Strangest modifications you made as a kid.
 

How about the strangest, weirdest or more stupid modifications you made to your Pontiacs as a kid.

I was a tinkerer .... I hooked up an electric antenna motor to my glove box door. Used the driven nylon core of the antenna to open and close the glove box door. I could make it open and close real quick like a berserk giant clam.

I installed a home 8-track stereo under the dash. Bypassed the AC transformer and ran it on the straight 12v DC from the battery ... and it did work for a while.

I removed the front wheel wells cause I thought it would look cool ... it did make working on the exhaust manifolds and changing plugs easier ... but the battery fell out once.


http://forums.maxperformanceinc.com/...9&d=1607700013

I glued a rubber trim around my car's dashboard. Making it look cheap.

I had Midas weld in a cut-out on my '62 F-85. Worked fine until the wire rusted in the cable, of course w/the valve in the wide open position. And of course the tickets followed. So back to Midas for new section of pipe. Sadder (and poorer) but wiser........

Nothing odd like @dataway did. I added fog lights on my 1972 Nova (first car) and then added a red light under each rear shock mount. I think I added a colored light under the dash too if I remember...which I don't.

I don't think I want to confess to these in print ;)

But a couple of them involved the addition of a model T Ford spark coil.

Jon.

Not a Pontiac but my first car at 16 was a '63 Impala that had the radio speaker in the back seat with that metal grille. I rigged up a blue light behind it so I could turn it on from the drivers' seat. I thought that all those little perforations in the grille made the headliner look like a disco club..it didn't but I still had a cool blue light in my car....lol
Found a pic-
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/MMwAA...-TY/s-l640.jpg

Putting muffler clamps on shock absorbers on my dad's 64 Catalina to jack the back up. My buddy George had a 59 Catalina convertible. We stood in trunk in his dad's garage to hook shocks up springs were so heavy,Then, he put 2x6 lumber under front frames to jack it up! No bs. One time he hit a bump and 2x6 feel out on one side! Oh to be young and foolish or daring!!

My cousin bought a windshield washer kit. Filled it with a bleach/water mix, and routed the outlets to spray in front of his rear tires. Stock (at this time) '78 T/A with 2.56 gears. He did some cool burnouts!!

Did the same as above ^^ however it was filled with Jack Daniels and it came out of a hose in the glovebox.

My buddy routed a windshield washer to pump ATF into the exhaust pipe just below the manifold outlet. It made the most incredible smoke machine.

I remember that one, for a while there were quite a few cars with lights up under in the rear axle area.

I'm ashamed to post this one.
Besides the other horrors .... no fender wells.

http://forums.maxperformanceinc.com/...3&d=1607717916

built a v8 vega out of parts from the junkyard next door. radiator would not fit with fan setup, so we took the grille out and mounted it between the bumper and header panel . our high school auto repair teacher just shook his head.

Don't know if this counts as a modification. When i was 18 I had a 68 442 with a bad vinyl top. I ripped it off sanded it down and painted it with semigloss rustolium with paint roller. Actually looked good from 20'. Bought it for $300 and towed it home 15 miles with a chain and a buddy. Ended up selling it for $2000, Wish I still had it loved the body style.

Sure that counts, I had lots of ill advised painting adventures.

ts3189 ... back in Memphis in the mid 70's a "little person" named Billy Desmute if I remember correctly was the terror of Summer Ave. Had a V8 Vega he would bring to the Krystal drive-in restaurant on a trailer and take on all comers. Sat on a phone book and had blocks on the pedals.

We did this and routed it the same way, only we put traction bite in it and street raced :3gears:

I too installed a secondary windshield washer pump, with the push button neatly installed on my dashboard. I mounted the spray nozzles just above the rear license plate, spraying up at about 45 degrees and directly behind the vehicle. You might wonder why, and I'll tell you this - when some idiot is tailgating your ass on the freeway, a few shots from the sprayer covers their windshield with water, which pisses them off and they just go around or back off. I called it the "Tail-B-Gone", LMAO

I ran the hose to the rear of the passenger seat. A couple of pushes and they think they wet their pants!

I think I got the idea from a Car Craft magazine.
When I got my drivers license, but before I bought my GTO, I drove my mothers ‘73 Delta 88. Rocket 350 , 2 barrel, single exhaust, and highway gears. I ran a flexible drier duct that I duct taped to the air cleaner snorkel down to under the core support. I then duct taped a big funnel to the end. “It’s got RamAir man!”

