Super Nova Part 2

Hi and welcome to Horsepower TV. You know, there's nothing quite like a quick trip down the quarter mile, especially when it puts a smile on your face and a low et slip in your hand.

And if you've been to your local drag strip lately, you know that novas are the perfect platform for a drag race car,

whether you're building a simple bracket racer or even a six second pro

mod.

And that's why we use the 69 to launch our project supernova recently. Now, our goal is to get this thing in the nines with the help of a GEO performance parts 572 race motor.

We kicked off the project by back having the car using an art Morrison rear clip kit

that included a nine inch housing

that we filled with strange engineering guts and axles.

Then we added a pair of their coil overs,

some Wilwood disc brakes

and a pair of Mickey Thompson slicks on. Well, the LMA stars.

Now, later on, we're gonna make the Nova even more race ready by adding a full roll cage. But first, we're gonna get rid of this whole front cap so we can have full access to that front sub frame. Now, once we get all that sheet metal out of the way, we're gonna bolt up a set of front disc brakes as well.

And what does it take to bring a nine second Nova to a halt? We're going with another

w wood set up to work with the ones we already installed

back.

Of course, Lenovo came from the factory with drum brakes and these are designed to boat right up to the stock spindles.

The rotors measure 10.5 inches

and the calibers of the kit have four piston designs that are filled with Polymatrix pads. Oh, by the way, it's a special compound designed to grab those rotors aggressively for safe stops at the finish line,

well as you

and racing weights critical. So the calipers, the hubs and the brackets are all made with lightweight billet aluminum. Well, before we get to work on these breaks, let's see how my partner's doing getting that cap off. Now, what do you mean? I've been waiting on you to quit flapping your yap. So you can give me a hand here.

Now, this is definitely a two man job. So grab a wrench.

The first thing that we wanna do is get rid of this hood,

then remove the front bumper,

drain the coolant

and disconnect the hoses,

unplug the wiring harness at the firewall

along with any wires connected to the engine,

remove the bolts at the top rear of the fender,

the door jam

and at the bottom of the fender behind the wheel opening.

Now, the last two bolts holding the whole front end on are the ones holding the core support to the sub frame right here. Now, once we get these two bolts out of the way,

we can lift the front end right off.

Sure.

Do you clear the firewall yet?

There we go. Ok. There we go,

man that sure opens up things to work on the brakes. And of course, later, we can run our cage tubes through the firewall and down to the sub frame and tie this thing together. But

right now, we need to get the dove up on jack stands and get those drums out of the way. How's that look?

I'm good here

after removing the wheel,

pull the brake drum

and disconnect the brake line.

Next, remove the dust cap,

the cotter pin

and spindle that

then you can get the hub out of the way,

remove the bolts, retain the backing plate to the spindle

and remove the backing plate and break as an assembly

before we bolt anything up to those spindles. We need to do just a little bit of pre assembly first. Now check this out, I've already pre assembled this hub and rotor assembly

and as you can see it's ready to go. Plus I've already packed these bearings out of the seal and the wheel studs to this hub.

Now, we're gonna go ahead and bolt the rotor to this adapter plate. But before we do, we need to add just a little bit of thread lock

this bolt here.

There we go.

And once we get all the bolts tight and torqued down,

we'll just safety wire them all together.

Once that's done,

we

both the rotor and adapter assembly to the hub

again, using thread lock on the bolts.

There we go

and a little bit of safety wire to keep everything secure,

the caliper bracket bolts up to the spindle. Now, of course, the kit comes with a couple of different length bolts for this top hole in the bracket here.

If yours has drum brakes, like ours did use this short bolt

and a thin washer behind that upper mount. But if yours came from the factory with disc brakes, you get the longer bolt and a spacer that goes in its place. I would just slide everything right in here

bolted up,

slide the hub and rotor assembly

on to the spindle,

install the outer bearing

washer

and not

after tightening the nut to factory specs

drop in the cotter pin

and secure it.

Now thread the dust cover into place.

Finally, we both the caliper into place, make sure that the bleeder screws are pointing up.

Now, you want to check the alignment of the rotor and to do that, you just look through the top of the caler here, you'll want the caler

pretty much centered over the rotor. And if it's not, uh, you can use these shims that are 32,000. So they come in the kit and you just put them between the Caler and the bracket to make any adjustments.

Once you get everything together, just go ahead and put some thread lock on those bolts

to them to 30 pounds and safety wire, everything all together.

