Mirror Topz polished 316 stainless steel bolts have that deep lusture that you can see your face in. Ideal to go with high quality polished parts. Perfect for your bike, motorcycle, Hot Rod, Street Machine, Restored car, or boat. Gives your engine that completely chromed look when you use with other highly polished parts, for example aluminium inlet manifolds, timing covers, water necks, water pumps, etc. When you assemble your highly polished engine parts with Mirror Topz they will tend to blend in with their surroundings so you notice the bolts less and can admire the engine finish.
Mirror Topz is our Premium range of polished stainless steel bolts processed to suit the tastes of those who want the best. All MirrorTopz are 316 stainless steel bolts. Even when your pride and joy needs another paint job, it won't need new polished bolts if you have installed Mirror Topz premium polished stainless steel bolts.
If your polished parts are not to a high reflective mirror type polished then check out our Kustom Bitz standard range as they may better suit in that instance. The KustomBitz standard range is brighter than chome but because they are not machined to a mirror finish like our Mirror Topz, they complement parts that are bright but not mirrored. So choose wisely it all depends on the look and effect you want. Typically our opinion is that you do not want the bolts to look better than the polished part they are holding on. If it is a painted part either will look great.
Mirror Topz bolts fitted to big block Chevy stainless headers, MirrorTopz nylock nuts used to assemble a quick change rear end, MT nuts and bolts used on polished stainless steel exhaust system flanges and our custom stainless thin nylock nuts on the rear hair pin radius rods with our new chromed head high tensile Mirror Topz bolts for suspension components. Click on the photos below to see larger.
You would think a supercharger kit install would be pretty simple .... well no, is the short answer.
A wise man once told me a 'kit' is not a solution. And having worked on a few of these set ups now these words keep ringing in my head and I remember this old man who at the time I didn't think was that wise at all .... now I am older and I see.
In this install I had to port match the heads to the intake as there was a substantial lip into the head port because of the large intake manifold ports. If not corrected would have led to fuel puddling and fouled plugs and drivability problems that would have been hard to diagnose once assembled. Also the distributor hole at the back of the manifold was off centre and way too big for a standard chevy dizzy and any aftermarket dizzy too. So I had to make a boss to take up the slack and provide a stable boss for the dizzy clamp to work properly.
To add to the woes, the engine assembler failed to pick up that it was a tall deck block and required a longer oil pump drive shaft .... that was hard to diagnose when a new engine loses oil pressure for no reason.
I got there in the end with modded accelerator links, better fuel line route, boost referenced carburettors and a proper harmonic balancer for a blower application. The install was challenging on this one but the end result was a sweet running engine with monster amounts of torque to hall this heavy full size sedan around the hills .... and cool looks of course.
41 Willy Coupe chassis fabricated to original dimensions yet extra strength provided in the depth of the chassis and via tubular centre X member and many tubular cross members to take the weight and torque of a big block Ford drive line. This chassis will have an original steel body fitted to it and the owner wants the whole car to resemble an early 60s drag car, right down to the rear radius rods that look like ladder bars, however it has to have nice street manners and pass ASRF construction guidelines for safe street rod engineering. Now many may argue a leaf sprung front end and rear end is not the best handling street car and I would agree, but there are always trade offs for the look you want and the right combination of parts installed with the correct geometry can still yield a very nice driver with a really cool look. When driven responsibly this 41 Willys will provide hours of enjoyment for the owner cruising around.
Chassis by Kustom Bitz [our custom designed rails], Engine Ford Hemi V8, T400 auto, 9" diff installed on leaf springs with diff housing floaters designed by Kustom Bitz for street use [so we have flexibility and suspension give], Super Bell front I beam with disc brakes cleverly mounted to parallel leaf springs without any mods to I beam and not relying on welded parts.
See our section on Hot Rod Chassis construction for more images of our various Willys Coupe chassis that Kustom Bitz has built.
The Toyota Crown ute is progressing along, the body is fitting the modified original chassis and this is how it will look when it's dropped ... I think it has the right stance ... The framing you can see is holding the upper body together as the floor and lower sections are rusted away and have been cut out, then to be completely refabbed by us. The frame allows us to lift the body on and off as we please during this stage.
