So, the guy agrees to deliver the car on the coldest day yet of the year - January 17, 2007. The darn thing barely runs, the carb is so bad. He brings it over, I pay him and drive him home, about 30 minutes away. I get back to the house about 4:00 PM just as it's getting dark. I have two daughters, I drive them each to the corner and back in the unregistered car, and pull it in the garage. It's now about 4:20 PM. By 7:00 PM the engine is on the garage floor, and the C4 is at the curb where it belongs. I reckon it took me about 1 hour longer than it should have to get the darned C4 out of my garage!
To this day, those two trips to the corner are the only time I have ever driven this car. Within a few days, the suspension is out of the car, it's just a body on frame rails. Now I stop and decide where I want to go with this thing. I know the suspension needs to be rebuilt, so it comes off the car with no doubts, the engine has to go, the automatic, to me, is the automotive equivalent of Ebola, that's a no brainer. This car was filthy, I have never been this dirty in my life. I take some time and really try to decide where to proceed with this. Do I want to just clean it up, warm up the 351C, drop a standard transmission behind is, new rubber in the suspension, just freshen the whole thing up and go? Or do I want to take it down to the most basic level and start over like a brand new kit? Well, being the stubborn idiot that I am, I decide to go whole hog on this thing.
I had a set of 351 Cleveland 4V heads that I had bought back when I was thinking of keeping the Cleveland engine in the car. They were a great deal, and I jumped on them figuring that even if I didn't use them I could sell them or trade them for something. They were nice heads. Sure enough, after I decided to go with a FE I advertised the heads for sale, and I got a call asking me if I would like to trade the heads for a somewhat worn but complete 390GT engine. I thought about that for at least half a second and made the deal. I had my FE mule.
At this point the body is still on the frame, and I call in my ace, my good friend Nick Acton (Mickmate). I bribe him with the ability to come and see my dog Max, and Nick agrees to come down from the frozen tundra of New Hampshire with a pickup loaded with his welder and all sorts of supplies. He stays on Long Island for a few days and we enjoy breakfast, lunch and dinner together, playing with the dog, talking to the family, and in between this getting some work done. We use the 390GT as a "dummy" engine, bolt the Tremec TKO600 to the Quick Time bellhousing and then the whole assembly to the 390, and use it to mock up the perfect engine position, placement, angle, etc. I purchase a set of Contemporary FE header pipes from Cobra Restorers, and they fit perfectly. Once we have the engine perfectly positioned in the frame, the pipes right at the body cutouts as they should be, Nick fabs up a perfectly accurate set of FE mounts and cuts out the 351C mounts. By the time he drives away, I have a perfectly accurate set of FE mounts welded into my car. Guys, no kidding here, if you want top notch custom work done by a top notch guy, Nick is your man. He also fabricated for me a beautiful Stainless Steel rollbar which I had drilled the body for prior to his arrival (Talk about stress - at this point I didn't know if I wanted to paint the car or not, so I was trying not to make any mistakes. Believe it or not, I didn't make any, the holes were about perfect.).
Nick welded in the mounts for that while he was here as well. I wasn't planning on this thread at the time so I have no pictures, but this is how it happened, trust me!