The original master cylinder doesn't have the fluid capacity to work with our new disc brakes. So we upgraded it to this larger one originally found on a 71 Corvette. Of course, it had disc brakes all the way around now. It's not only an economical choice but what you can find it just about parts store. Oh, by the way, we're also replacing the stock rubber hoses with stainless braided lines that connect right to the calipers. There you go. And since this thing doesn't expand like that rubber hose does, we're gonna get a rock solid pedal no matter how hard we jump on those brakes.

There's one more piece of brake hardware to install this adjustable proportioning valve that allows us to adjust front and rear brake bias, which is very important with big slicks out back and skinny tires up front.

Well, I'm gonna be right up front about us needing to take a little bit of a break. But wait, you see what we got when we come back

next, we start transforming this pile of tubes into a real roll cage and with a little welding,

some cutting and some notching, we'll have our main hoop and roof line bar solidly in place. So keep welded to your place. We'll be right back.

Hi, welcome back to the shop and more of our project supernova in case you just joined us, Chuck and I are turning the 69 Nova into a nine second drag racer. We just upgraded the brakes. Now, we're gonna increase the safety and show you how to tie the whole chassis together.

In fact, when we're done, here's what we'll have a full roll cage that ties our Nova together at 10 points for complete safety strength and stiffness.

And we start with a pile of pipes like this from Art Morrison Enterprises. Now there's enough stuff here for you to assemble your own 10 point roll cage with only basic hand tools and a mig or a tig welder. Now, let me show you what we've got. All this tubing comes pre bent, so it'll fit up real easy with only minor trimming and cutting.

The tubing is one in 58 inch diameter with 100 and 34,000 wall thickness. Now, that means this stuff is gonna meet all the safety specs of any sanctioning body.

Of course, the kit comes with this main hoop, a brow bar, a couple of roof line bars and enough extra tubing for all the supports and braces that you'll need. Now check this out. Some of the tubing even comes with fish mouths already cut into them to make it easy to fit them up. Yeah. And for those that need trimming and notching, we're gonna use this tubing notch. We borrowed from Mittler Brothers machine and tool company. Now, this is the top of the line machine that handles tubing up to two inches in diameter. It features a V block vice here that holds the tubing securely and can be adjusted for any angle cut using the calibrated degree wheel. Now, they do have more affordable versions of this machine that work with the drill press or there's always the old blue tip wrench and grinding wheel. Anyway, we'll show you how this thing works a little bit later.

Now, the first thing that we wanna do is determine the height and location of our main hoop. Now, typically it runs right up here next to the B pillar.

I've already

fed up this box that attaches to the rocker panel. And what that's gonna do is give us a solid foundation to attach that main hoop to

and give us a place that we can measure from. Now, let's see what we got here.

Looks like about 37 and a quarter inches

and

mark your main hoop,

then cut it with a chop sa

while Joe holds it in place. We're just going to tack weld it for. Now,

next, we can take the roof line or a pillar bar, position it

and determine its forward mounting point.

Now, I'll make a mark here on the floor where we can weld in another platform like we did for the main hook.

While we're here, we'll mark a spot on the tube where it's gonna tie into the main hoop.

After trimming the roof line bar to proper lens,

we set up the tubing not

and make our cut,

be positioned the front mounting plate and welded in.

We tacked the roof line bar to the main hoop

and to the front mounting flight.

Well, I just welded the brow bar into place or at least what I could get to it.

Now, you probably noticed that I'm using a tig welder here rather than a mig welder. And here's why we want to eliminate a lot of that splatter, which is really important right up here by the headliner where we could start a fire and we sure don't want any splatter to get up on the windshield. Now, let me show you a trick so I can weld in the rest of that brow bar.

We just cut the tax loose from our front plate and the main hoop

then move the cage back far enough to finish our welds

with the basic cage repositioned

and tacked back down.

We're ready for this rear support bar. Now, I've already trimmed and notched it to run from the basic hoof back here to the rear clip just above the shocks when the car launches, a lot of energy is transferred back here and we wanna make this as rigid as possible to avoid any flecks.

Yeah.

Well, now I'm tacking in this seat bar here that

not only provides rigidity but also offers a mounting point for our seat and safety harness.

Hey, that pile of pipes that we started with is looking like a real cage. Now, huh?

The next pipe that we're gonna add is this rocker bar that goes right here between the main hoops.

