The first thing I wanted to do was put a floor shifter in it but my Dad didn’t want me to. I went to work at Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington, Texas the summer after I got my car and what do you think I did during the day when I wasn’t working? Yep…cut a hole in the tunnel and bought me a Hurst Competition Plus shifter. Wow…was I proud of that!! I remember it being a lot of work to put the shift arms on the transmission because for them to be pointed up I had to use a rat tail file and file grooves in the shift arms coming out of the transmission. It was a lot of work but I sure was proud of that shifter. Now I had a ’62 Chevy with 283 Rochester 2 bbl 3-speed and I thought I had the hottest car alive.

From then on I was buying something for my car. I can remember not eating lunch and saving my money to buy a Holley carburetor. One of my best friends, Dennis Henry, had this sleeper ’55 Chevy that I thought sounded and ran like nothing I had ridden in before. I remember it even had a 4-speed overdrive transmission. Dennis helped me put in my first cam. We did it in his driveway at his mothers’ house. His brother-in-law had helped him so we got the same cam from Wilkerson Chevrolet and put it my 283. I remember it took us more than the weekend to do it and Dennis let me drive his ’55 a day until we finished. I never told him but I got in a race on North Peoria and I’ll never forget the look on the guys face when he pulled up beside me. He couldn’t believe that sleeper ’55 had just kicked his butt.

By the time I was a senior in high school (1970-1971) I had done quit a bit of work on different cars. Another one of my best friends, Bobby Painter, came up with the idea to buy a car and build a drag race car. He found a ’56 Chevy hardtop with a 265 in it that we could buy for $65. And that’s when it all began. We took it over to my Dads house and started taking it apart. We had been to the drags enough to know we wanted to build a Modified Production car. We took the body off the frame and rented a sandblasting unit and scraped and sandblasted the frame, body, and body parts.

We then went through each and every component and cleaned, repaired, replaced, and detailed it. We decided on a 12 bolt rear end for the car instead of the stock rear end. We spent a lot of hours at the salvage getting the parts we wanted. Note in the pictures that we have aluminum body mounts that we made to replace the stock rubber ones. We made them buy melting down some old pistons and pouring them into Budweiser tallboy beer cans. That was when the tallboy beer cans were still made out of steel. Wow…that sounds like a long time ago. After they cooled we peeled the can off and then Bobby turned them down on a lathe at Bob Fullers Automotive in Sapulpa, OK where he was working at the time. Bob was building a ’65 Falcon to run in a Gas class and he always let us work at his shop after hours. When we started to mock everything up we decided we wanted to do away with the little bolt front motor mounts. We purchased a Hurst engine conversion plate. At this point we decided we should chrome some of the components. We chromed the entire rear end housing, front motor mount, upper and lower A-arms, master cylinder, and even the steering box.

We were reading just about every article that had to do with racing in Modified Production and Pro Stock. We incorporated some of the little tricks of the day such as solid body mounts, Lakewood traction bars, cutting coils off the front coil springs to get the ride height lower, and A-arm travel limiters. We later removed the rear motor mounts in favor of a transmission cross member. One out of a ’67-’69 Camaro worked perfect between the frame with the addition of two brackets welded to the frame.