Restoration of #2695

Engine bay is being smoothed. Unused factory cutouts are welded over.

The headlight buckets were not media blasted and were still painted. While stripping the paint and preparing these I found that the car was originally blue and then became black.

Test fitting front bumpers.

Test fitting rear bumpers.

Here are some of the bondo tools utilized including a pneumatic gun and cartridges by 3M. The body shop up in Seattle completed about half the bondo and it was up to me to do the remainder. And the engine bay used a lot of bondo. The 3M gun became my new best friend for this effort. The electric sander pictured in the bottom left is used to flatten the bondo during its green state, intentionally clogging the sand paper. The air file (belt sander) gets into tight places.

The stock 351C crankshaft was offset ground resulting in 377 cubic inches. Domed pistons were used and the result was very high compression that is not compatible with today's ordinary pump gas. Clay Smith Engineering (Mr. Horsepower) ordered new dished piston to reduce the compression. The dome of pistons that came with the car were the inverse of the dish that you see here.

Engine block back from Clay Smith Engineering after blue printing.

Engine block being built up.

Closed chambered D0AE cylinder heads with stainless steel valves. This picture is before Clay Smith Engineering blue printed the heads. Their objective was to eliminate stuck valves due to the higher combustion chamber temperatures with today's ordinary pump gas.

Valve cover removed to adjust lash for the solid lifers. Temporary exhaust manifold is installed.

9 quart oil pan for Pantera by Kevco. Clay Smith Engineering blue printed the high volume oil pump for the engine to this pan.

Engine on a test stand in the garage. It survived the initial startup and cam break in. What a relief. I changed the oil and filter after about 30 minutes. It was run for a total of about 4 hours during which ignition timing and manifold vacuum at idle were fine tuned.

Front hub

Rear carrier. It was powder coated blue when I got it, along with all of the control arms and hub component. I had it all stripped to bare metal and then powder coated all pieces gun metal grey using the setup in my garage. The powder coating was relatively easy because once the parts where stripped they were back to a sand blasted finish.

Rear hub and suspension.

Rear hub mocked up.

Project when I brought it home a year and three months ago.

I will post more pictures as this progresses.