never felt any solid like clicking through the detents and the transmission. And so some of that is to do with like how the linkage, the cable, attaches to the you know linkage coming from the shifter. And you got this big opening right here and the way it was kind of in there we got this skinny little bolt that would allow that to move the shifter handle to move a lot before it actually does anything on the shifter table. So these are like angled here and I think maybe they're supposed to sandwich this. I would agree. Yeah yeah and that that way maybe we could try it this way. You know what we could do? We could put one of these washers maybe before it. Yeah to fill up that opening a little bit in there. Because I think we should use the bigger bolt yeah? If that goes yes. So it's kind of like piecing this thing together. Yeah. But that might center this bolt in that shifter handle and that way our cable is actually like pulling on the transmission. Make sure it doesn't slip. Okay then you can put the cable on. Yep. Okay. All right so then what we can do is if we just do that from underneath then I can tighten it in from up top. All right well that feels good to me. Yeah it feels tight. I think we're good. All right get this guy on. Now that we got our shift selector with our new shift cable and everything redone this is big. Now I think the next move is we'll get the piping we'll get the mufflers we'll start measuring out how far we want to go we can start making cuts and really mocking this up. Yeah sounds good. This is the fun part. I know this is it's gonna be good. Steve was super stoked about piecing together an exhaust system but I've put a few systems together that almost make you want to cry. This is our original piping. Now the DNA motoring kit we have we have all the bends everything but since this 67 fastback has kind of like a frame stabilizer in it this was bent and done this way to go around the frame stabilizer. So we're gonna try something out if it doesn't work it's okay. We're gonna break the weld right here and we're gonna see if we can reutilize this piping to kind of get that same bend but with the shorter muffler so it actually should save us some ground clearance. How's that feel? Pretty good. That wasn't very convincing with your face. That feels great. Oh okay cool. Great. You know John I know it was a little bit of trial and tribulation because we have this frame stiffener right here. This will get us on power tour. Well you know it's gonna get us on power tour but the other thing too is those old mufflers were so bulky yeah they definitely hung down a little bit further yeah to the point where when you'd back up and if it was too low I mean your clearance was they were about three and a half inches lower than this roughly but you know what this just kind of shows people that you can make something out of what you have. Yep. I think the only thing we have to do really next is the fluids. I know we're playing on draining everything filling it all back up yeah put some miles on the engine we've done some passes yeah so let's make sure it all looks nice and clean yeah um you know we'll make sure she's all topped off and off the hot rod power tour west she goes. That's right. Before taking the Mustang on this road trip we topped off the oil with Pennzoil 0w20 and filled the radiator with Shell's Rotella pre-mixed antifreeze. John we're here. I know power tour west. I know it's going to be great we got our Mustang our pure pony power yeah five days five cities scorching hot. It's a good test for the cooling system and I'm gonna have the windows down since we don't have AC but you know what I don't mind the heat so when these cars you know they're from the 60s it's not like they didn't have heat back then so let's put it to the test yeah let's uh I know let's have a good week. This trip has been fun it's one for the books but it has been hot got to see a lot of cool cars we took our pure power pony Mustang to all five locations and it's been exciting you know what we've learned about this Mustang is it'll never be done and you know going forward looking at SEMA we're gonna be doing some real cool interior upgrades along with a little bit more electrical that way we can make sure that you know we can drive it in we can drive it out but we do something special for SEMA.