[GarysZ24]

Originally Posted by Pinballer

Short of acid-dipping or drilling 1000 holes and Swiss-cheesing the front half of the car, which I'm told isn't legal, there isn't a whole lot else left to pare front end weight cheaply off of this ride other than--getting it off me. Neither of those first two options will happen. The "me" option is a possibility if I can get serious enough.

What a lot of people don't think about with my chosen combo is the AMC 6 is a very heavy engine, it weighs about the same as an AMC V8 does, but being real long in design, it also hangs more weight out ahead of the front tires than the 304 V8 would have. There's only so much you can do to offset that without going super expensive. And this is a "dime rocket", remember?
What weight I could get off the front during the build almost all had to get put into the back end to get the car back up to the legal T class weight, so there really wasn't a big net gain of weight savings for all the effort. What gain there was was to equal out the front/rear weight distribution better than it was before, and that was about it.

Gary--with my ride using a low-horsepower long stroke low-end torque motor that will hardly see 5000 rpm, I'm going to start out with a mild converter--around 2700 stall--and then advance up from there just a little bit if needed. On paper, it doesn't seem to need a whole lot. After 3200 stall, the gains are insignificant from what I'm seeing.

Well I'm glad that you were able to transfer some of the weight from the front to the back, because that'll be better for traction. Good luck with your combo, and I hope to see pics of the whole finished car soon!