Wasteland 64

[The Swede]

Hi all!

A few years ago I picked up a pretty severely rotted 64 with a 390 / Cruise-O-Matic. It hadn't run since the early 90s. The trunk lid was rusted through, there was about an inch of standing water on the carpet in the trunk, despite much of the steel underneath it having been "chemically lightened". The usual rot around the rear window and where the top meets the body.

The window motors were rusted solid, and someone had tried to fix that by tearing out all of the switch panels, it seems. I decided this car was well beyond restoring, and put it in my bin of cars to be turned into Mad Max drivers for the Wasteland Weekend festival.

Well, it ended up sitting in my front yard since then, but today I can finally start a build thread! Got the engine running again this past Thursday, and towed it out to Lord Spud's Motorcycle Emporium in California City. I traded him an axle he needed for a dually Dana 60... Let's see where this takes us!

https://i.*********/hdQvgoe.jpg

The rake is a bit much as is, so next up will be to lift the front 6 inches or so and get the steering figured out. Oh, and find some knobby tires.

 

[Hadderz]

Fab, look forward to seeing the rest!

 

[64ZCODE]

This is cool! Maybe following the Mad Max event, you could compete it in the Baja 1000? Something perhaps useful for your build is that on the Galaxie, the shock towers extended out above the hood and the trunk decks to give that extra travel needed for the really big bumps...

 

[64ZCODE]

BTW the Galaxie I referred to is a '66 Galaxie that was turned into a Baja 1000 racer. A big, mean, racing machine!

 

[The Swede]

OK it's been a good long while, going back and forth on how to make the rear end look both bad and good at the same time. Settled on widening the body a bit.

https://i.*********/R5SjfiP.jpg

https://i.*********/jjDVBxl.jpg

 

[64ZCODE]

That's big and mean or at least headed in that direction. Did you have to tub it to accommodate the big wheels?

 

[The Swede]

That's big and mean or at least headed in that direction. Did you have to tub it to accommodate the big wheels?

I haven't needed to yet, since the exterior sheet metal has been moved outward, but we'll see how much suspension travel I get and if I want to either limit that (a Dana 60 is a lot of unsprung weight) or replace more of the unibody reinforcement areas around the trunk with tube framing.