WIDE MGB: Sawed-In-Half 1966 MGB Gets 535 HP Supercharged Water-Methanol Injected V8 | EP22
[Music] thank you [Music] today we're in San Diego and you're going to meet Jim who reached out to us because he's got a 1966 MGB and he did the unthinkable to it he cut it in half lengthwise widened it and dropped a 535 horsepower v8 in it who does that [Music] I'll give you a big old hug I can't believe we're meeting each other finally I know so you reached out to us because you saw a couple of the videos and thought I'm that guy yeah right yeah here we are and here we are what you did to this MGB will tick people off and I love it who cuts a car in half down the middle did you like take a Sawzall like what would you actually do I took a Sawzall and I cut it right down the middle if I knew there was going to be big challenges along the way but somehow I'd figure them out I mean you think about it every single thing is affected the bumper the trunk the cowl the the windshield windshield the the hood every single thing now you have to figure out right I mean this was not a straightforward easy project it took you how many years I cut it in half the day after Christmas of 2000. you even painted this yourself painted it right where you're standing I can't even believe that mad respect because it looks good sometimes when a guy paints a car himself it's like 50 50 paint you know what that is looks good from 50 feet away an hour yeah this looks good well thank you and this is a single stage with a coat of clothes this is single stage and the reason I did single stage is I was painting everything underneath the engine compartment inside the trunk the bottom of the car I didn't want to have to clear coat everything so when I painted the the single stage on the outside then I cleared over that so I could cut and buff it that makes sense and clearly these are curved panels like this hood and you had to fabricate every piece in there everything yeah you did that there's there's a couple pieces in here that are out of an old hood an old aluminum hood that the the car came with uh but the rest of them I had to make and weld them together and then I made the frame for the for the hood as well and did you use an English wheel I did and had you used an English wheel prior I did not I had to make the English wheel okay because I that right there is mind-blowing you had to make the English will you made the tools to make I made the tools to make the car that's one of the reasons it took 17 years that's crazy and I want to go see that right now I want to go see those tools okay so this is the English wheel it's about 500 pounds it's a it's a very substantial framework on this thing this is a steel caster that I I bought put new bearings in it and refinished the surface and then I made all of the wheels that go in it yeah you made this I made that I made all of it these are two belt Sanders that I built uh this is the one that I I use a lot it's a two horsepower this one is a little detail one this is a swimming pool motor that was that was here with a bad pump on it this is a a chop saw that will cut through metal it's a slow speed and it's got a metal cutting blade in it this is a ring roller that I made that will bend a very gradual bend in a piece of tubing when I made the the edging for the cockpit is a very gradual Bend in the tube how do you how do you do that well you need to very gradually bend it so this is how I use the Bender this piece right here bends this way and it also bends this way and how do you bend a piece of one inch tubing to do that you have to make a tool to do it and same from here all the way to that corner one continuous piece yes how much of this car is still an MGB the tops of the front fenders a couple pieces of the front bumper the headlights the doors and the jams around the doors the two halves of the trunk and the surround of the trunk and the the tail lights yeah ever inside of the body is is fabricated there's only about 200 pounds of mg car left super unique well let me let me show you the uh the badging that I did for this for the car this is It's a take on the mg of stock mg logo except the car has more GM content than it does mg content so I just flip the letters awesome your windshield they don't sell this anywhere no tell me about this process well first of all with the car being a lot wider and the windshield having a fair amount of curvature to it it's very difficult to find a piece of glass that's that wide and has that much curvature to it right I looked and looked and looked and I was sitting at work at lunch one day and I saw this 67 Impala drive by and I got a good side view of it and I could see nice big curved windshield wide car so I saw where he parked I went over and measured it it's it's wide enough and so that became the glass that I was going to use I had to make a frame so then I think myself how to cut glass I made two windshields and all of a sudden big crack through it this is the third one there's a guy who does all of the glass work on Overhaulin he came out and he made this windshield I knew how to cut the glass I can make the glass so he said what you do is you have it hanging loose inside of there and then get black silicone I see and squirt it in there and I had to pay him for the windshield which I already knew how to cut right but what I really paid him for was his advice on how to mount this thing now you know no I know foreign wow so the mg would not have opened this way the mg opened this way look at this so this is an LT1 out of a Camaro out of a Camaro a Z28 Camaro 95. and 535 horsepower 535 horsepower 550 foot-pounds of torque so why did you go with the LT1 instead of an LS I bought the engine 2001.