Kustom Bitz just completed a 35-41 chassis, stepped up at the rear and a reversed centre X member allow this chassis to sit 40mm off the deck. It runs a Rod Tech IFS, big block chevy and L80E auto, a 9 inch diff with floating hubs, all on modified original rails. Kustom Bitz has developed our own boxing plates that suit the original rails near on perfectly. Original Ford rails are curved from front to back there are no straight sections, so to get something that fits right we had to jig the chassis up and map them out. This is what we do, when it just needs to be done right to make it a well engineered car. This allowed us to make a nice transistion for a high step at the rear. We have designed in 6 inches of travel at the back, so this car can have a normal, almost stock ride height then dumped to the max when parked.
'67 Toyota Crown ute chassis build is going well. Got the LS engine and 6 speed manual box in place and we can use all the orginal serpentine pulleys, brackets etc. The narrow wheel track on the Toyota called for a tailored solution when it came to the front end. These old Toyotas dont have service parts available any more so the front end had to be changed, so that made a brake upgrade alot easier too. We run R6 air bags from Air Ride sitting at a ride height of 6" for the air bag so got plenty of air volume in them for a good ride quality and a full length travel shock absorber so we get proper rebound tuning, along with a power steering rack. So at the sill [belly of the car] we get a 5" ride hieght with a 4 inch drop, this thing will look great.
Recently in Victoria some engineers have called for the upper and lower mounts for the rear coil over shockers to be a double shear bracket. The thoery is that the bolt has too much twisting force on it and it will break. Well thats why on Hot Rods we use a 5/8" grade 8 bolt in a single shear bracket application to over engineer it so it does not break. A typical OEM application uses a 1/2" bolt in a double shear bracket. However to please the engineer we have thought out a simple plate kit that can be welded in on the upper mounts as you see here to satisfy their requirements and should fit into most applications without too much effort or rework. We have a lower mount bracket nutted out as well.
So many hot rod shops don't install proper bump stops. In this instance we had to rebuild the shocker mounts on the diff as the rear end was bottoming out on the shocker travel becasue it had no properly designed bump stops in place. So the shock absorber mounting bracket was absorbing every bump when the suspension bottomed out, easy to see why both mounts broke.
While we were repairing the diff I made a simple yet effective progressive bump stop that is held in place via the U bolts that hold the diff to the leaf springs. It turned out a very successful set up.
This is yet another example how Kustom Bitz can sort out problems on your custom car or hot rod, its what we do.
Back in the day Group C racing one of the tricks to get the Holden Torana to handle nice and be more predictable in corners was to fit a rear pan hard bar to give much better diff locating than the OEM triangulated 4 bars offered. However the body, subframe and floor pan at the rear is no where near strong enoungh to concentrate the loads of pan hard bar in any one spot, so it has to be carefully planned and constructed, especially so in a street car like this that we cannot put a full roll cage in. You see in a race car I can place the roll cage in a position to pick up such loads placed on the pan hard bar brackets, but in this situaton we couldn't.
The picture above is with the unit installed, keep in mind the car was just a shell so no weight was in it and the rear is sitting high. Once the full wieght of the car is on, it will sit fairly level. It retains the original triangulated 4 bars however we run PU bushes in the bottom arms and ordinary rubber in the top arms. So the lower arms and pan hard bar do the locating and the top arms have some give so they don't bind with the pan hard bar.
We have put a lot of time and effort into this 38 Plymouth. The whole rear lower panel and floor right through to under the seat has been completely hand fabricated and replaced. The front and rear mud guards have been widened and the shape reworked for cleaner lines, the guard edge now follows the wheel's shape and shall feature a straight edge running board.to clean up those ugly Plymouth bits but still retain some typically Plymouth features like the swage lines. We have basically just fattened it up and made it more curvey.
First pass for the day in Q1 in Vintage Gas [V/Gas] and we did our first wheels up launch in "Angas" and later in the day ran our best time so far with this combo with an 8.80s for the 1/8th mile track with an ET of 79mph.
The venue was Sunset Dragway which is just outside Mildura in country VIC. It was a 20deg sunny spring day with little wind, an all but perfect day for this time of year. Great facilities at this venue for grass roots racers like us and they really looked after all of us racers, so its well worth the trip we had a blast.
As far as our little 105e Anglia Gasser goes there is still heaps in it yet when a few tech issues get sorted out, but totally stoked at the moment. woo whooo .....
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