When we last left our intrepid V8 swap S-10, we bolted the small-block in place and installed the Summit aluminum radiator, the Maradyne electric fans and relays, and the Centerforce flywheel and clutch assembly. We were about to install the bellhousing when we discovered it was cracked. This required some skilled, cast-aluminum TIG-welding we’re not qualified for, so we took our housing to Tim Moore Automotive. With that accomplished, we decided to finally face the electrical issues. Frankly, we had been dreading this part of the engine swap. If you have been following the Sten’s progress, you remember that because we live in a state that firmly believes in iron-fisted emissions controls, we were forced to follow the Bear State’s rules and swap in a ’90-or-newer engine with all the emission controls in place. We chose a ’90 350 Tuned Port Induction (TPI) engine as our swap victim, which meant we had to include all the factory emission controls and the stock factory computer.

We have to go back a year to pick up our story on the V8 S-10 swap called Project Sten (think inexpensive WWII machine guns). In our last intrepid story (“Stuffing the Small-Block Between the Fenders,” Nov. ’11), we had managed to get the engine rebuilt and dropped into the tight engine compartment. As we’ve mentioned before, this is not a new idea. Guys like Mike Knell at Jaguars That Run (JTR) have been stuffing small-blocks in these little trucks for decades. Mike wrote a book called “Chevrolet S-10 Truck V8 Conversion Manual” (catchy title, don’t you think?) that outlines all of the details you need to pull off this swap with minimal frustration. We’re all about living hassle-free, so we got Mike’s book and dutifully followed the steps.

I've known for a long time that my car was too tall, but it's taken me a while to do something about it. I've mentioned before that Ford redesigned the front suspension of all the Panther Platform cars (Crown Victoria, Mercury Grand Marquis, Lincoln Town Car) in 2003 to make room for the 32-Valve 4.6 engine in the then-new Mercury Marauder, the only Panther car to come with a DOHC modular V8. The Marauder only survived two years of production, but that was enough time for the performance aftermarket to develop speed parts for the car. Because most of that stuff will also work across the board on '03 and later Panthers, I'm in luck.

Though this is the third part in our series, the paintjob was actually the first thing I did to the car after buying it. To recap, this is the '03 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor I bought from Ken Porter Auctions in Gardena, California, for the paltry sum of $1,500. While the body of the car wasn't bashed up, the paint was scruffy looking. I thought I would be able to drive it around without caring what it looked like, but those who know me would have pointed out my flawed thinking. I'm the guy who washes his car religiously—once a week at least. So it only took about two days of looking at the dull, furry-looking finish, complete with hastily applied, aerosol-black on the doors and roof before I was scratching all that stuff off. From start to finish, the whole job took five weeks, working nights and weekends. There are things I wish I had done better, but the car looks pretty decent now. There are lots of pictures here, so let's get to it.

Last month we promised to document the cheap paintjob I gave my ’03 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor shortly after buying it. Lies! We’ve got a major paint-themed issue coming soon, so you’ll have to read about it there. In this installment, read about things breaking and things getting fixed.

Here is the plan. We want to run 9s in the quarter-mile, look really cool, and drive this car on the street as much as possible. The last two are simple enough, but the first one is going to take some finesse if we want to keep this thing fast for beer money. Using the calculation for quarter-mile times, RWHP = (MPH/234)3 x weight, our 2,600-pound Demon’s engine needs to make about 750 flywheel horsepower to go 145 mph in the quarter-mile. Or we can lighten the car.

I love Crown Victorias. I like their looks, and I'm fascinated with their technology. I'm impressed with how they've adapted to their roles in fleet service as police cars and taxis, and I admire the amount of abuse they can take in those roles. As you'd expect, I'm saddened by the news that they will be discontinued at the end of this model year. Folks, this is the last body-on-frame, front-engine, rear-drive, mass-produced car on the planet. That architecture resonates with me, so I bought one, an '03 Crown Victoria Police Interceptor (CVPI) At the time, it had 133,000 miles on the odometer.

We promised dumb summer fun when we went out looking for a new project car, and here is the payoff. This abandoned '71 Dodge Demon race car has the goodies like aluminum tubs, a four-link, and a full 'cage already installed. Our vision is to put it back on the street in Pro Street splendor without destroying too much of its gritty, back-halved, track-only influence.

The editor's call went out across the land: "We need new project cars and anything is fair game as long as (this means you, Smith) it's not a Chevelle!" The gauntlet had been thrown down, and we had to come up with a suitable vehicle. We offered a third-gen Camaro ("We're already Camaro Craft!"), we proposed an LS Fox Mustang ("Everybody will hate us!"), and we even toyed with a mid-engine LS-powered '69 Corvair idea, which offered all sorts of potential but was, sadly, too weird to be acceptable. Finally, the conceptual synapses clicked and it came down to a simple question. What is the least expensive, lightest, domestic rear-wheel-drive vehicle on the road today that could accommodate a V8? The answer was (insert bell chime) a V8 S-10 Chevy pickup.

That Reagan guy called it trickle-down economics. In political rhetoric, it's about feeding an industry resources and taking advantage of the natural tendency of ideas and hardware to spread from the industry guys down to the man on the street. In Car Craft terms, it means watching the racer who blows things up for the sake of winning and adapting his trial-and-error knowledge to the street machine. Since the racer is going to push as hard as he can, he is also going to find inventive ways to use the latest technology. So you can look at the Car Craft Magazine Street Race class as kind of an R&D facility for your street machine. Pay attention, you are going to learn something.

