People who work in junkyards can be a great technical help. Mike Honeycutt even pulled the parts we needed. He had the equipment to make it easy, which is always a lot better than crawling around in the dirt.
The comment that sparked our inspiration was innocent enough: "We should do that sometime." The conversation was about building a race car and going from being fans in the stands to racers on the track. It still surprises me how little planning we did before committing ourselves to this project. Little did we know what we were in for. There were three of us: brothers Rodney and Scott Helms and I. We knew we wanted to start in a smaller car and race on dirt; but otherwise, our enthusiasm far outstripped our knowledge. It wouldn't be the last time this was the case.
A few of the decisions were easy to make. We chose Lancaster (South Carolina) Speedway because it's close to home, dirt, and offers a division to our liking: the Modified Fours. Mod-4 cars, as they are commonly called, are four-cylinder rear-wheel drivers. They are entry-level, but a cut above the Bomber Class and require a good amount of preparation. That was fine with us since the allure was building a car as well as racing it.
The first job when we got our junkyard parts home was to tear everything apart and inspect it all. The rearend is in really good shape. We'll need to completely redo the brakes, but both axles, the gears, and bearings all appear in good shape.
With that out of the way, it was time for step one: Find a car. Here, we ran headlong into our first obstacle. A quick tour through a couple of local junkyards left us overwhelmed. Ninety percent of the field in this class is made up of Mustangs, so that's probably a safe bet, but what model? How much damage to the donor is too much? How much should we expect to pay? We needed help.
Calling All Experts
LWP Auto Salvage is a family-owned scrapyard in Concord, North Carolina, that specializes in helping racers, so we went there armed with plenty of questions. "Most people these days in the four-cylinder classes are racing the Fox-body Mustangs, even though they have a (MacPherson) strut front suspension," explains Wayne Pendergrass, the "W" in LWP and a racer himself. "A double A-arm setup is easier to adjust, but to get a Ford with that you have to go back to the Pintos and Mustang IIs, and those are getting pretty rare." That is a favorite front suspension of the street rod building crowd, too.
Part of the purpose of this project is to show our mistakes so you can learn from them. So here's our first: When mounting the front suspension assembly to the body, we bolted the metal frame on first and then tried to attach the struts to the top of the strut tower. We should have done this the other way around; the springs didn't want to compress even when we pushed them up with a floor jack. Here, Rodney (left) and Scott resort to cranking down on a pull strap to bring everything together.
Wayne spoke the truth-unmangled Pintos and Mustang IIs were tough to locate, and believe me, we tried. But he did point us to an '89 sedan body he'd already hulled out. We snatched it up quicker than you can say, "Will you take a check?" and Wayne even threw in a pair of doors, a hood and a nosepiece (although it may be damaged beyond repair). By the way, if you don't have a good pair of gloves, get some before you set foot in a junkyard. We invested in several pairs of Mechanix Wear gloves and have been very happy with them. Your hands will still be useful after you root around bent metal.
A hulled-out body may save us time stripping the car, but it also meant we had more junkyard shopping to do. We found both a front suspension and rear end off a '93 model at Love Auto Parts. Again, we weren't just looking for parts; we were looking for someone who could steer us in the right direction, and we found him in Mike Honeycutt. Mike has worked with race teams big and small and knew exactly what we needed. He led us to a '93 Mustang with only minor damage and even took off the parts we needed. Because most Fords, including Fox-body Mustangs, are unibodies (instead of a full-frame car with a body mounted on it) the entire front suspension came off in one piece.
"This car had the nose pushed up. It looks like it hit a ditch or something," Mike said of our donor car. "This is exactly what you are looking for if you need parts or an entire frame, because everything from the front shock towers back is still straight. If you are looking at a car that's wrecked in the side, if the damage is up high you are probably OK. If the damage is down low, be careful because the frame could be bent. If the frame is bent you'll probably never get everything straightened back out right."