63 Nova

Not to long ago this is (and brutal cold) is what met me every morning..



But the past two or three weeks most of the white stuff has disappeared and my garage door isn't frozen shut any more, so I actually got some garage time after work Saturday.



First thing I jumped on is the headers / intake. I used the Clifford Performance intake and headers on my 67 Nova, and everything went together well on that one.....This time around wasn't quite as easy. The rear header wouldn't fit up in line the way it should have, so I had to modify the underside of the intake rear port and the flange between the last two header tubes. I didn't have to take much off either one, but had to be done.





My 67 was an automatic, This one is manual, and it doesn't leave a whole lot of room to snake dual exhaust through the Z bar area, but there's enough.


Since I was on the intake / exhaust thing I started mounting the new gas pedal. The original pedal was modified for a cable set up from the factory linkage, and I didn't like the way it was modified. I bought a Lokar factory mount gas pedal for the early Novas and I had a Lokar throttle cable sitting on the shelf for years from some other project.

First thing was to remove the original pedal and install the Lokar pedal mount



Then put the pedal together about where it should be when the rest of the linkage and carb is hooked up and run the new cable out into the engine compartment.






I still have to shorten the cable, but I'm going to wait until I'm further along with everything else for the final modification and mounting

The last thing I wanted to do was to mount the new master cylinder and booster assembly. I pull off the old master cylinder and there are two studs on the firewall that it slid off of. I look at the new set up and there are three studs coming off the booster[S So after a quick measurement, the top two studs on the booster are the same width as the original, and low and behold, there is a dimple in the fire wall where the bottom stud would go through the firewall. I guess the factory used some three bolt mounts, but since my car is one of the lower end from the factory, they only used a two bolt set up.

I tried to knock the factory studs out of the pedal mount (back through the firewall), but saw that wasn't going to happen. So I decided the whole clutch and brake pedal assembly had to come out to mount the master cylinder and to remove the factory studs.

What a pain in the buttocks!

On the positive side...to get the pedal assembly out, I had to remove the steering column, so now that I have that out it will be easier to prep and paint before putting everything back together.

Once the clutch and brake pedals were out, I drilled the start hole for the booster bottom bolt to pass through. I only opened the bottom hole enough to slide the bolt through (the top factory holes had a little clearance around the bolts). Once I slid the booster in I found out I was going to be adding a little clearance to the bottom hole too...I must have slid off the factory dimple when drilling, because the booster isn't exactly level ....I'm going to have to "slot" the bottom hole toward the passenger side just slightly for the master cylinder to sit level. You can't see it in the only pic I took of this, but trust me it's cocked a little.

Boy is it starting to get crowed on this side of the firewall




Hopefully I'll get chance to drive back out to the garage and do a little more this afternoon.