Being a keep it stock guy my craziest mods to a GTO are rather tame to say the least...

1... i once painted the white part of the grill emblem on a 68 goat red instead of white.

2...i once put a red carpet instead of black into that same 68, it had an ivory interior and was solar red outside

I'm still ashamed how I butchered that car.

My buddy and I put some of the lights that responded to different sound levels under the dash. The whole car would flash to the beat of the music!

My dad and uncle told me about making a flame thrower exhaust for one of their cars in their youth. My uncle helped me build one for an old truck dad had. It's been almost 50 years, but you build it out of junk parks. It works really well on something that has a manual choke. You first drill holes into the exhaust pipe at the back of the car. You then install a couple of spark plugs into the holes. You will need a small electric motor to drive a distributor to ignite the plugs. I built a small box to house a points distributor, coil and I think we used a windshield wiper motor. This contraption is powered by a 12V source form the battery, which is turned on and off by a switch accessible to the driver.

When the system is installed, you rev up the truck engine, pull the choke out, and turn on the electric motor. The spark plugs ignite the raw gas coming out the exhaust and it will shoot flames out the rear.

First car was a 66 Mustang coupe. Pulled the back seat out, replaced it with a piece of plywood, with 4 speakers in it, coming from the underdash 8 track. Same car, installed a console from a 68 Impala SS. Almost fit.

Please tell me this was for flame throwers

In 1974 Dad was convinced he should hacksaw the Connecting rod to the Olds V8 with a Bad CYL. So i helped drop the Oil Pan and Held the light while he hacksawed the rod from the big end. He pushed the piston to TDC, probably undid the pushrods, and I remember he shimmed the Rod big end do it was tight and would clear the block on rotation.

Well. we got it buttoned up and started it, then drove it. Boy did it vibrate. Was like the quietest vibrating V7 you could imagine. Pretty sure that dar was gone after 2 months later.

That’s a new one to me!

I was 8 years old then and my thoughts then were wondering why do this, why this way. And when we drove the car my thought was this thing is done. We called it "the bomb".

He was a good and schmardt Dad, but Dad didn't work on any of our Pontiacs.

They could certainly have been used in that manner.

It is rumored that an excellent theft control can also be made from one.

Jon.

Neighbor had a 68 black high po Mustang fastback. He removed one piston and rod for some reason. I remember him driving the car to work. Cant imagine fuel in oil.

A friend of mine did the same thing in his 66 GTO....only it was for vodka.

That device, if I remember correctly was the "Remove your Fat AZE" (from the front fender of my car you are leaning on." A very good "removal" device.

I had a GTO with 3.90 gears so I rolled along at a slower speed than some other vehicles. I was running factory manifolds and head pipes at the time.

A windshield washer pump and bottle allowed some light weight machine oil to enter the exhaust pipes, BURN, and emit some very good "Mosquito Killer" smoke vapors out the rear of the exhaust splitters if some one was tailgating you.

Tom V.

After I got my 69 Camaro in high school back in the late 80s I wanted to put cooler wheels on it to replace the then uncool factory dog dish hubcap/wheel setup.
Bought some cheap imitation Cragar look alike that my HS shop teacher warned me about buying. Found out the tire shop couldn’t even balance them very well. They told me they were complete junk and refused to put them on the car.
Put them on my self and drove the car anyway and it shook a lot and found out one was actually built crooked as I measured the depth in the rim. Luckily, Wise speed shop refunded my money.
Found some nice Chevy Rally sports for less and they’re still on the car.

I took a 66 Caprice I had and swapped in a 4 speed behind the 283 with 2 series gears. What an awful combo that was, taking off from a dead stop was painful but it would do 70 in 1st gear.

Kinda car related...

Had(still have stored away somewhere???lol) HO slot cars with a 4 lane slalom track and a 25' drag strip.

Upgrades with performance armature/magnet/brush sets.
Graphited the axles and gears ect.
Largest tallest silicone slicks could get. Better for top half of track on real fast cars.
Shortened all "slot pins" so wouldn't drag in groove.
Experimented mixing/matching parts from different kits resulted in even faster cars.

