Projects Austin Somerset Gasser Build (DragNasty)

I would like to take it to Bowling Green but it will have to wait for next year. We are going to a local Nostalgic Race event here in a couple of weeks and then: Meltdown Drags, HAMB Drags, and MOKAN Fall Hot Rod Reunion this year.

 

Sunday around Noon we hit the High School Parking lot to start breaking in the clutch. It was perfect. I could start at one end run through 3rd gear and then back down, turn it around and head back. We did about 100 laps yesterday, that is 200 stop and goes and right around 600 clutch depressions....we are halfway there.


So I am being crazy gentle just simulating stop and go driving as McCleod Clutch demanded. The car is running excellent but to be honest it feels a bit "squirrely" to the seat of the pants. I had made about 10 laps when it happened. I let off in third ready to slow down and make the turn-around when the car got the Wild Willy Borsch "style" Death Wobble! Now the car was only doing maybe 25 or 30 mph but it rattle my cage pretty good.

I idle it back down to the trailer and Dad hopped off and approached wide eyed, re-assuring me of what I had just experienced. We looked the front suspension over but nothing jumped out at us. So I went back to work to see if I could get it to do it again. I made another 20 laps before it finally repeated the big wiggle. So we did what any good builder would do, loaded it up and went to the Mexican Restaurant for a late lunch.


After we ate and mulled over the situation we headed back to the shop. With the car still on the trailer we got the front wheels in the air to have a real good look. Our eyeball tow in/out job about a year go was a little off, no doubt because I changed the tie rod. Not enough to cause the crazy wobble but we went ahead and did it right. With the wheels still up, you could feel a ton of slop in the steering. Vega cross steer boxes have an adjustment on the top side that allows you to adjust the play in the steering (it was WAY OUT). After making a couple of adjustments there, we tinkered in the shop until about 5:30 and then headed back to the school parking lot for round 2.

Our adjustments were gold and the car handled and felt really solid this time. We made about 70 more laps as the sun was going down. The engine temps never got over 180 all day long, even on the long runs in the heat of the day. I am very happy with its performance. But I will tell you this, playing nice from 200 dead stops on an empty parking lot with a Supercharged Gasser absolutely took the most self control that I have ever exerted! I was completely exhausted from the experience! I would have kicked my cat as a realease when I got home but my legs were simply too tired! LOL

 

Congrats on getting to drive it, I haven't had the chance with my 41 yet. When I was reading and seeing your header paint burn off I thought of my own, in this photo you can see where it cooked the coating on the upper section of the headers. I had these headers well seasoned on my n/a big block but something about the blower cooked them while running on the run in stand.

 

Just saw your vid on boob toob. BITCHN!

 

When I said in the last post that we tinkered in the garage between parking lot adventures, what I should have said was we spent that time solving one of our biggest head aches: The flip front end. Now I promised someone about two years ago I would post how we built it but to be honest, we have been tweaking on the stupid thing for about two years. From the git-go I wanted to keep the cowl area of the front end in tact.


However, I have also known even before the "blower audible" that it simply could not tilt forward and clear the carbs etc. Over the past couple of years we have experimented with several lines of thought. First we put the front portion mounting bolts in a vertical slot. The idea was when you pop the hood latch, "hatch back style" hydraulic cylinders would lift the nose. That would mean it would then tilt from a higher point than when closed. Trust me, we wasted a ton of time working all the angles etc. but it simply did not work the way we hoped. Then we moved to pivoting arms that lifted the front end as it tilted. Also an engineering nightmare and total waste of time. There was simply not enough room in the Austin to effectively pull this style off. Although either of the ideas from above would have been cool, they simply made a very simple procedure complicated and bulky.

Before we blew the car apart last fall to start the final assembly, we welded a couple of tabs on the font end and to the frame horns and put a grade 8 bolt in place between them for the front end to rotate. At the time we still had to remove the rear carburetor for the cowl area to clear but since it was not running at the time and the carb was not bolted down, it was not really an issue. Of course that would become a real pain in the backside after the build is complete! LOL

So after looking at several places to cut the cowl area from just enough out of the middle to clear the carbs and bug catcher to removing the entire cowl area, we opted for the later.


We picked a line that followed the natural shape of the hood hole but just before it made the cowl corner. From that point we marked and cut that line completely removing the cowl from the flip front end. But before we made the cut we did a bit of strengthening to what would become the new wings.


We already had a pretty sturdy bace system in place that mirrors the functional down tubes of the roll cage in the engine compartment. To that (again, before we cut the cowl area out) we bent these 1.25" wide 3/16" thick steel strips to match the shape of the fender. Then welded them in place extending all the way down to the tubing support on both sides.


Then we carefully cut the cowl area out. I am still going to put the cowl area we cut off on the car but it will stay in place when the front end tilts.


Our little strips really did the trick...I was worried removing the cowl would really weaken the front end but after we got it in place it was very strong.

 

very nice!

 

Thanks Hoop, glad to hear you guys made it home in one piece. That is a lot of miles!

 

Went through the same issues on both of my gassers. The Austin A10 was a bigger issue, and for the same reason as your Austin; no room. I opted to change the back edge of the hood, as I didn't need as much clearance as your Austin did. In my case I cut the back edge of the opening out, and then built a support rod that offset back to clear the Hilborn scoop when I open the tilt nose. It sits above my cowl when closed, and being solid rod it keeps things from flopping. Don't have a good picture of the back, but it's 1/4" rod welded in, and sheetmetal covering it to blend to the hood.



