Part 2:
So now that the body panels were mostly fastened, we had one very significant problem, her nose stuck out way to far.
She needed a serious nose job, involving the radiator, intercooler, condenser, and transmission cooler. We ended up cutting about a foot off the front.
We knew the radiator would work at the rear, like the Hoonitruck.
The stock intercooler was another story, it would not work in the back, and it looked ugly and didn't fit well with the front. We decided to get a cheap ebay intercooler to solve the problem.
Next as you can see was the hood and front grille. My dad cut out the middle of the hood and welded in some scrap metal to make it wider. We fastened the front grille with piece of aluminum, a couple pieces of wood, and some zip ties!
Ugly, but got the job done. We knew we were going to cover it with our special “bedliner” paint.
Next up was the rollbar (all dad). I tried some welding, but it is most certainly not something I picked up right away. Dad is not a welder (his words not mine), and he didn’t want to teach us any of his bad habits, so we let him do the heavy lifting. He swore a lot. I guess welding thick plates onto thin sheet metal is a pain in the butt.
The cage was the last major hurdle for the truck. After that it was all downhill. Or so we thought!
We had about 2 miles of wiring to sort through to find and eliminate what we didn’t. My dad told us the key was to go slow, cut something off, then start it up and make sure it still ran. We managed to not ruin anything and eliminated almost all of the mess.
For windows, we found left over covid spit shields on FB that were nearly perfect! A little thicker than we wanted, but we drilled holes on the perimeter and used ebay sourced hex head bolts, washers, and nuts to old them in place. The cowl was cut from a piece of scrap plywood my dad had in the garage. We used the old truck cowl as a template and extended the lines.
We screwed on the universal flares from the Taurus, and my dad welded a couple of brackets on the roll cage supports for the radiator. However, we would end up not using those and instead set the radiator lower.
To get the water from the engine to the radiator, we used pieces of piping from a tree damaged trampoline along with flexible radiator hoses from ebay. You can also see the jumper cables from Amazon we used for our battery cables. We used steel zip ties to secure the pipes because my dad thought the regular ones might melt. Nothing came apart after about 20 autocross and 20 drag runs, so I guess they do hold up well.
Unfortunately, when we tried to refill the radiator system, we could not get it to work. It was not strong enough to push the water from the front all the way to the back and then get back to the front. We kept overheating in about 10 minutes. My dad said we needed to add a booster pump, so we purchased one off ebay and it solved our problem immediately! So, if you ever want to relocate a radiator in the back of a car, consider about adding a booster.
Rules mandated that we add a shut off to the rear most part of the car since we moved our battery. We used the same T-handle we had from the Taurus, but added an old fiberglass fishing rod to extend it to the rear! My dad welded on a tube to keep the rod from bending. It worked great!
We took a whole lot of weight off of the rear of the Taurus, so we had to cut a little off of the springs to get the rear lower. Note to others, cut a little bit at a time, we ended up a little lower than we thought!
At this point, we had a running, complete truck! Now we needed to do some testing to make sure she would be up to the challenge!
Next stop, Bradenton Motorsports Park! Turns out we needed another hood pin in the center of our floppy hood, and some kind of latch at the top of our floppy doors!!
It was super busy at the drag strip, we managed 3 runs, 12.1, 12.3, and a 12.4. The truck was getting slower each time and my dad thought the transmission felt like it was going out! We were super bummed on the way home, when we suddenly realized we never checked the transmission fluid after relocating the radiator and transmission cooler!!!!!!! Turns out we were 1 qt low, disaster averted :) Now we knew we had a solid performer, that should do well at the challenge. Just to be safe, we took it the next week to Orlando Speed World Dragway, and she ran a 12.2 and 12.3. We were a little disappointed in the times, but we thought it might be due to the tailgate causing some drag. That’s when we decided to run without the tailgate at the $200 Challenge drag.
Now that we had our truck 90% it was time for a paint job! We thought seriously about leaving it as it was, my dad and his friends thought it was a cool “rat rod truck”. However, that would not work for our theme at all. At first we tried to appease my dad by doing “rat rod pastels”
It did not turn out so well. She was U-G-L-Y and we did not have an alibi. But we had more paint!
Plan B was to use a “Shutz” gun for truck bedliner and spray our sand thickened latex house paint to create a bedliner look that would cover all her rust and blemishes.
Oh my is that soooo much nicer. Note the caulking on the tailgate. We used regular house caulking to fill all the holes and stuff.
Now for the stripes!! As my dad says, racing stripes make it go faster!
And so do stickers! We had a really hard time getting them to stick to our “bedliner” paint, so we used caulk to put them on. Right here we were waiting on our tires to be swapped to new ones. We chose the same Kumho Ecsta V730 as they did really well for us previously. We used our Tire Rack gift certificate from last year towards the new tires. The truck looks so light in this picture, it’s hard to believe she still weighs 3,200 LBS. That’s more than my Mazda 3!
We finally finished. We estimate that there are about 400 hours in the build. Body swaps are def not as easy as they look, at least this one wasn’t. When we started, it sounded so simple!
Off to the races!