Be 3-4 of us at a time betting on each others cars on 1/4 mile races same as our older brothers did with their street/strip cars lol.
My fastest car only had to come out the case 1 time ever ;) when my 2nd and 3rd fastest cars needed cleanup real bad after dozens of run each. It would beat my 2nd fastest by 2'.
No one had ever seen it except my older brother was home one night and I showed him testing with lights out. It would throw sparks nearly 2" wide :D
No one would ever let me use that one again...

Anyhow, long story short, most unusual mod was one I day decided to use extra burned up chassis and parts to make an all wheel drive car.
Took some experimenting, trial and error, but turned out good. Don't go any faster though...

Back in high school I helped a friend put a Ford "y" block into a '60 Impala convertible. Not sure why since sbcs were plentiful.

I took a couple of empty Maxwell house coffee cans, spray painted them silver and drilled a small hole in the center of the bottom of the cans. Then I took a piece of 1 x 6 pine about a foot long and screwed the two cans to the board leaving about 6 inches between the cans. Then I took off the "top" part of my shaker scoop on my 79 TA and used a piece of rope to tie the pine board with the cans to the "bottom" part of the shaker (the air cleaner housing). Up close it was an obvious fake, but driving by it looked pretty good. I fooled all my car buddies that were at the local car hangout when I drove by. They all thought I had dual quads with velocity stacks!

I wish I had taken some pictures, but didn't. Oh well.

1984. 28 Years old. Car Craft and Hot Rod had whazzu TA's and Camaro's on the covers. Crazy mods.

So I had a mint 78 TA. One of the now desirable TA 6.6, 4 speed, WS6 ones, optioned out. So I pulled the back flares off to be different. Molded an L88 scoop to the hood. Painted it the most neon red I could (from tasteful brown). I was Car Craft Cool! I really hope someone has put that car back to stock. It is a truly pitiful chapter in my Poncho history.

When I was in Jr High I made my own glass pack muffler. Vacuum cleaner pipe with a bunch of holes drilled in it. Two coffee cans with a big hole cut in the bottoms. Pack the cans with fiberglass house insulation, slip them over the pipe, solder the seam. Couldn't convince dad to put it on his Plymouth Valiant.

When I had a learner's permit me and my buddies would jack up the back of the folks 68 Catalina and stuff pieces of 2x4 in the back springs. All it accomplished was scattering chunks of lumber on the street when I hit a bump.

I had a 68 Firebird that had so much blowby I put a 'catch can' on the PCV system and mounted it on the fender well. It was a glass pickle jar and I could see when it was getting full so I could empty it.

I hope you were frugal enough to pour it back in!

Back in the mid-60's day I put red stick-on vinyl racing stripes on my blue charcoal 65 GTO. It was a center stripe about a foot wide with parallel 2" stripes . Got tired of them quick. Sounds crazy now but I also put factory exhaust splitters on it but got tired of them too after a while.

I also made a tripower ram air pan out of the metal side of a washing machine and some foam rubber from a mattress shop. Worked fine!

I put the dual wiper blades on my Nova because a girl I dated said they were cool. I think they shaved at least a second off my time in the 1/4 mile. I also bought the shorty header (I didn't have headers) Accel u-groove spark plugs because a friend of mine said it would make my car faster. He was also the same guy who said that we should drill holes in his mufflers to release the back-pressure in the engine. All it did was make his truck back fire something crazy.

90 degree gutter pipe connected to a dryer hose to my air box on my 86 Mustang LX 5.0
Knocked off 2 tenths in the quarter.

'39 Hudson field car, back in 1955- removed the right hand windshield pane so my buddy could literally "ride shotgun" and shoot at woodchucks as I idled through the fields.

These are awesome.

Once used a Diet Coke can and rivets to fix a rusty lower quarter on a 76 TA, then fiberglassed over it.

Had a beautiful Flame Red Metallic GTA in college. Bought it from the original owner. Digital dash and everything. This was the late 90’s and I hung out at a mustang shop. Everything we had was slammed. I pulled the coils to cut them hoping for a 2” drop. Cut 1” off the springs, put them back in with no real change. Pulled them right back out and cut them again. Went to lower the car and it sat down on the jack! We had to lift up on the fenders to get it off the jack! It must have dropped the car 4” and it was sitting on the bump stops.... but damn did it look cool! That poor car ended up with neon underneath it (GroundGlo!) and neon under the grills in the hood.

