Rally Prep

Bender an old soul in need of a new heart

In 2018 we acquired bender. He was in need of a new heart. Here are some of our rally/Bender prep moments. We hope to have some great tips on our site as we grow our team and work to find great solutions. For now we are at the R&D stage tell after a few Stages.

Donor Acquired

E85 Tuned 90k motor was pulled and front end was swapped. To much love for the hawkeye front end and it was in great shape to not want to use it!

Motor swap

We managed to get the swap finished and car running in a month with the help of some of our greatest friends and many late nights. New Timing Belt/water pump, 2006 body harness swap, front end, and the rest of the good parts were all moved over.

Catalytic converter cartridge

We love to make everything simple and easy to fix, so we welded up a bolt in Catalytic converter that fit our exhaust. It can be swapped out with just 2 bolts if it fails and can be removed easily for service. All we needed was a cat in a tube and an exhaust silencer to weld onto the cat housing.

Heater to tight!

We found the Original heater was jammed tight when we went to do our harness swap. We found a smaller more easy to service dedicated heater unit that fit great! It even had a larger heater core vs OEM!

Underbody protection

With the need to update bender to meet ARA rule compliance we found that 18 wheeler mud flaps can be had very cheap and also are very thick to help protect our fuel tank. We may also cut them up for future mud flaps.