'While you might consider buying testing time on a vehicle chassis dyno an expensive luxury, we hope you'll at least read this article to consider the possibilities. If anything, what we experienced in creating this story wasn't what we expected, but the safety, durability, and performance unleashed would have definitely been more painful to discover and resolve without time on the chassis rolls. To learn the most we could possibly learn, we partnered with the pros at Wheel to Wheel Powertrain (W2W), in Madison Heights, Michigan, as we ran a vehicle through its paces on the company's four-wheel-drive Mustang chassis dyno.

'Of all the classic Detroit Super Stock engines, the '62-'64 Mopar Max Wedge is the wildest of the bunch. Say what you want about "real fine" 409s, High-Riser Ford 427s, Super Duty Pontiac 421s, and the like. None can match the sheer visual impact of the 413/426 Max Wedge. With that crazy cross-ram intake manifold and those beautiful upswept exhaust manifolds, it's a surefire party starter in both the looks and performance departments. But the big problem with the original Max Wedge cross-ram intake manifold is that it was part of a factory-matched system that also included big-port heads-some 20 percent larger than standard passenger-car big-block wedge stuff.

"We need a Mopar project car." Those words have been tossed around our offices quite a bit lately. And why not? We've been working to shed the Camaro Craft image with Buick engine builds, our '64 Oldsmobile and '67 Mustang project cars, and the CC/Rambler. We'd pretty much have all the bases covered if we had something with a Pentastar on it to thrash on.

'The back of your head is someone else's problem. It's not like you have to stare at it for hours on end or use it for critical gear changes. So you can leave its destiny up to the femme with the buzzin' clippers and call it good. Not so with the dashboard on the street machine. You're gonna stare that thing down on long road trips and need to consult it during gear changes and illicit top-speed testing. It better be right. It better be good.

'Face it: Bigger is better.
Since it's a jungle out there, where the meek get eaten for lunch, if you wanna be Tarzan, you'd better swing a bigger club. The days of a 396 or even a 454 as king of the jungle are long gone. When we stumbled upon this used 496ci Rat motor for a righteous price, we snapped it up thinking we could build an affordable big-inch Rat. The problem comes from using the terms "affordable" and "Rat motor" in the same sentence. Nevertheless, that's the challenge we decided to take on. We think Tarzan would approve.

If you've been drooling over the '67 Mercury we've been transforming into a Stock Car replica over the last few issues and want to see the completed car that will be given away, here it is. In this final installment of the Timber Wolf Comet project car story, we yanked the FE 390 for a look-see at what made it spew oil, while we hung out with Russ Stevenson at Gold Coast Customs for the addition of subtle Stock Car cues to go along with the retro graphics applied last month. It makes us weep a little to know this neat stick-shifted big-block cruiser won't be in our garage for much longer, but who knows, it might soon be in yours.

`There's a saying that goes, "Everything old is new again." When it comes to our hot rods, nothing could be closer to the truth, as more and more dudes and dudettes look to the past for inspiration in the present. One of the up-and-coming retro trends is the vintage Stock car look. With their slammed suspensions, monster superspeedway gumball tires, and loud race car graphics, there's nothing else like those big-block-powered high-banks screamers from the days before NASCAR went all disco on us and mandated restrictor plates and small-blocks.

We know. It's hard to imagine spending $3,500 and still look cool, but it's possible. You just have to do it the Car Craft way by waiting and watching for a clean body to show up in the classifieds, then scrounging the wrecking yards and stripping useful parts off other models.

We stood in the faint outline of blue that surrounded the Rambler like an upside-down halo greeting the unusually high number of gawkers that came to see the art. "This paint on the decklid looks a little iffy" was the first comment to break the silence.

'Oops! We have a new project car. We are going to get into real trouble for this one because we just hatched this idea, saw an opportunity, jumped online, and bought a car in Las Cruces, New Mexico, without looking at it or asking anyone if this was even a good idea. Then we flew out there and picked it up just to see if it would make it home.

This is a story that many traditional small-block Chevy guys don't want to hear. They think the new Gen III and Gen IV small-block engines from GM are too expensive to build and don't make that much more power than the old engines. The truth is that while these new-generation engines are different and the parts are sometimes more expensive, there are ways to make affordable power-big power. The more progressive car crafters have already embraced this new technology and are enjoying the powerful fruits of their willingness to try new things. While there's always room for both small-blocks, if you are serious about the horsepower game, it's no longer prudent to ignore these late-model engines. They thump.

'A straight-bodied, two-door sedan from 1967 for $2,000 that runs and drives? Sold. Our fantasy was to build a car and drive it solidly into the 10s because even factory cars are running 11s, and Car Craft hasn't had a really fast car since former Editor Matt King's Super Nova went deep into the 11s with a correction factor. We need to be faster.

'It sounded like a great idea at the time. Take one gutted musclecar and a big pile of pieces, turn this cast-off '65 El Camino into a running car in one day, then take it on a road trip. It didn't work out exactly that way, but it wasn't from lack of trying or lack of sweat. It all started when we scored the Elco through our pal Jim Peterson for the righteous price of $1,800. The reason it was so cheap was because it was a stripper-we're talkin' not even so much as a steering column. This also meant it was without all those essential little parts that are the furthest from your mind when you're staring down the relatively straight quarter-panels of a virtually rust-free car.

500hp engine combos

As I pulled the last box off the hood of the '69, all hopes that it wasn't actually as bad as I recalled were dashed. It looked like hell. I'd been toting this Camaro around for more than 15 years, ever since it had ceased to provide transportation while I was still in college, and being dragged about the country and stored in dusty, damp quarters hadn't helped a car that already looked haggard in 1985. Most people scrap cars when they're no longer useful, but this just wasn't the sort of car that got junked.