Gradually, the Vicki came together; we took the body off and put it back on several times over the ensuing months. I had intended using the Thunderbird 6 way electric bucket seats that came with the car, but it was a lot of fabrication and hard work on an otherwise rusted out floor. Yes, the seats worked, and would be comfy, but even after many weekends of cutting and welding and measuring and trial and error, it still wasn’t quite right.
I had purchased a Lokar foot-operated emergency brake (handbrake) which fitted up under the dashboard nicely. The cable, however, would need to be custom made and quite long. No big deal, I thought. The shifter was another story. The 4 speed auto needed a 4 speed shifter. I finally got hold of an AU Ford shifter, with all its plastic covers and mounting bits to fit in a factory AU console. A bit of a challenge for an upholsterer, but the car was Vicki’s car and she did NOT want a cable shifter like the ratchet shifter that was in the Plymouth. She wanted something like the shifter in the daily driver, an EL sedan that we bought new from Valley Ford in the Barossa Valley in South Australia in 1996. But I digress.
By now, all the brakes, steering and suspension were fitted up. I’d sent off to Kanter for a complete front end kit, not realising that I already had one in the various boxes that came with the Vicki, courtesy of Fred Sanderson. D’oh!
One by one, all the panels got sandblasted and I painted them in etch primer before stowing them away. All that remained was the body, but there were still a few things left that I wasn’t sure about. At this time, I was driving an EL station wagon that I’d bought from our son, Danny. He owed us some money, the car had a blown head-gasket, he couldn’t afford to get it fixed and the EL sedan he bought for a few hundred bucks was falling apart. I bought the wagon from him, which enabled him to replace the rolling wreck that he was driving. As I said before, I removed all the LPG stuff from this car and gave it back to the previous owner, who fixed it up and sold it again.
I drove the EL Wagon for about a year before the transmission schitt itself. I wanted to get rid of the car, but Vicki thought that it would cost less to fix the transmission than get another car. By my way of thinking, if the transmission was shot, what about the rest of the car? Well, I got the transmission fixed, and a week later, the head gasket blew again. I parked the car in the driveway, cashed in the rego and bought an AU2 Ford ute. I had wanted a decent ute for ages, but I had to suffer some “resistance” before the opportunity came along. It was to be a serendipitous event, as it turns out, in more ways than one! I was in the garage one weekend, not long after the Wagon blew up. I looked at the seats and the modifications to the floor I had made in the Vicki to fit them. It still wasn’t right, even after several weekends of cutting, shutting, welding and fabricating. I then tried the shifter, hoping that the binding on the makeshift linkage would somehow magically fix itself up. No such luck, it was stiff and awkward and would have to be looked at again. I also pondered the Lokar e-brake, its positioning and how I was going to get it to work. I then remembered that I had to take the stereo out of the EL Wagon before I sent it to the crushers.
I jumped in the Wagon and removed the stereo, but, as I was sitting in the now disabled EL Wagon’s comfy bucket seat, I had an epiphany! If Vicki wanted the comforts of her EL Sedan daily driver (which was starting to show its age) why not incorporate those bits from the Wagon? I grabbed the tape measure, and checked the width of the floor at the seat mounts. The outer mounts were almost the same distance from the edge in the EL as in the Vicki.
Perfect!
I then measured the distance fore and aft of the shifter, to the approximate point where the linkage would be. Almost the same in both cars.
Perfect!
Out came the seats, the dash, the console and the handbrake of the EL Wagon. Some more measuring, some more pondering, and then I took my proposal to Vicki. Replace the floor of the Vicki with that of the EL Wagon. You get the seats (and the seat mounts), the console, the shifter, the air-ducting and the double-DIN stereo system cradle. A no-brainer! Of course she agreed!
About a month earlier than this, GT rang to inform me that Tom Matic was selling his Chrysler 300C, and was I interested? He knew I had always wanted a Hemi 300C to replace the EL sedan, but I had just bought the AU2 ute, and, well, all I could do was take a look. I took Vicki to Tom’s workshop in Hume (5 minutes away, in the adjoining suburb) and we took the Hemi for a spin. It was a 2007 300C with the 5.7L Hemi. It had about 50k on the odometer, 22 inch wheels and lowered suspension (done professionally). I took the car out for a drive, and it was like heaven on wheels! I handed Vicki the wheel for the run back to Tom’s, and when we got there, she turned to me and said “Let’s buy this, shall we?” But, again, I digress, except to say that I now knew that Tom had a large workshop with a hoist in it. The least he could do after buying his car would be to let me use his hoist, right? Right!
So I took the EL Wagon to Tom Matic’s workshop in Hume and cut the floor out of it. It was a big job, but it only took a weekend, and the shop across from Tom disposed of the rest of the Wagon for me, for the cost of the battery that was in it (a new one). I also managed to salvage the new transmission, and sold it on eBay for $1,000! To top it off, I had put brand new tyres on the Wagon only days before the engine blew. The EL wheels and tyres should be just fine on the Vicki as long as we can locate suitable hub caps, but that’s open for discussion!
In a couple of weekends, I had the floor in the Vicki and everything fitted in so that Vicki could sit in her car and give it her stamp of approval. It saved a lot of fabricating! So now that I had everything covered, the body was sent to AAA Sandblasters for sandblasting and a coat of primer. The chassis was completely stripped once more, and sent to the powder coaters. Everything that bolted on was powder coated. All the suspension bits were renewed with new, neoprene bushes. I bought all new steering arms, idler arms and a pitman arm from the one eBay store. I bought after-market lower trailing arms, new brakes and callipers, and ran all the brake lines. I took the 5L engine to Queanbeyan Engine Service to do a full rebuild, balance and stroker kit, and use the Holley Systemax heads and cam that I had bought from Fred all those years earlier. Not everything would fit, like my roller rockers and rocker covers, but eBay is my friend! When the engine-builder stripped the engine down, I picked up the pickled bare block and took it to the powder coaters for a candy-apple red job that they assured me would work just fine. I also took the Holley Systemax plenum and the accessory brackets to them for the same treatment. This was over the Christmas period of 2011, so it took a few weeks until I could get the painted block back to the engine builder. I then started making enquiries about building the transmission. It was here that things started getting messy.
