1941 Plymouth Road Racer Project: Pedals and Wipers

It has been a while since I posted updates on the 1941 Plymouth Road Racer Project, but progress continues at Rocket Surgery Racing Headquarters in Denver. The body has been removed once again from the handmade chassis (with its Lexus SC400 suspension, GM Vortec 4200 straight-six engine and ZF Black Tag Corvette 6-speed manual transmission), so that plumbing and wiring can be installed, and many of the hundreds of smaller fabrication tasks — all necessary for a street/track-capable finished car — are getting finished. The Wilwood brake and clutch pedal/master-cylinder assemblies are now in place, as is the heavily modified drive-by-wire throttle-pedal assembly from the 2008 Chevrolet Trailblazer engine donor.

Those are the brake and clutch fluid reservoirs on the driver’s side of the firewall and the power-steering reservoir on the other side. The holes in the lower firewall are for the heater hoses, because this car will be going on road trips year-round and it will have the 1941 version of climate control (i.e., windows that open and a simple heater box under the dash).

Driving a car with no windshield wipers is rough (I’ve done it, and I give the experience zero stars out of five), but most Detroit cars of the 1940s had vacuum-powered wipers. That means that when you’re passing uphill in the rain at night, the engine vacuum plummets and the wipers slow to an agonizing crawl when you need them the most. So, the RSR shop fabricated everything needed to make the Trailblazer wiper motor (which was still lying around the shop after scrapping the engine-donor carcass) work with the original 1941 Plymouth wiper arms.

The body goes back on the frame in the next couple of weeks, and then the final wiring, glass installation, and all the rest will be up next. Once the car gets moved to my garage, I’ll have fun making a custom dash panel for it.

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