It would take about a year between seeing the car at Fred’s place to having it in our garage. We knew we would need to find more space, not only for the Vicki. I was building the 36 Plymouth Coupe at the time and Danny had bought himself a nice 60 Caddy convertible. I had sold the chopped and channelled 36 Ford coupe at the 1999 Street Rod Nats in Geelong, and bought the Plymouth as a work-in-progress that I had my eye on for a while.
Anyway, after months of trying to get our garage extended, we decided the only option was to move into a house with more garage space. We sold our old house in a matter of days when we found the perfect house in Jerrabomberra. We moved in, relishing all the space we now had for the cars!
A few months later, the Vicki turned up. Our friend GT supplied the tow car, the car trailer and the muscle, and off we went to Taren Point to pick it up. The trip was uneventful, and, finally, it was home, in our own garage. We were quietly surprised that everything was still there, still packed in the boxes and garbage bags inside the car. I had been given the ultimatum that no work was to take place on the Vicki until I had finished the 36 Plymouth Coupe, but we did manage to sort out some fundamental, long-term planning on the Vicki that couldn’t be ignored.
The first reality check was the chassis. It was just not going to work. It had a Torino front clip, badly engineered, and a Torino rear, also badly engineered, but came with a very narrowed 9” diff, Detroit locker, 31 spline, and huge slicks on Centreline wheels. At a recent car event in Sydney, we had been talking to our mate Nick Rees, who had a 56 Vicki with lots of Kustom bits. Nick’s Vicki had a 351 Clevo in it, and it was built on a Mainline Ute chassis. He told us that the Mainline Ute chassis was exactly the same as the Vicki, only right hand drive.
It didn’t take long for Nick to call and tell us about a registered, hot rodded 56 Mainline Ute in Sydney. It was owned at the time by Les Buckley of Aussie Kit Cars in Campbelltown. We called up Les and went to his shop to check out the ute. It was a nice car, had a 302W, C4, 8” diff and disc brake front. We bought it for $7,000 and trailered it home. A few days later, we had a heap of blokes come to our place, and we simply swapped the bodies over. It was a shame, in one respect, because the Mainline was really neat, and drove very well. All it needed was a rego sticker, and it could have been a cool daily driver! But that wasn’t why we bought it.
After the chassis swap, the Mainline Ute then had a drag racing chassis under it, so I put it up on eBay in that condition. It sold a few days later, for the money we asked, and off it went to its new owners in Sydney.
Over the three or four years that I was building the Plymouth Coupe, we had some work done on the Vicki as opportunities came up. We had our friend Danny Fort make the comment that the rear of the car would be an easy job to fix. This was the space in the boot that was ripped open to make way for the drag slicks. We handed the car over to Danny, who built the complete rear floor pan, including mini-tubs, the HQ one-tonner fuel tank hole and everything else between the back seat and the boot. A beautiful job, indeed!
By this time, the Plymouth was built and registered. It took longer than expected, due to circumstances beyond our control that I won’t go into just now. Needless to say, it debuted at the 2007 CRAKK run. Within a year, it would be sold, sight unseen, to a Perth rodder looking for a Mopar powered Mopar Hot Rod built for weekend drag racing.
With the Plymouth out of the way, work started on the Vicki in earnest, and it was moved into the main garage. I bought a 1992 NC Ford Fairlane sedan for $500. I pulled out the 5L engine, BTR 4 speed transmission, disc brake rear end, the complete wiring harness, dashboard, brake pedals, brakes, engine management system and anything else I though might come in handy. I also removed all the LPG fittings from an EF 5L sedan that belonged to our son, Danny, who had bought the car from the same junkyard dealer that we bought the donor Ghia from. The plan had changed to go for LPG injection instead of petrol. At a critical time in the future, these plans would be changed yet again, but more of that later.
The complete 5L drivetrain was fitted between the Mainline chassis rails. To maintain all the accessories in the serpentine drive, the engine was positioned closer to the right hand chassis rail than the left, resulting in somewhat of a challenge for whoever built the exhaust. At some stage, I had an XF Ute that gave up its steering, as I was informed that it all fitted well into the Mainline chassis. This turned out to be quite true, and the power steering box, cross steering and idler arm all fitted up nicely. I just hoped that the power steering pump from the NC Fairlane donor vehicle would drive the XF power steering box.
One advantage of using a donor car is that most items can be bought off-the-shelf. In other words, there is less customising and modifying to do. Well, that’s only half true. The rear suspension consisted of Rod Tech coil-over-shock units and a cross-member, replacing the semi-elliptic springs. I did this to get the car down low, use a disc brake rear (from the Fairlane, ditching the old 8” diff that came with the Mainline Ute) and have a later model diff where ratios and parts were easy to get.
I wanted to use the trailing arms that came with the donor car. They looked like they would fit nicely, so I fabricated some odd looking brackets and tacked everything in place. I then pondered the placement of the rear wheels in the wheel arches. The diff was just too wide, no matter what kind of offset I could get on the wheels. I took the diff to Craig at Southern Diffs, and he shortened the long end to the same width as the short end. On the next trial fit, the wheels (with zero offset) fitted perfectly under the wheel arches. I could also take a wheel off and put it back on again using a normal jack. I also decided to manufacture the upper control arms so I could have a little bit of adjustment to the diff pre-load and pinion angle. I bent up some chrome moly tube and threaded some control arm rod ends and fitted them to the original brackets on the diff and my own brackets on the chassis.
The factory lower control arms fitted just nicely between the original diff brackets and my manufactured brackets on the diff. I tacked everything in place using my trusty Dillon/Henrob/DHC 2000 gas welder and, when all the suspension and steering was in place, we got Danny Fort over to weld everything up properly with his mig.
