This was a welcome sight to see in the driveway a couple weeks back. The suspension on the car was upgraded and ready to go, but it certainly wasn’t going to be idealized with the junk tires on the car at that time. These Mickey Thompson Street Comps were the ticket.

The tread design here has a lot got on. The big shoulder blocks keep the meats planted while the channels in the middle are robust enough to move lots of water out of the way in wet conditions. It has been raining like Seattle around here for the last couple of weeks so wet weather performance has been the order of the day.

Here’s a pretty stark contrast. The tire on the left of the car is obviously the junk we were taking off and the right is the Mickey Thompson Street Comp in 275/40/17. The tires that came off the car had a 235 section width and TONS more sidewall. 

It took all of about 20 minutes upon receipt of the tires to get them and the wheels loaded into our daily driver and off to the tire store to be mounted and balanced. The guys at the tire shop were excited to see the new Mickeys and then burst out laughing when we told them that the wheel/tire combo was headed onto an old Caprice. We may or may not have done burnouts there after the fact.

Mounted, balanced, and ready to go. For cosmetic purposes, we asked the shop to not use the old school knock on wheel weighs on the fronts of the wheels. Instead they used the stick weights on the inside. It looks way cleaner.

With the new wheels and tires installed , it was time for an alignment. Yes, we could have done some driveway voodoo with a tape measure and stuff, but honestly, we weren’t comfortable in doing that having had the car down to the frame in the front and knowing we had specific alignment specs I was interested in having dialed in. Hitting a trusted source,our old man, we asked if he knew of a good shop to do the work that would also let me bug them with a camera. Dad suggested Kenwood Tire and Auto Service in West Bridgewater, MA. This shop had balanced drag slicks for him recently and he said it was clean, well run, and great to do business with. We emailed shop owner Spencer Carruthers and asked about having the work done and having access to the shop. We locked down a time and a day and I showed up! The shop is HELLA COOL, built off of a library building that is more than 100 years old. New England history rules.  

Tire shop and history aren’t normally words that run too close together, but Kenwood’s facility really is a neat slice of the past. The garage area is modern and well appointed, but the store portion of the operation has all the feeling of the historic building it is housed in. Ever been in a tire store and felt like wandering around before? Yeah, neither had we before walking into Kenwood.

After we were done gawking at the store, Spencer sent me and Buford down the hill to the shop area where we met Sean, the wrench who was to perform the alignment on the car. We chucked the keys at him, grabbed the camera and got the hell out of the way. The first order of business was getting the car onto the alignment rack.

So we just eyeballed the toe adjustment in the driveway to get the car operable enough to run the 6 or so miles to the alignment shop. I guess our eyes were crossed that day because this was what the right front looked like with the wheel straight.

Sean affixed these reflector panels to all four wheels. These panels are what the computerized Hunter alignment machine uses to “see” where the tires are during the alignment process. Our horrifying toe adjustment was so far out of whack that the alignment machine would not even “see” it. Sean sprung into action and used the Hotckis billet adjusters to get the toe into a realm that the machine could work with. This photo also illustrates the large amount of negative camber that was present before the alignment. 

Here’s Sean at work under the car bringing the toe back into a range that the Hunter machine could work with.

Once the toe was in the ball park, the Hunter machine could go to work. We had come to the shop with specs that were recommended for a driver looking for a more responsive and aggressive driving experience. Since we plan on auto-crossing this thing in the Spring, we went that way. Here you can see Sean working on the camber and caster adjustments. Since we installed Moog offset cross shafts at the time of the front end rebuild, the camber was way off. Sean dove into his shim box several times to get things lined up to the negative eight tenths of a degree we wanted on both sides.

We said shim box and we meant shim box. Sean said he uses this thing less and less as virtually all modern cars use eccentric washers, rather than shims.

There’s LOTS of options in this box!

Cool shop photo interlude.

This McCreary sign rules. Was this just a regional brand or did they sell stuff all over the country? We once ran a drag car on old McCreary circle track slicks.

This sticker is pretty damned cool.

With the hard work of the camber and caster done through the use of shims, the last portion of the alignment was getting the toe correct. Because we installed the Hotckis billet adjusters as part of our suspension upgrade, the toe adjustment was easy as pie. In this photo you can see Sean cranking the adjuster while watching the screen to indicate when he had hit our spec on the toe.

With the alignment complete, Sean pulled the paddles and fixtures from the wheels and we hit the road. The difference from the weirded out driveway alignment and the proper one were immense. Driving home we jammed down some tight back roads to work the big Caprice out and kept on going until we had virtually drained the tank of fuel. As under powered as it is, this car is STUPID fun to drive. Thanks to Spencer and Sean at Kenwood Tire and Auto Service for getting it dialed in and allowing us to hang out in the shop with our camera. Lots of shops are leery of such things because they’re grease pits but Kenwood  Tire and Auto Service is a very well kept shop that we’ll direct business to  without any hesitation. We’d send our grandmother there for work on her car and there is no higher praise than that. 

So here’s the current look of Buford T Justice. You don’t have to take our word for how well this thing drives. Dave Nutting was super impressed while we cruised last week. The ride is very firm but not harsh. The car feels totally connected to the road and there is not one whiff of body roll, even when tossing it around.

Our tastes can always been called into question, but seriously this looks bad ass, right?

The stock Chevy center cap looks right at home on the center of the 17×9 Cragar Soft 8

We had some concerns about the 275 Mickey Thompson Street Comp tires on the front, but they work perfectly with no rubbing. If we had gone the route of cutting coils from stock springs, we bet there would be issues, but the Hotckis components set this up perfectly.

We mentioned that the car broke down twice on the day we were shooting these photos. Well, the first time Nutting was standing on a loading dock shooting photos and asked me to move the car. No Problem, right? Wrong. It wouldn’t start. We suspected that the coil took a dump and since we were there with no tools, I made a call to Jon Wall who responded within minutes. We quickly confirmed that the coil was dead so we jumped in Jon’s truck to head for the parts store.

That coil is one dead son of a bitch.

The parts store initially tried to sell me the wrong coil. The one they handed me was a coil in cap HEI piece, which this car clearly does not have. The only part number they had for the small cap HEI unit was an MSD Street Fire piece so we grabbed it. The car fired literally on the hit of the key.

We were then back in business for a little while.

Suspension-wise Buford is now equipped to “barbecue the Bandit’s ass in molasses”. Now the car is in desperate need of horsepower.

So the second time the car broke down was a couple miles across town in the other direction. At about 50mph on a back road the car completely shut off losing all power. No lights, radio, etc. There’s some wiring creepiness under the hood that we’re undoing as you read this. Literally. The next update will be filled with some performance testing and speed parts as we preview what we’re going to do to this little tired small block before we stick a rat motor in this car. It is going to be bolt-on a palooza with this small block. From induction to cam to exhaust, we’re taking this mouse from a sad bastard to a snotty performer. Stay tuned!

Stance…it does a B-Body good!