The story of how Westside Collision in Lancaster “hopped-aboard” the LS train
Antelope Valley car show judges and other custom enthusiasts applaud the Nova II that forever created a protocol for hot rod-building
The child of a bodyman from Northridge, California, I spent the beginnings of my teenhood trying to figure everything out. But what exactly I was trying to figure out were a little different from the concerns of most early teenagers. In this case, my 12-14-year-old mind was overly-busy trying to figure out different engine and trans configurations, because at that point in life, we do tend to be nubiles in the world of all things automotive. I had a lot of misconceptions in mind, back then, about cars and how cars work, the absolute best angles for building a drivetrain. But with time, a lot of my misconceptions would be disproved, and I would eventually come to be grateful for that education.
One of the very first of my “bubbles” that would be “bursted” about cars is that anything that isn’t built in the backwoods with 8 cylinders or up is not worthy of a high-performance article like the very one that you are reading. I think, in retrospect, that that was a very bad notion for a young kid who’s into cars to have in his or her psyche, and I think that it was a notion that the adult gearheads in my life had to break, and, like so many of the cars that I was hooked-on, fast. This would first come to pass as I spent a lot more time around friends’ and family friends’ garages, all throughout the San Fernando Valley. Those were the places where I received what I consider to be my real education, by watching those men execute many different kinds of projects on many different occasions.
The “8-cylinder” notion was first broken, for me, at the random age of 14 when a stroll past a neighbor’s house revealed a few things: first, a Marina blue, ’66 Vette, second, a white mini truck that appeared to be a Chevy two-door Blazer with some very intriguing ground effects and an appetite for speed (both the ground effects and the speed from the factory apparently!), and a Buick Regal, which apparently belonged to the guy with the Corvette, that had a round, black-faced speedo inside of it that read up to 160 mph, though something didn’t seem right about the white mini truck or the blacked-out Regal. There was something that was subtle but scary about the late-model performers, and that was my very first introduction to late-model performance, an introduction I can promise you I would never forget.
Skipping ahead to another incident that happened around the same time, dad and I had started to build my small-scale model of a ’70 Chevelle SS. I was also new to traditional muscle cars at that time, but dad, a previous Chevelle owner himself, seemed to have a knack for it. He knew better than I ever could which shades of black paint differentiated the seats from the dashboard, assuming that the car really was a 1970 and that the interior was factory-correct. Dad knew, for example, that between the flat black and the high-gloss, that it was the high-gloss paint that worked best for the bucket seats, while the flat paint looked best on the dash and door/roof panels. He also taught me that the difference between “Competition” and “Hugger” orange is that one goes on to the engine covers and manifolds while the other applies to body and interior. That was the first lesson that he had taught me in paint and bodywork, primer-prep and all, but dad’s philosophy behind building a car’s platform would not show itself until 11 or 12 years later.
It’s actually funny, because General Motors introduced the LS motor series in ’97, around the same time that dad and I were putting-together my cranberry-red, model Chevelle. At that time, the LS was a brand new, factory-built motor with a warranty and EFI, so the market of old iron with late-model drivetrains retrofitted into them was something that was non-existent at the time. Actually, most of what we were reading in Super Chevy and Hot Rod were tech articles about putting-together 2.02/1.06 valvetrains for conventional small blocks, along with various articles about head porting and body prep, for those hot rod builders who hoped to achieve a showroom finish in the sense of appearance. Come to think of it, the articles I read in junior high and the early part of high school were not too much different from the auto mags my dad and his friends were reading when they were kids, except that Centerlines were out-of-style by the late ‘90s/early millennium, V8 Vegas might have been replaced with V6 Cavaliers, and of course our generation of drag racers rarely brought primered “door-slammers” anywhere, even to the dragstrip itself. But as the concept of a modern “Muscle Car era” or a new-age “horsepower war” came closer and closer to reality, another reality also unfolded: the reality of retrofitting Vortec and LS engines, entire platforms as a matter of fact, into what “smog states” like California would call “Early” makes and models, those 30 years or older.
