About the wheels: I love them, hard to clean all the little 'windows' but they're very cool. Sadly, by the time I received them from Weld, they were discontinued. Said the owner to me, "When we were making them, we couldn't sell them. When we discontinued them, everyone wanted a set."
About the transmission: It's a Stage 3 build, able to withstand about 700~ horsepower. The wiring is simple, just a few connections using the TCI Auto trans
EZ-TCU. Initially we had lots of problems because we were using a different controller (PCS Simple Shift). Once I
upgraded to the EZ-TCU, the settings were different and the transmission started acting like an automatic transmission should. They are coming out with a better handheld for it, with more functionality, and I'll be upgrading to that and writing another article about the change.
About the installation: Silver Sport currently doesn't do the 62-65 B body, so we used a later, 66-up kit and were able to make a couple of modifications to the supplied crossmember and the mount itself to make it work, the rest was a piece of cake. You will need a longer driveshaft - much longer. I actually had to go to 3.5 inches for a steel driveshaft due to the length (I now have a smaller, 3.2-inch carbon fiber shaft from QA1). You can see the mods and
read about the installation on the project page, if you haven't seen it. Unfortunately, the site is constantly having issues with images loading so I can't show you the mods we did right now, I'll try to get them to fix the site (they constantly have problems with it). The modification was easy, we simply cut the long 'ears' down after making a pattern with the 62-65 727 crossmember, only having to drill the outer holes on the shortened, modified crossmember. There are some adjustments necessary to the tunnel to clear the bigger transmission, nothing extreme, but plan to R&I the trans a few times to mark where you'll need to persuade the sheetmetal to adapt.
Why not the A-518?: I had thought about that, but with the plans for the car the A-518 was not going to be enough. I also liked the idea of being able to control things with the electronics, and also that I could control TC lockup. The nice thing about this particular trans (97- up Truck trans, I believe) is that the bellhousing can be replaced, so if you have a small block and swap to a big block, you don't need to get another transmission: just get the bellhousing and TC/flexplate and you can bolt it to a B/RB/Hemi. I don't plan to go big block, but we do have some surprises coming up with a new small block that I'll be writing about, as well. Can't let the cat out of the bag just yet on what the plans are, but after having been through a couple of ideas and thinking we would go one direction, we went another. But soon... I'll spill the beans on the next upgrade!
Thanks everyone, I'm thrilled that people are enjoying the progress and that it has inspired others to make changes. There will always be purists who want to keep it as it came off the sales floor, and I'm okay with that. I bought this car with the hopes of building a driver - and never imagined 15 years ago that I would be giving Porsches a hard time through the sweeper! It's been a blast, and it has been one of the longest running project cars at the magazine, done in increments rather than stripping a car down and building it up over a span of a decade. This is why we kept it as a project car even though I am no longer the editor of Street Muscle. I am a regular contributor, however, and have a room full of parts and a head full of ideas for future articles and upgrades.