On my Falcon the engine sits back far enough that I had to do surgery on the cowl to fit the scoop on the carbs, so no chance of not opening the hood up. I boxed in the opening with lightweight box tubing, and then bent up some sheetmetal to give the hood opening a raised lip, and a nice curve to the corners.

 

So after finally deciding HOW the tilt front end was going to clear it was time to install it for real. Knowing what I know now, I would have stored the front end differently. For the most part, since we blew the car apart last Fall for the final build etc. it has been sitting on the floor in the corner. What I didn't think about was the "gravity" of that situation. I mean that quite literally. Just sitting there on its fender bottoms, gravity sort of worked it over a bit.

Upon installing it back on the car, it opened and closed perfectly but to be honest when it came to fitting at the cowl and the doors it almost looked like the wrong front end. Dad and I double checked the shop but it was only flip front Austin Somerset nose in the place so it had to be the right one!


So we had to come up with something that not only supported the back side of the front clip but also helped in keeping its shape. Above is what we came up with, a heavy bracket on each side that would support the very top part of the fender.


These little rubber stoppers are really cool. They come from the commercial coffee maker world, thanks to Dad's past life experience. They are actually the legs. The rubber end fits securely on a 3/8 hex bolt head and then you screw the bolt into the bottom of the machine and you have adjustable legs. We fitted them to the bracket so we could adjust them to line the fender up with the door etc. They work really well and honestly make us look much more professional than we are...of course you guys know the truth.


Then we were down to latching the front end in place. I had decided a long time ago that we would go old school in that department with hood pins down at the bottom of the fenders. But I was not sure how to get a hood pins down there. After some deliberation I decided to use scrap 1.5" square tubing. I fabed up a piece that could be welded solid to the subframe of the body with an extension to hold the pin out far enough to get to the lower fender areas.


After we drilled the hole in the fender, we took a measurement of where it need to sit on the shank to align with the door. Then we cut some rubber fuel line that fit very tightly on the pin and slid it on (with the help of some silicon spray lube). When the front end is closed and pushed in place over the head, the fender pushes against the rubber hose on the inside and then you put the pin in place on the outside to hold the it secure.


Overall, the front end sits on two adjustable rubber stoppers on either side of the cowl, the two rubber stoppers on the brackets and then is locked in place at the bottom with the pins.

 

Looks pretty darn professional! Just a thought from knowing how they settle and vibrate. Might want to add a 2nd bracket to the adjustable coffee maker support, and tie it at 90 degrees to the first one. Over time it may flex and eventually crack. Don't ask how I know!

 

Saturday we took the Austin to a car show and got to drive it with the front end on for the first time. Something I noticed, outside of how cool it looked was how much faster it got hot. Nothing 911 style or anything but up until Saturday we had not seen run over 190 (and that was driving it around for several hours). However, it was pretty hot and it had sat in the sun all day but still it was obvious we would have to do something to increase the air flow.


Above is how it looked at the show and below is after a few modifications to increase airflow.


As you can see, we removed the grill slots and drilled several well placed holes in the nose. The next step is to inclose the radiator area (between the radiator and front sheet metal) so that when the nose is closed, all the air coming in the front HAS to go through the radiator.

 

And last night we finally finished all the wiring. The crazy turn signals and brake lights had been giving us fits. You remember a ways back I showed you how to use a small electronic trailer wiring module to run both the brake and signal lights on the same filament. Well, I wired that stupid thing up but we must have had a bad module or something because we could not make it work. We tried for several days on and off to figure out what was going wrong with it. Finally, I just broke down and bought an aftermarket generic turn signal switch. We hooked up five wires to it and in about 5 minutes or less, had all the lights working....figures!

 

Have been following this build, keep up the good work, you have certainly done a lot !
guess things would have been a little different if you had whats in my garage over here in the UK .......

 

Very cool...as I have said, I really love the Dorsets but now that the Somerset is about complete, it is pretty cool to basically have the only one. But I am still envious of your garage!

 

This has been such a cool build. Very nice work bringing this car together. Question - could you reattach the removed section of cowl, permanently to the firewall? Looks bad ass either way!

 

Yes...that is our plan. That way when the front end is closed, it actually looks complete. But with the Metldown Drags looming in a couple of months we are really trying to concentrate on the essentials to make sure we make it.

 

Well things went really well at the DMV this past week and the Austin is officially in my name, titled and ready to license. I am putting Historic Tags on it and thinking about personalizing them. Here are a few of my thoughts, feel free to ad if you have any better ideas as I am not sold on any of these yet! Here in Missouri the personalized tag can only be 6 digits. It can be just the six digits or it can have six digits and include a dash or a space. Remember it is a supercharged Austin A40 Somerset Gasser named DRAGNASTY:

AUSTIN
SMRSET
BLN A40
AA-GAS
DNASTY

 

HANGON

 

I vote for "Austin"
Subscribe d since day one. One bad ass ride.

 

Deuced up!:
I work for Missouri DOR. Let me know if you need me to check any license plate configurations for availability.

 

Hey that is very cool. Thank you.

 

Six letters, h'mm, what would Austin do?
How about "Shag it" baby.

 

Unfortunately, the following configurations are taken (with or without a space, hyphen, or apostrophe):
AUSTIN
SMRSET
HANGON

However AUS10 (or AUS-10, or AUS'10, or AUS 10) is available...

 

GIDYUP

 

Taken.

 

Guess I am going to have to dig deep.

 

I bet NITSUA is available (AUSTIN backwards).

 

My vote is AA-GAS

 

Have any Dorset parts you don't need?

 

Yep...that is the direction I was leaning...