Making a Vert strong enough to handle serious power
 

Is there a way, to strengthen a vert chassis without a roll bar that shows above the top of the doors (so it still looks clean with the top down) to take, say 800HP?

Re: Making a Vert strong enough to handle serious power
 

Re: Making a Vert strong enough to handle serious power
 

Thanks. What an awesome car. Almost exactly what I want to do powertrain-wise. I noticed he mainly put the Spohn SFCs in along with poly bushings.

Re: Making a Vert strong enough to handle serious power
 

Re: Making a Vert strong enough to handle serious power
 

Certainly it is feasible. Definitely use outer subframe connectors and I would tie them into the factory's outer subframe connectors as well as adding in extensions to connect them to the inner subframe rails on the middle and front sides similar to what I did with mine. The BIGGEST improvement to a convertible's front end strength would be to cut open the entire inner side of the inner subframe (the ones commonly called the frame horns that the actual bumper, K member and transmission crossmember get bolted to) and weld in a set of custom bent tubes and then weld back on the inner side of the subframe. It is these frame rails that provide the strength for the front end and if you have ever put jack stands behind the front wheels on a convertible and then slowly lowered the jack and watched the front end sag you understand that the frame rails are not really adequate but what choice did ASC have? I looked at the car 88IROCvertZ mentioned and I didn't see anything obvious that shows that he did much besides a pair of off-the-shelf subframe connectors.

Re: Making a Vert strong enough to handle serious power
 

Re: Making a Vert strong enough to handle serious power
 

I haven't had it on a dyno. Best I can do is tell you that I closely followed one of the engine combos in one of the articles that Air Flow Research had on their website. I looked moments ago and can no longer find the article. It was also listed in that Ryan guy's list of sbc engine combos that was like 108 long and no longer exists as a website. Luckily I downloaded it from a member who posted the downloadable file which you can find in post #15 of this thread: https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/engi...bc-combos.html
I followed combo number 16 from line 17 which shows them making 491/501 on an engine dyno. The only changes that I made were that my AFR heads were/are a competition port that I did some blending work on and I have in the neighborhood of 10.5:1 compression instead of 9.5:1. My camshaft is a similar duration (236 instead of 230) and made a by a different manufacturer but that's probably negligible. So I am guessing I should have 400 hp at the wheels.

Thanks for the compliment, my wife is ready for it to end.

You know exactly what I'm talking about then.

Re: Making a Vert strong enough to handle serious power