The Studebaker....

The Car: Started out life as a 1953 Studebaker Commander Coupe. In late July 2003, the car looked like this:

After about six weeks, it looks like this:

Wow! A little work goes a long way. It's now at the beadblaster getting all the old paint removed and a metal-etching primer sprayed on. After that, it's off to the frame man where a Corvette C4 suspension will be grafted onto a heavily-stiffened frame. We'll use a 2003 Corvette Z06 engine with a T56 6-speed gearbox. When done, it'll weigh about 3200 lbs.

Havin' some fun now, huh?

Here's how it looked in November 2003. Body is back from the beadblaster, frame is on its way, and we've refinished the floor and inner fenders with POR-15 before tackling the very minor bodywork required. There's only a teeny bit of rust, and the floor is pretty much as it came from the factory; when we beadblasted the overcoat off, it was like new sheetmetal. Lucky.

Finally, a new heart: that's a Lingenfelter LS1, good for 440 hp. and 427 lbs/ft. of torque. This will be backed up by a Level 4 4L60e by Finish Line Performance, good for 700 hp. Now that's in, as well.

We started out looking at adapting Corvette independent suspension, but made a different decision for the chassis. Art Morrison's Tri-5 Chevrolet had great marks, and there was always the possibility that we will end up with more horsepower than the 440 the LS1 puts out. So we got together with the folks at Art Morrison Enterprises, and they happened to have already built a frame for a '53 Stude, so we didn't have to reinvent the wheel. We went with their 4-link rear locating a very robust Ford 9" housing with Strange Engineering axles and centersection. Front stopping duties are Wilwood's 4-piston brakes, and the pieces that come from Wilwood seem a shame to cover up, they're so nicely done. Wheels are American Racing's painted Salt Flat Special, 9.5" in the back and 8" in the front. They look great. All in all, the frame is a real piece of work--fit and finish are great, and the welds are top notch.  See below...

Next: Mounting the body....here's the first shot. A bit of fitting to do, but the front fenders line up nicely. A bit of cutting in the back to do, and some brackets to fabricate...

We're into May 2004 now. Initial fitting...having the wheels on is a must, and you can't fit the car on the frame based on the rear alignment alone; the front has to be there as well...

July 4th-- The body fitting process is painstaking. Lots of measurements to make a fifty-plus year old body fit a frame it closely resembles, but isn't exact. There are a number of different braces to fabricate and holes to drill, and some spacers to fabricate. Ride height is starting to approach what we want. Here's a new picture with the passenger door held in place with tie wraps to help us get a sense of what looks right. We're getting pretty close to starting the engine installation. And no, we don't use those teeny little tie-downs to lift the engine/trans combination. 

November 2004. Back to basics. Thanks to the welding magic of Dale Snoke, we're closing in on the big pieces. Next is to reinstall the bodywork and make sure we have the right fit for the brackets we've fabricated. At this point the biggest hurdle--the engine mounts, which we redesigned quite a bit--are behind us, as are the main body mount brackets and the master cylinder bracket.

Feb 2005: The second photo is with the gas tank in place but not yet repainted, and a new driveshaft from Denny's Driveshafts in place. We are working on a flat firewall in place of the stock firewall (we're about 30% done with that) and removing the (rain) drip rail from around the edges of the roof, smoothing the contours of the lines of the body. We also decided to relocate the master cylinder from the frame rail to the firewall; that saves us from having to use a remote booster. We should have headers very shortly, and are upcoming on the last body/frame fitting session before the frame and suspension go out for paint. Our chrome has come back from the plater, and it is stunning; he did a fantastic job.

March. Headers look great--but they will still need some tweaking to fit...ack.

April 2005: the chassis is out for stainless steel brake lines, fuel lines, and the completion of the exhaust system. In the meantime, work continues on the main body.

August 2005: Finally wrapping up final chassis details with exhaust, additional body mounts, a custom flat firewall and a new tunnel for the driveshaft. That's the hood on the roof of the car. We've also dropped the front end an additional 2 inches, as the spindles we were using made for a very high ride height.

October 2005: The 4-link Morrison suspension intruded into the trunk space, so we had to fabricate new sheetmetal for the trunk floor. We also replaced the transmission doghouse and the driveshaft tunnel to accommodate modern hardware. We also needed to fill in the floor to accommodate the exhaust system we wanted. While we were at it, we replaced the right rear trunk lip where water had accumulated under the trunk lid gasket, rusting that through. New sheet metal courtesy of Fast Eddies', in Orange CA.  Great work. It's still a work in progress, but we're getting very close to final bodywork and paint.

Feb 2006: We took a slightly different approach as we really started to align the car's bodywork. The stock front bumper extended so far out from the body that it looked like Ross Perot's ears, so we sectioned it for a better fit.  Many of the seams were filled, and we welded the rear fenders to the main body. This helps the cleaner look we're trying to achieve, as well as making it easier to get good gaps on the car's joining surfaces. It's looking so good that a coat of clear, rather than paint, isn't so crazy.

Jan 2007: It took a long time to get the bodywork and the ancillaries (like air conditioning and Mercedes seats) mounted in a way that looked right. We had an especially long search for seats that looked period-correct, but still supported the performance theme of the car. Keeping the instrument pods and their hoods, with new instruments, is also laborious. It took forever for a radiator. We haven't set the ride height correctly in these pictures; it's too low for what we want, so it will be higher after paint--which is the next job.

March 2007: We've primered the doors, hood, trunk lid and some of the assorted minor parts in preparation for the Big Push--disassembling the car and painting all the stuff that needs paint, which is a lot of paint. Bodywork prep and pre-paint prep are really, really big steps, since there's so many little details that have to be addressed before final paint. The car itself is getting the finishing touches on its plumbing, with all the flexible lines being done at the same time--brake lines, fuel lines, oil to cooler to filter lines, A.C. lines, trans cooler lines, vacuum lines...well, there's a lot of plumbing to do in a car like this. We shot the underside of the hood in a potential color, before bodywork, just to get an idea of whether the color was right for the car, and it looks like this:

Oddly enough, it turned out to be more blue than green in the picture; reality is, the color has more of a green than it shows here.

November 2007: Plumbing and electrical has been challenging.

March 2008: Back home after plumbing the beast. Lots of finish work to do before paint. Chassis harness to do, some interior fab, audio, a sub-dash, and , most importantly, making the very straight sheet metal a perfect paint surface. We've decided on a much darker green; an early Porsche 356 color called Fjord Green.

Fooling with the HID headlight ballast mounts behind the grille bars

Who was it that called this painless??

Mating the Painless chassis harness to the Speartech engine harness, the wiper harness, the Vintage Air harness, the HID headlight harness, the Classic Instruments harness, etc....(and I know the foglight switch doesn't go there, and the wiper switch isn't quite right, etc. It's just the process of mocking up, and seeing what makes the most sense...)

Looks great with the right offset wheels...(try to look past the initial wiring nightmare...)

On the ground

This is a great project, mostly to introduce Auto Mechanics 101 to my helpers:

Wait until you see the paint job they cook up.....

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