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Project Buford T Justice Update: Where Has Our 9C1 Caprice Been Hiding?

Mar 18, 2013Buford - 9C1 Caprice, Project Cars7

Project Buford T Justice Update: Where Has Our 9C1 Caprice Been Hiding?

(Photos by Dave Nutting) – So it has been a while since you’ve seen anything with respect to our much beloved project Buford T Justice Caprice. What the Hell, right? We can assure you that nothing underhanded is going on and that we’re actually on a short holding pattern until we return to the dyno for legitimate technical reasons! Read on and you’ll learn our litany of excuses and the actual legit reason we’ve not been back to the dyno yet.

For starters, the super mild winter of 2012 spoiled us rotten and the dragging snow-filled “real” winter of 2013 is sucking our souls. Since the wrenching environment for Buford mainly consists of driveway time and our driveway does not have a roof on it we’ve been getting slammed hard by old man winter. Not rocket science here but when a few feet of snow come down the car wears it just like the rest of the ground. That’s been an issue for sure. Add in some event travel and the time really starts to mount. On the plus side, we’re confident by some time on the “butt dyno” that we’ve solved the carb issue and want to bear it out with actual dyno test numbers before we totally get ahead of ourselves.

We’ve installed a raft of Auto Meter gauges that we’ll get you up to speed on when we’ve got the whole dyno situation sorted out and we’re in the middle of installing exhaust on the car, real exhaust, not the simple header mufflers we have lived with for months now. It all comes back to the dyno and that’s where things really get interesting.

While Chad was shooting photos like a mad man at the LA Roadtser show a few months back, he ran into Steve Raymond who is the General Manager of Dynotech Engineering, better known to most of you as Dynotech Driveshafts. Steve was familiar with the car and wanted to talk to us about driveshaft tech and Buford. He was obviously aware of the massive driveshaft failure we had early in the project’s life that took a perfectly good transmission out with it. When we got on the horn with Steve a couple weeks ago (after a bunch more dyno pulls between his meeting Chad and that call) he not only explained why we experienced that failure but also did the math to prove that it was pretty much a guarantee to happen again as the factory driveshaft was reaching critical speed at 125mph…the same speed we were making (and maybe a little more) during our dyno pulls.

We’re going to be adding a Dynotech driveshaft to the car in the coming weeks and we’re going to go over the hows and whys of choosing a driveshaft with respect to diameter, materials, etc. The fact is, even a car making the measly horsepower Buford is currently can experience a failure that will do far more harm than just wrecking a steel tube. Our TCI 700R4 has been working flawlessly and we want to keep it that way.

So, that’s the quick and dirty update on Buford to bring you completely up to date. As soon as we have the right components in place to minimize the chance of a major league destructive failure, we’ll be back on the rollers. We’ve never spared the rod on this thing and we won’t in the future, but having a driveshaft fail at 125-mph and potentially tear up through the floor and really hurt someone is not something we’re interested in doing. We dodged that bullet once and don’t really want to do that again…and yes, we’ll be adding driveshaft loops with the new driveshaft.

HERE’S A LIST OF PREVIOUS BUFORD STORIES TO KEEP YOU UP TO DATE!

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BangShift Daily Tune Up: Hot Rod Heart - John Fogerty (1997)

7 thoughts on “Project Buford T Justice Update: Where Has Our 9C1 Caprice Been Hiding?”

  1. Andy

    Nice!! I can’t wait to see what happens next!
    Absolutely true on the critial speed of the driveshaft.
    Just youtube “mustang driveshaft failure” and you’ll see a bunch of late model V6 mustangs popping their driveshafts once they travel over 125mph.

    Man…how many of us just got lucky when blasting out a top speed run with a factory shaft?

    My Mustang has a Dynotech shaft in it. Not cheap, but you get what you pay for.

  2. Russell

    What is the RPM of the Driveshaft at 125? How do you determine critical speed for a drive shaft?

  4. TheSilverBuick

    Brian and I were talking about driveshafts and it’s been on the upgrade list for a long time on the Skylark. Still running the stock V6 drive shaft on my Skylark, I know I know. I’m looking to swap it out this summer when I swap out the rear axle.

  5. Darren N.

    I’m super interested in seeing the upcoming drive shaft tech. I’ve got a few questions in general about driveline vibration that I’d like to ask the pro’s:

    It’s easy to estimate the shaft’s critical speed if it were perfectly isolated/mounted. But in an actual running vehicle are there other significant contributors to driveline vibration?

    If failure occurs outside of the range of expected critical speed where do you start looking?

    How much of an influence, if any, do u-joints, motor mounts or trans mounts have?

    Sincerely,
    A former cop car owner also with driveshaft puking tendencies

  6. Anthony

    Im interested in the driveshaft situation as well as what fixed the Carb. Brian get one of those portable shed/tent things from Harbor freight. It will help with this friggin shit snow !

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