Pro Touring Track Day Buick Skylark: Time to do some fab work on my own

With the progress of 2016 being painfully slow, I decided I would do some things myself.

The last thing I had Chris at White Rino do for me was the exhaust. We did it from 3" stainless steel, mandrel bend sections. I did not want a cross over, to keep things simple under there, and hopefully to have a little more burble from the exhaust. I wanted the exhaust to exit through the bumper, like at N-25 factory GS exhaust from 71/72. This meant the exhaust had to come up into the trunk pan. We had to cut into the freshly made trunk panels.

This shows the challanges off getting the exhaust routed through the trunk area. The mufflers are ahead of the axle, pointing upward. They are small, short, stainless, straight through Magnaflows. I want this car loud, since my other cars are fairly quiet cruisers.

I brought the car home around March of 2017, and started seeing what needed to be done next. I discovered that the footwell was too narrow for my size 14 shoes, and 3 pedals. Here you can see where I cut and widened the footbox about 2" inches to the right, by tacking in a new piece of steel shaped to fit the rest of the floor pan in that area.

Here you can see a new type of steering column mount that moved the column to a more comfortable position.

Here is the back side of a new pedal mount bracket that Chris fabbed for me to hold the Wilwood brake/clutch pedal assembly.

The new steering shaft position is just barely going to work. Here is a bearing that will hold the shaft where it comes through the fire wall.

A close up of a new pedal bracket. The bolt is a temporary spacer.

Titlton came out with a billet aluminum throttle pedal that compliments the Wilwood pedals well. Here I am mocking it up right next to the brake pedal bracket. Clearance is tight!

My friend Mike Modena is in town from AZ, and is tweaking the steering column bracket.

Gratuitous welding shot!

His back is probably not going to be feeling good tomorrow. He also had to remake two header tubes on the left side to clear the extra wide foot box.

More welding that I don't trust myself doing.

Mike got the steering and pedals 100% mounted and very stiff, so with him gone I am doing some easy stuff. These are my rear bumper brackets. The fiberglass rear bumper has no mounting holes, and I want it smooth with no carriage bolt heads showing. This mounts will adhere to the back of the bumper with 3M panel bond epoxy. I can't weld aluminum, so I making them from steel. They are only 1/16" thick, so they are still very light. That fiber glass can't take any abuse anyway, so there is no point in using heavy brackets to mount it to the frame.

The small holes are for some 1/4" bolts that will hold the brackets to the bumper while the adhesive is curing.

Oh yea, here is the finished steering column bracket with some cool supports that Mike suggested. I ended up putting a 1/8" steel plate across the top of the bracket to create a four sided box with maximum strength.

Bumper is installed. The blue tape shows where the exhaust tips will come through the bumper. How about those cool, one year only, 65 factory tail lights?

On to the front core support. Do you know what this is? A custom hood pin bracket that I made.

In the background you can see a frame bracket for the core support that is removable via 2 bolts. The foreground shows the vertical piece made from 1" steel tube. Far left is the end of the horizontal piece that goes between the fenders.

Here is the main part of the core support. I call it that, but it will really only mount the headlights, grill, and upper part of the front bumper. The radiator will be supported off the sway bar tube that is behind and below it.