Then we're gonna add a couple of diagonal braces that go from the sub frame up here to the main hoop and a diagonal door brace that goes from the main hoop down here to the front mounting pad. Now, I hate to be tacky, but we're gonna take a little bit of a break while we finish tacking the rest of these pipes in

just ahead. We'll wind up our two fabrication and finish up the front struts before we dive into some tin work as today's project Supernova starts to take shape.

Hey, welcome back. Well, we finally got all the pieces of our roll cage here tacked together. Hey, does that mean our cage is uh intact? Get it. Oh, man, why don't you just pipe down over there? Now, the final piece of this puzzle though is probably gonna be the toughest. It's the Ford strut bar that connects the main hoop here to the forward part of the sub frame and to do that, well, we're gonna have to pass some pipe through the firewall.

Every car is different. But with the novo, we just removed the fuse box and parking brake pedal on the driver's side and heater box over here.

So we can pass this tube through and determine our forward mounting location. Hey, you got it. We're good. Ok. Now you want it to be right in front of the control arm and

it looks like we're gonna have to trim off about four inches.

The length is pretty good. So we'll just notch to the other end and we'll be in business.

Yeah.

You know, up to this point, we've just tack welded all of our pipes together and we did that so that if there's a problem, we just cut the pipe out, fix it and weld it back in. But you know what

this cage is looking pretty doggone good. We're gonna go ahead and finish welding it all together

while ch finishes welding up the cage, we can get started on the tin work. We've got to cover this area back here. And as you may recall, we already fed

up our wheel tubs. When we installed the clip, the rest of the pieces are mostly flat and go together pretty easily. Just make sure you have plenty of cardboard to make templates. Some metal shear,

a

drill

and several dozen of these

Clios to hold the pieces in place before you pop rivet everything together.

Or the first template we're gonna make is gonna cover this area here between the rear sub frames from the base of this kick up here back to the center of this rear strut.

And we're gonna measure between the sub frames looks like we got about 28 inches. Now we're gonna add about an inch on each side for the flange.

Then we measure from the center of the rear strut down to the base of the kick up. It looks like about 36.5 inches. Then we add another inch up here for the flange

with a cardboard template cut to size

and laid over the frame rails

and mark the kick up radius.

Now, we can just transfer this template to the sheet metal

and you wanna make sure that you have plenty of aluminum to complete the job

and you also wanna make sure it's a good commercial quality aluminum. So you can easily form and bend it into shape.

We're using our break to make a 90 degree flange.

But the edge of your work bench in a soft mallet will get the job done.

Then cut V notches in the flange.

This will help the sheet metal conform to the radius.

Well, now we can lay the sheet metal over the Subra here

and fit it to this radius.

Now, this is by far the most difficult piece to create back here. The rest of them are pretty much flat and hate. Even my partner can do them. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, they say sheet happens when you work with metal, we'll finish our work on the Novo right after the break. Stay with us.

We hope you stay riveted to your seats. We'll get all the tin work in when we come back. Then a look at what's hot from the high performance aftermarket. Stay tuned.

You know, it's pretty good.

All right, welcome back to horsepower TV. As we wind up our 10 work on Project Supernova. During the break, we finished that center section covering our rear clip and reinstall the wheel tubs.

Now, I've been making some more cardboard templates for the flat pieces

when we lay these out. We wanna make sure that we make the best use of our aluminum.

Now, we can start tracing.

Let's see what we got here.

Hey,

that's a pretty good fit. If I say so myself, a real uh work of art. Huh? Not too bad for a guy that doesn't know sheet metal from Shinola.

Now, you've probably noticed that we've drilled some holes and we're using Clios here to hold everything in place until we can pop, riveted it all together later on. Now, here's a little tip for you. You definitely don't want burnout smoke getting inside the car. So it's always a good idea. Once you get everything fitted up to seal all the seams with some body cop,

no doubt about it. We made our supernova look a lot more like a race car this time

or in case you're wondering, you don't have to remove any doors to install a road cage. We did it to make our work a little easier and make it easier for you to watch. It's not a bad idea anyway, though. Now you can plan on taking a couple of good weekends to complete this job

and the cage that we got from Morrison about $300 for the mild steel version like we use double that for Chrome Molly. Now, you also need to add about 100 and $50 to your budget for sheet metal and miscellaneous stuff. Yeah, we got some hot stuff for you to check out right now.

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