I finally bought a better aluminum transmission pan. My thinking is it will help strengthen the case and the nice, flat flange will help keep it from leaking like it does with the steel 518 pans. Made in USA to boot!

Glad you were able to scoop up some of that AMD metal before it all disappeared.

Me too!

I pulled out the transmission to fix what I thought was a front seal leak. Turns out the snout on the converter had some wear so I decided to have it fixed. The transmission shop did that and pressure checked it only to find the drive plate was cracked. So, new snout, drive plate and ring gear for it and I'm back in business! The $320 would have gotten me close to a new converter but this one does what I want it to, so I decided to press on with repairs. Fortunately I had a local shop that could do this because Turbo Action wanted over $280 just to repair the snout and that was before shipping to FL. Doubt I use them again or recommend their converters when people ask what I'm running...

While the trans was out I took the opportunity to inspect it. The steels had some heat marks so I replaced all of them with new, put in a new front pump bushing and seal and did a new thrust washer. Alto Red clutches seem to be holding up so I threw them back in.

It's all together now and I just need to stab it in the car.

We did Mopars at Mo-Kan a couple of months ago, car ran fine but went out in the first round. We were running n/a, detuned and dialed an 11.70 to try and get it to hook.

It ran back to back 11.68 and 11.69 in test runs and in the first round ran an 11.58 braking hard before the finish. Ugh! best 60 ft. for the day was 1.63 so it was a full tenth off of what it should have been.

Gathering parts to do a bottle heater for the nitrous and have it on it's own circuit apart from the car. Dewalt cordless battery power and a pressure switch to ensure we have the correct pressure all the time without draining the battery in the staging lanes.

Working on the stand alone battery power for the bottle heater. Made some progress on that today...

The bottle has an adjustable pressure switch that will turn off the heater when it reaches 1000 psi. Uses DeWalt 20v cordless batteries for power to maintain temp yet keep the drain off the car battery in the staging lanes.

Added little rubber isolator feet to mount it to the trunk floor.

Base painted and ready to install.

I installed everything tonight and the second I flipped the switch the blanket was hot! It only took a couple of minutes to get the bottle up to 91° from 75°. I still need to wire up the pressure switch as it got late before I realized the leads for it were too short. I'll wire and test that portion of it tomorrow. I'm very impressed with how well it works so far!

I wired the pressure switch tonight and it turned the heater off at 1000 psi.

I can flip the power switch and not worry about bottle pressure for the rest of the night!

A couple of changes this weekend: The front tires were way too small and were too sketchy to be going through the traps with at 130mph, so I put some Mickey Thompson Sportsman SR's on it and threw them on some 15x4.5" Torque Thrusts for good measure. Decided to change up the look some. Someone on Moparts mentioned a good deal on Dana-Spicer Dana 60 rear covers so I bought one of those and painted since mine was the original pitted piece. The wife and I had an enjoyable Sunday evening driving it all over Wichita tonight.

After a pretty much wasted Summer, we finally got to make some passes at the SPAM Drags at Mo-Kan! It's a nostalgia race so they don't do a lot of prep and what they do gets pulled up and destroyed by the street treaded cars so I wasn't expecting great traction.

I was able to keep bottle pressure in the low 90's all day and keep the car consistent. It ran 105 mph to the 1/8th mile on every pass and 129-130mph in the 1/4. The best e.t. of the day was a new best of 10.39! Pretty happy with that since DA was 3500, the temp reached 90° and the 60 ft. was a lackluster 1.53.

It did what it was supposed to.

A new best quarter mile e.t. at KID last night. D.A. was 1800 and temp was in the 60's.

I bought new DeWalt 20Volt 6AH batteries and was able to sit in the staging lanes a long time with the bottle heater on. Worked great!

The one thing I have discovered is an engine using nitrous is much less sensitive to DA, temperature and water grains compared to a naturally aspirated engine. The mph is super consistent and the only thing really changing is 60 ft times due to prep.

Alternator is old unit for mock up only.

Yep, that was the plan (years ago) but the old one pulled out of a box on the farm worked perfectly for 7000 miles and hundreds of dragstrip passes. No need to change what was working.

Fortunately I have great friends and one of them upgraded to a smaller style and gave me his practically brand new unit. The new one had been sitting on the shelf for a couple of years.

We raced the 11.50 index at Kansas International Dragway yesterday.

It came down to me and one other guy that bracket races regularly (slicks, open headers, vinyl lettering on the windows, me with my mufflered pump gas pig...).

In what I thought was the last round, I beat him by .004 at the stripe. I had to brake hard near the stripe, mis-judged and and to whack the throttle a couple of times to get him. He bought back in so here we are lining up one more time.

This round I accidentally bumped in and turned on the stage light double bulbing him. He waits a bit, turns on the pre-stage light but doesn't go ahead and stage. The system times him out and gives him a big red bulb!

He goes to the tower and complains that he "didn't understand the rules" where the system would time him out if he didn't stage (he was trying to burn me down). He then comes up to me and asks if I was trying to double bulb him? Told him I slid in and didn't mean to. He says they will re-run us if I agree. Against my better judgement, I agree.

3rd round against this guy. I finally dispatch him when he goes red by -.01 when I was .01 to the good. He was trying real hard to put a beat down on me and ended up beating himself. I spent half the day racing THIS ONE GUY! LOL.

At the end of the day I ended up winning the 11.50 class and he went home a loser.

I achieved my goal to get a 10.20 this year and then some! I got maddeningly close to a 9 with a 10.01!

Not many changes to get there save for upping the jetting to a 250 shot and putting race gas in the nitrous tank and some in the stock tank for safety.

That was probably the last passes for the season and it ended on a high note.

Impressive!! Nice work Mark!

Thanks, man!

It's amazing what a hack with some hand tools can do in the lawnmower bay of his home garage.

It weighed 3,720 lbs. today as raced when it did the 10.01.

I weighed 216 lbs. and the spare wheel/tire I had in the trunk for ballast was 56 lbs.

Car is 3,448 lbs. by itself.