and LS ones were still new you know they they didn't come out until 97. and they were very expensive I don't think there is nice looking as this engine so this is a centrifugal supercharger it is it's driven off of the crank So the faster the engine spins the faster that spins so you get very little boost at low RPMs and it builds up gradually and and just keeps going the faster you spin it so at about 5000 RPM this thing is making 10 pounds of boost okay um it 3000 RPM it makes about three or four pounds of boost all right and so when you're here at sea level you know atmospheric pressure is about 14.7 pounds and so what that means is you're adding that many pounds I'm adding 10 to that right 10 pounds of pressure more Yep 11 to 1 compression what octane are you running runs on standard California 91 premium okay and the way that works is because that little tank back there is water methanol I injection without much compression you're going to get a lot of detonation there's two switches one that turns on at about three pounds and the other one that turns on about six pounds okay and it it squirts that water injection right into the intake all right so this looks like a radiator cap that's a radiator cap well the engine sits very uh low the radiator is even lower and if you want to be able to fill the thing you need to have a fill Point that's higher than the engine and the radiator so that's why this is back here and up high it's the it's the highest place in the engine compartment so I had to build a tank and then connect it to all of this there's no no cap on the radiator you have a really wide radiator yeah what'd you put in there it's a 19 by 31 dual core Griffin radiator it's got a Ford Taurus fan on it and I hate having cars that overheat [Music] okay so you got your fuel cell back here fuel cell everything you see in here is is fabricated the fender Wells that panel the tank everything and you put that bead roll in it to rigid give it rigidity make it more rigid yeah smart and how many gallons is this system holds 17. 17 okay yeah and it actually uh gets pretty good mileage with the six speed putting it in the second overdrive in sixth gear it'll get better than 20 miles per gallon yeah what do you got going there what are those little orange and black what is that if I need to jump start it I can jump start it or I keep it on a trickle charger and that's where you hook it up because the battery is is buried way down there and you can't get at it there you go again being clever I know there you go again you're welcome this is really styled nicely I really like what you did it looks very race car-esque you made this entire Dash and I'm assuming what did you have to use your fancy little roller for this Edge piece down here too um I did that with a tipping wheel on the English wheel and this I made a two inch pipe that I formed it over I hammered it over it's actually quite thick and rigid right here it has a lot of structure to it yeah it's not going anywhere if it stays cool what kind of Ideal running temp are you usually looking at on your water 180.
when you're in sixth gear at 70 miles an hour on the freeway it's doing 1700 RPM nice what's this guy that's how you start it you gotta turn the key turn the key and then this is it's cold they're on vacation that little light there that meant that the water methanol injection turned on oh it was a what a sound it started making boost a mess wow my gosh that sounds great you're a hot rodder let's go put it on the lift I got to see what you got underneath okay all right your fuel cell fits really good with your mufflers well this is the second exhaust system I had on the car the first one I had was a three inch pipe that came around there and it exited over on that side I think it sounds better it's got a little raspier sound to it is that due to the resonators I mean that will I mean what the benefit of having those things I was just trying to keep it from being any louder than it had to be that sounds perfect whatever you do it sounds really good but the most unique thing when you lift this is that it's completely flat it's essentially a belly pan right and I did that for a couple of reasons one I wanted to get the seating position and the car down as low as I could and second of all when you have a bunch of cross members and exhaust pipes and and chunk hanging down on the bottom of the car creates a lot of turbulence when the car is sitting on its Wheels all the suspension pieces are tucked up in there so you don't see those either and the the tunnel itself is structural it's it's a very weak part of the car on any convertible I made a frame out of one inch tubing when I built the thing and then it's sandwiched on both sides with sheet metal let's talk about your suspension this is suspension out of an 88 C4 Corvette standard width I put adjustable camber rods on it and I converted it from the fiberglass leaf spring that it had to coilovers because the car weighs a lot less than the Corvette weight and this way I can adjust height and dampening and all that sort of thing it's got 373 gears you got a date on 44. it's a Dana 44. so that's a limited slip which is great because you're going to keep your tires pulling and not spinning one out and that's your battery which is why you made those posts accessible from there exactly because that's not very convenient it's not convenient at all and to get to the battery you there's a plate behind the passenger seat this is a a piece that I had to put in the exhaust to clear the clutch slave cylinder this side doesn't have it this side hangs down a lot lower but I didn't want the pipe hanging way down to keep the volume of air yeah so so this is about one and a quarter times the volume of of the two and a half inch pipe oh the car sits really low the top of the windshield is only 44 inches off the ground good grief and here's where you added your rigidity by adding those originally the the Corvette had a cross member that connected all of these pieces all the a arms it was so ugly that I decided that I was going to make a whole new front end for the car and when I was doing it I Incorporated all the mounting points for the a arms and wouldn't you anything special about your brakes the brakes are they're not standard Corvette they're the high performance j55 option which is 13 inch rotors and and two piston calipers in the front and the the rears are 12 inch rotors obviously you can see your steering