| Fotos 3: Taken shortly after taking delivery from Mid-City Chevrolet. Snow's really great for drag racing.................... :-) |
![]() |
| Foto 4: Notice 327 emblems in this foto that were later removed to give appearance of a 283 powered machine. Stealth Street Machine! Damn, is that me in the fender........ |
![]() |
| Foto 5: This view gives a bit better perspective on the original equipment Firestone F70x14 Red Stripe tires........ |
![]() |
| More Stuff (some repeated):
Bought the car new around Feb 1967. Built in Baltimore. Took 2 weeks & 4 days to build and deliver to Laurel, MD dealer, Mid-City Chev, from date of order. Marina Blue exterior. Matching Blue Bucket seats with no center console Tinted glass. Non-power brakes with optional performance sintered-iron, metallic brake linings and hardened drums on all 4 wheels (strange looking brake shoes with 2 or 3 square blocks of lining instead of full-coverage. Didn't stop worth a damn, until they got a little heat in them, then they hardly faded at all. Probably would have been great for road racing. Worked great at the end of the drag strip. I don't recall that Chev offered disks unless you bought the SS model. No power steering (I figured PS would slow it down with the extra drag on the engine) 3.73 Posi, 12-bolt rear. Wide ratio 4-speed. I replaced stock shifter with a Hurst. Wide-ratio provided something like a 2.52 low gear rather than the 2.20 in the close-ratio. Lower first gear gave just that much more grunt off the line with the 3.73 rear. Not low enough for drag racing at the strip, but just about right for a daily driver and street racing from lights. Red-stripe F70x14 Firestone tires; 6" wide rims. 70 series tires also lowered the overall ratio off the line. Swapped the front tires for a narrower, larger-diameter tire and ran it at a higher pressure to lower rolling resistance when going to the strip. Larger outside diameter of front tires gave a longer roll thru the staging lights; allowing me to start a fraction of a second earlier without fouling. Ordered the standard small hub caps. Dual exhaust had large diameter header pipes; maybe 2.5" diameter back to mufflers. Had no resonators under the rear fenders like the smaller 327s did, just a large, high-flow muffler. Believe exhaust exited just behind rear wheels. Holley carb, maybe a 585 cfm, with jet plates in the front and rear of carb. Standard jets were 67 front & 72 or 74 rear as I recall. Carb had vacuum secondaries. But of course an appropriately placed screw in the linkage provided positive opening where you wanted it. Aluminum high-rise intake manifold stock. Chrome air cleaner, valve covers and oil filler were stock. My recollection is that ‘67 was the last year the engine had the smaller diameter bearings. Had a forged crank and forged pistons, maybe 11.00 or 11.25 compression (memory's fuzzy on that). What I liked about the car was that it was a real sleeper on the street. I took the 327 emblems off the front fenders. And of course in 1967, street racing was common from traffic lights or just cruising down the road. The el cheapo transistorized ignition (maybe a Judson), which used the distributor breaker points to trigger the unit, was fool proof and the ignition never broke down in the 37k miles and 3 years I had the car. Car was never beaten on the street by a new, big-block, street stock of any type that I ever ran across. Plus I never lost the street stock class at the strip (not that I went regularly). In 37k miles and quite a bit of drag racing at the track and on the street, the car never gave me a single problem. I never replaced anything other than normal wear items (tires, plugs, filters, etc.), nothing mechanical. I think the Hurst shifter with the adjustable shift stops saved the transmission. Any time you were racing you always flat-shifted, power-shifted, whatever you want to call it when you don't let off the gas during shifts. That was really hard on the old gearboxes without shifter stops. I originally ordered the car with an AM radio. Later swapped my cousin for the AM/FM out of his ‘67 SS 396. He lived in southern VA, no FM stations there at the time. I installed the Sun two-piece tachometer. As you saw in the underhood foto, the sending unit was mounted on the left front fender and the tach was mounted on the steering column with a hose clamp and a rubber strip protecting the paint under the clamp. My car had no power equipment at all, windows, seat, etc.; was plain and clean and non-threatening in appearance. |
| Bryan's L79 Page |
Updated 02/22/03
|