In the spring of 2007, my dad had surprised me and the rest of our family with a ’64 Nova II, a solid hardtop car from the AV that was originally an Ohio-built model. Apparently, the previous owner of the car had started it as a pro-street project, but the quarter-mile car that was to become from the first-generation Nova never was completed. What my dad was left with was the leftover from that project, namely a blown-and-cammed 350 punched out to a 355, a GM 12-bolt rear and an outdated Richmond 6-speed that shifted like butter, quite literally, as the infamous “slop” from the Richmond gear box caused a lot of pain to the hot-rodded Nova as the car struggled to regain a powerband just from one gear to the next. On top of this, the car’s previous owner failed to mention just how many miles had been put on the blown, 355 motor after the last phase of the hot rod project had been completed. The previous owner had also failed to mention that if we actually did run the blower with the small-diameter pulley sold with the car, that there was just a slight risk involved in punching a hole somewhere at the bottom end of the engine itself, which would eventually happen anyway.
After the 355 motor was history, a 4-bolt 350 that ran great, but wasn’t nearly as interesting as the pro-streeted 355 was dropped in, a Dominator Series 4-barrel eventually being replaced by an Edelbrock injection unit in an attempt to make the whole thing run evenly.
If there was anything significant about the first fuel-injected small block to run in the Nova, it was the use of the fuel injection itself. Dad’s first attempt at using electronic injection in an original muscle car wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as the LS conversion that would later follow. Honestly, Edelbrock’s answer to “plug-and-play” and their definition of “bolt-on” fuel injection was a little bit of a hoax, but me and my dad wouldn’t figure that part out until much later, when Edelbrock’s hand-held adjustment module failed to calibrate for the profile of cam that the small block was running, causing the motor to either starve or flood, but never in-between.
In that context, I think that dad realized before a lot of us that aftermarket fuel injection was a fantastic invention in theory, but it just wasn’t all that great in practice. It was actually my dad who first taught me this concept about aftermarket equipment/applications, and their uses in the high-performance craft. After that it was clear that GM factory “stuff” was really the way to go.
This is where the conversation about the LS motor kicked-in, because the whole concept behind the conversion itself was that an old-school street car would be built with a late-model, factory-certified and developed street engine, a street engine that utilized GM’s best in terms of computer-controlled spark and fuel systems. The whole idea seemed to interfere with the very hot rod tradition, but no one could deny that high-tech drivetrains, because of their self-adjusting nature, are just that much easier to deal with in the way of prep and maintenance. Dad understood this, and so his mission became to do an LS1/6-speed conversion on his now “prototype” Nova II.
The drivetrain in question would be transplanted from an ’04 Pontiac GTO, a car that didn’t last too long with GM’s American sector, though the LS1 motor with the ‘Vette Z06 intake and Trimec, T-56 trans was a perfect platform for a 1960s “econo” car that weighed 3000 pounds or less, back when it was still original.
The other argument in favor of the LS-motor conversion in the Nova was that if a modern GTO could run, with the same setup, mid-13s in the quarter, then an early Nova, with the exact same drivetrain and power output, could easily pull-off low 12s to high 11s. With time, dad would send the motor out to be cammed with a Comp “Thumper” grind, and some intake and exhaust work would follow to bring the otherwise stock LS1 into the even-400 horse range. Otherwise, the unibody construction of the Nova II was the main cause of its “slippery” driving dynamic, and running the GTO drivetrain in the mid-sized car with its equally modern suspension components complimented the “hairball” factor of the whole driving experience.
Another concept that was paid careful attention to in this conversion was the use of modern interior implements, such as white-faced, aftermarket gauges and late-model, GM seats in place of an original bench. But the most recent addition to all of these is a retrofitted air conditioning unit from Classic Air. Along with an aftermarket wiring harness from the Arkansas-based Speed and Performance, the custom Nova II has also been retrofitted with a ChassisWorks front-end with coil-over shocks and custom motor mounts. As far as hooking up the electronics of the car, Mark from Speed and Performance was especially helpful, and the system as a whole came together in the plug-and-play fashion that everyone had expected. Speed and Perf was also responsible for the installation and programming of the PROM, or onboard computer, as well as the header installation.
What the idea behind the LS conversion does is reinforce a notion, and even a market, that is still pretty new. The idea of using factory-installed engines in hot rods was one that I could’ve told you was the most successful, even going back to the limited number of 427-powered, ZL1 Camaros that were ordered during the first generation of the F-body. But as far as using late-model platforms in pre-smog cars, that concept was made most clear by my dad and his Nova II conversion.
- Sal Alaimo Jr., B. A. (3/30/11)
S. J. A.