coming in here and you got this out of a it's out of a Fiero it's oddly enough it bolted right up to the Corvette like steering from the corner you had to you had to clearance this obviously yeah and your alternator is super close you have maybe a finger thickness yeah it's right there like that when I built the the front end of the car when I decided not to run the Corvette uh cross member I had to duplicate all of the suspension mounting points in the structure that I built right so where those things are located in space I went to a uh frame straightening shop and they had a plan of how when you've straightened the frame on a Corvette it it's this far out and this far up from this datum line and that's where it went so I I was able to construct it was a wood structure that just held those things in space when when I was there's nothing on the front of the car right so they were just being held in space and I built the frame to you were able to find where those locations would have been with that crossover going and and just that's crazy built the frame that way and that's how it came to be there you go again didn't plan it out didn't draw it out didn't do anything thinking these are power brake boosters okay it has to have two of them because it has a balance bar set up with separate circuits for the front and the rear brakes and you can play with the bias you can play with the bias it's it's not dialable but I can adjust it okay and that's what all this Plumbing is about is to get the brake fluid back and forth and your wheels were off of a Corvette also they're uh they're replicas of the ZR1 Corvette Wheels they're 11 inches wide in back and nine and a half wide in front this is your water methanol tank the pump is is right there it's a 250 psi pump and when you start making boost that thing switches on and pumps the stuff into the engine and it's noticeable when it starts you you just that supercharger is gonna change my life the supercharger will change your life I think we need to throw the wheels back on this and let it rip we can do that thank you it's really good this feels really planted it is it feels heavy I don't know what it weighs it weighs a little over 2 800 pounds okay it has the illusion to me of it being a heavier car feels very heavy which is good I mean it feels planted you know oh nice little blip I like that so much torque wow we got a perfect day to be out I know isn't it nice I know my shield is perfect all that glass cutting is paid off I know this transmission has six yep so fifth is overdriving six is an even higher overdrive yes the six is really just a freeway thing this is throttle responsive wow the scoots man no this has way more I mean that was probably what 30 or 40 throttle and it just took right off like a rocket ship it's like you're you're staring at it on wide lens it doesn't look real I know I know right it is I went through a lot of effort to try to keep as much mg look to this thing as I could is the crown of your hood and trunk higher than where a stock would be because you had to make up the difference just you stretch it out just barely yeah because that that's up in the the part that was the flat part of the hood anyway so it's at the most a quarter of an inch yeah not bad so do you weave your own carpet too no did you scan your own pal but I made the loom good grace wow I wonder what your top speed would be the way you've got it geared 6 000 in fifth gear is 160 miles an hour wow that's all theoretical I doubt you've tried to hit that theoretical and sixth gear yeah is like 200 or something but I already have noodles uh nt5 Dittos they're fat that's a totally inappropriate horn for how much muscle this has it's loud though yeah Jiminy Christmas it's so dorky this seat's really comfortable I feel like I fit exactly perfect now that the seat's really forward these are very squishy these are Corvette C4 Corvette seats they're perfect they hit like your head in the right spot I know they're really comfortable actually super comfy foreign you're having way too much fun you remember you called me the thing rides fairly smooth yes it really does it feels very stable it doesn't feel dirty you give the Sensation that it's a lot heavier and I don't mean heavy slow I mean heavy stuck to the ground like really sticking it also has big fat Meats which is great good traction I've read what this is uh from a company called Southern polyurethanes and the name of the color is red just red just Red symbol right yeah red and it was about the reddish red I could find of course you did and your shift knob then the shift knob of course you did answer are are common affordable in comparison to LS I wonder how much weight savings you would get out of a out of a wonderful yeah out of an LS uh 50 75 pounds somewhere in there yeah yeah this thing has 50 50 weight distribution you make your own uh roll cage back here too of course you did but it's kind of fun you you forget what driving an analog car is like right you know and there's there's nothing fancy on here I I'll get to control what it does it's not thinking for you right it's my favorite part no it's our turn wow I had to lift a little it wanted to get some money on me I could tell wow top of the world be grateful that you contacted us never have known about this car and I I feel really fortunate that we get to bring it to the world I can't think of a better way you know after all these years that you put into the into the car then to allow other people to hear your story and see what you did because it's incredible it really is cool well I know we're ticking off all the Brits if you're watching from Great Britain I want to hear what you guys think because you hate what we do in America we love what we do sacrifice of an MD right I don't know I want to hear what you guys have to say because I think this is a lot of fun we will catch you guys next time this show is a ton of hours to produce and we could use your support go to patreon.com Nicole Johnson's detour or check out our merchandise nicolejohnson's detour.com hello today we're in San Diego I forgot what I was going to tell you cut it in half my mom was like you need to wear earrings no no it's an 88 an 88. the 80.
let's talk about your independent rear spent so uh no this is a suspension out of a 60 no [Music] no it's you if I can do it can't do it you can't do nanu nanu no man united I can do it that far but I can't make [Music] [Applause] [Music]
2023-04-11 10:50
