I’ve spent about 100 hours so far on the body, patching the floor, the rear body and welding, filling and smoothing the firewall. I forgot what a pain rust was on steel cars, but that’s the price you pay for the real thing

Fortunately my years in a body shop paid off and is saving me a ton of money doing my own body work. I enjoy doing it for myself, but hated doing it for a living.

I would have had to really hack up the cross member to install a 700-R4 but I was determined the get an overdrive transmission that would work. After doing a lot of research, I came up with a great alternative. This is a 200-R4 4 speed overdrive transmission I had built for the car. It is smaller then the 700-R4. It was used in the mid ‘80s GM cars including the Buick Grand National. It is about the same physical size as the T350 and it fit great. Built properly and beefed up it is stout enough to use with the 425 hp small block Chevy power plant going into the ‘36. (More on that later). 

As you can see I converted a section of our warehouse to my streetrods. It’s a luxury I don’t take for granted, as it sure helps. I couldn’t attempt this in my small garage at home. The biggest drawback is the temptation to work on the car when I should be up front taking care of business! My wife usually lets me know when I abuse it.

Well that’s all for now. But as time permits I’ll be posting more pics of the progress as we go. Guess where I’ll be spending my spare time over this winter?