Body is going onto the chassis
We’ve been following the construction of the 2017 ARP/Street Rodder Road Tour 1957 Chevrolet convertible sponsored by Chevrolet Performance at Chris Sondles Bright, Indiana based Woody’s Hot Rodz for a mere four days and in that short period of time we’ve watched Jerry Taylor, Woody’s body assemblyman, make amazing progress building a new Bel Air convertible body with reproduction sheetmetal from Golden Star Classic Auto Parts.
On the last day of our visit Jerry was putting their finishing touches on the body while operations manager, Matt Baldwin was uniting the ZZ6 small-block from presenting sponsor Chevrolet Performance with the 4L80E from Hughes Transmissions.
Before the engine and transmission were slipped into the chassis for a test fit Matt swapped the factory fasteners for the 12-point hardware in an ARP engine dress-up kit. Earlier in the day he had wrapped up the installation of the Wilwood disc brakes meaning all that was left to have a rolling chassis was to bolt on the super cool American Legend wheels wrapped with 18-inch Falken rubber.
Over the last four days we learned a lot about Tri-Five Chevys (do you know how many Bow Ties are on the 1955 Chevy dash trim, the year dual-quad carburetors first appeared and how many GM factories produced Tri-Fives?) including the intricacies of building a body from scratch.
We’ll continue to monitor progress of the 2017 ARP/Street Rodder Road Tour ’57 Chevy convertible and you can follow along at streerodder.com or in the pages of Street Rodder magazine—and don’t forget you see it first hand and join in the fun by riding along with us on this year’s series of Road Tour adventures.
Check out Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 here!
The post Day 4: Building the ARP Street Rodder Road Tour 1957 Chevy Convertible appeared first on Hot Rod Network.