Been a lurker on this forum for a while and initially came across this forum when searching for some frame fabrication info. Seems like when ever I would do a search for some car related subject the Hamb came up in the results page. I figuered I should make the jump to member.
About time you filled us in on that Chevy II also. Do you know we have a ChevyII/Nova thread? Here: https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/chevy-iis.397699/page-15
So, as things go in the life of a car guy, you have a project you are working on trying to gather the bits that have stripped by others and forever hunting for the missing bits. Such is the case with this car. While working on another 63ss(Black) that I was building for the GF I was hunting down parts for that build and came across this blue 63ss. Again it was missing a lot of stuff and had some nice spots of rust and dare I say patina that most might have run from, but I wasn’t figuring on building this one. It was a donor. Life happens and things change these are the things you can count on in life. The GF and I parted ways and rather then have anymore discussions about about who gets what I walked away from the original 63ss project and set about rebuilding my life, finding a new group of people to associate with, and focus on a new project to apply myself to. Since i already had the Blue Nova 63ss in my shop and I already had a passion for these little cars. It wasn’t a hard sell to myself. At the time I wasn’t really sure what direction I was going to go with this car but I figured i would start by cleaning it up and putting some tires on and seeing how it looked then take it from there. I knew I didn’t want to go the front clip route with this car as they are pretty pricy and i had always felt that the front clips don’t really address the flimsy unibody structure that these cars have. I’ve looked at all kinds of subframe connectors and still not satisfied with the out come. A step in the right direction but not enough for me. So the next thought was a chassis swap. I had an early S10 which had some promising attributes and being all GM platform thought it would be worth investigating further. As I proceeded with measurements and fitment proportions from truck to car application it became clear that the truck frame would be super strong but not really work without a lot of reengineering to keep the rear floor and back seat area and get the stance I want. After some more research, I came upon the G body platform as a promising candidate for a chassis swap for a Nova. Track width is nearly identical, the perimeter frame could potentially allow the floor to stay intact, there is tremendous amount of aftermarket support for the platform which all looked really good, and there are a multitude of vehicles that used this chassis to choose from. So an acquisition of an 85 El Camino with a small block and a 700R4 looked to be a good donor. And it could work if I really wanted to go down that road but there were some challenges that started to become more important to me as the merger of the Nova and El Camino got closer to a possibility. The main issue ends up being the rear frame rails of the Elco and the sub rails Of the Nova are not going to be making more space in the rear wheel house without a lot of reworking. The G body rails are wider then the Nova’s which means less space in the wheel house for tire. The alternative is to cut the floor out of the Nova and notch the rails but there still isn’t much gain for all the work it would require. So at this point I have decided to build my own chassis that will be a bolt in and require very little modification to my Nova which translates to only some minor trimming in a couple of locations. The rear suspension will be a torque arm setup like a third and forth gen Camaro and possibly the El Camino front clip but I’m also currently looking at using the front suspension from a forth gen Camaro.
The Jalopy Journal
