[Ed Fernandez]

Originally Posted by Pinballer

You're right there, Dan, the Jeep crowd is the one experimenting more than any other group with this engine. A lot of their efforts can translate over to what I'm pursuing, so they were pretty helpful. The main thing they know is that revving this engine much about 5000 rpm doesn't help anything. The power curve falls flat on its face and parts attrition goes way up. That told me that the ET I need must all be developed in the 1/8th mile because there won't be much gain after that. It's all about torque on this one, not raw HP made by wringing the guts out of it.

Back to the build:
At this point (early Oct as I catch you up), I'm looking at a rusted out piece of junk I'll have to part out. A new body is needed, and I still preferred to go with the Spirit platform rather than switch to something that classes differently, so looked around at what I had in my own stable of cars and saw this 'jewel' that had been sitting in front of the pinball shop since 1993. It's a weather-worn 1982 Spirit GT that was originally a 151 4 cyl 4 speed car, no engine or trans, that had a straight good body, that I had bought back then with the idea of throwing a V8 and an automatic in it and bracket racing it eventually. There was some initial work I did to it right after hauling it home back then, the best part of which was installing an 8 3/4 Chrysler rear end that has the same width as the original tiny AMC rear. The pinball business was getting going good about that time for me, so I shelved the project due to building the business and let the car sit where you see it in the picture. It was still there in the same spot as of October 2015. Man, where do the years go??
Now then: is it rotten underneath like the '80 Spirit was too? Going to have to pull this one out and take a full assessment.
On to Plan B!

FYI If you go with the Spirit that came with the 151 engine you'll need the disc brake rotors and pads specific to that engine, they're different than the 6 cylinder cars.