Here are some before and after pics of that car:

Since I lived in the land of rust, and PA once required that all the sheetmetal on the exterior of the car have no holes over 1/2 inch, and the floorboards, and inner fender wells could have no holes whatsoever. We would use nylon self adhesive drywall tape over the holes, (close to window screen) followed with Duraglass or Bondo to make the required air tight permanent seal. This was reserved for daily driver type/winter beater vehicles, not our prized possessions that we drove in the good weather.

It works pretty well to close up gapping rust holes in sheetmetal that you don't want to weld metal patches to. If you take the time to smooth it out you can spray bomb the repair and it doesn't look hideous. Good until the surrounding metal also rusts away, if you still have the car, you just repeat the process............LOL

The coarse nylon screen gives the repair quite a bit of rigidity and integrity, similar to fiberglass mat, and is able to be penetrated by the thick Duraglass or Bondo for adhesion to the body panel. Duraglass was always my go to for these repairs.

I bought all the 66 GTO grill parts and put them in a 66 Tempest Custom. All brand new parts. I did that back in '72 when I was working at Eastman Kodak, and got them from my local Pontiac dealer in Rochester, NY on Lake Ave. It only cost me about $75.00 to do it.

Also made a trade and added a 66 GTO hood a friend had off his 65 Lemans that he put thru a ditch and totaled the frame. Tho the 65 body was actually in pretty good shape he ended up sending it off to the junk yard. If I'd known how to do it I could have swapped his 65 body over to my 66 GTO frame. I totaled that first 66 GTO but the frame was still good. I rolled it over a frozen hard-pack snow bank in April of '71, up in the frozen North of NY.

This is the best photo I have of the Tempest Custom. You can see the GTO hood and just see the left side GTO parking light lens. BTW, his 65 and my 66 were the same color.... Nightwatch Blue.

My dad let my brother and I have his 74 f100 with a 240 6 banger 3 on the tree. A friend had just totaled his 351 Cleveland Torino. So we found out it would go in with a 302 bellhousing so we made the swap using the trucks running gear. the freaking thing was a beast and would leap with every shift. Up to 65 mph. We could however beat anyone we knew off the line with this impressive launch so we would just tach it out and abruptly quit the race having clearly shown them we were faster. It went from embarrassing to hilarious to us for some reason. Plans to put in the Torinos C6 and a gear swap were dashed when my brother was t- boned by a Buick. killed the truck, bro ok.

I don’t know if this counts as a “modification,” but at some point I apparently disconnected the vacuum advance from my distributor, plugged it with a Phillips screwdriver, and drove my car around like that for awhile. I didn’t remember doing it but I left my car sit for three years while I was in the Army, and when I got out of the service I came home and started working on the car. First time I popped the hood in three years I saw the screwdriver sticking out of the vacuum line and thought, “wtf is that doing in there?”

Down in Missouri in the old days we used to have lots of trucks run over the speed limit on the two lane blacktop roads. Some would be right on your bumper at times.

I had my grandfather's Dodge 330 (426m wedge) hooked up with a couple of spark plugs so you could get a backfire/flame out of the exhaust. You might have seen a similar deal in a couple of Hot Rod Movies in the old days.

The other mod I made to that car was, as I have posted in the past years ago, something to keep the trucks off my bumper. So if they were too close I would speed up, hit the backfire button, and turn on the windshield washer pump that would spray light weight machine oil into the exhaust after the spark plugs. There was always some left over gas mixture in the exhaust after the acceleration with the carb calibration.

Massive amounts of oily smoke would pour out of the exhaust pipes, like I had a mechanical issue. But the oil would go everywhere on the idiots nice shiny Simi-Tractor and Trailer. Royal pain to wash it off too.

I would pull off the side of the road and let the guy find the oil all over his truck at the Truck Stop. Fogged a gas stations windows one time too.
Guy was a real as-wipe.

Tom V.

My father built a door shocker for his old Dodge.
i was a little kid at the time but i remember the switch under the dash, the coil, and also the ground wire hanging from the bottom of the car.
He said he shocked the same co-worker every day for a week.
I probably still have that coil and braided ground wire somewhere.