Gasser axle components, axle kits and or complete installs. Gassers as they were known back in the 60’s through to early 70’s were state of the art drag cars for their time. The theory of the time was to help with weight transfer for tyre grip because when you raise the front of the car it places more weight on the back tyre.
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The easiest way to do this was with a straight axle and semi elliptic springs. The other advantage was it cleared the engine bay and gave you more room for the engine and oil pan. The other reason was that straight axles were quite common in old cars found at the wrecking yards so they were cheap and plentiful at the time, hence many of the old gasser dragsters were quite unsafe from an engineering perspective with all sorts of back yard hacks having a go at it. These days it is harder to get away with poor engineering and in reality we want to build something to be proud of and good engineered parts on our car is where it's at.
Now you can capture that classic look of the gasser dragster with Kustom Bitz gasser axle components to allow you to build a safe vintage gas drag car and go nostalgia drag racing or just have some fun at the hot rod drags.
The Kustom Bitz gasser axle kit uses 37 to 41 Ford spindles which is common for all aftermarket I beam axles. You can use original Ford spindles, or So-Cal or Rod Tech spindles or we can supply you with our own Lakes Hot Rod Parts spindles.
This allows you to run modern brake components from common Ford rotors, big brakes or Wilwood light weight brakes. Kustom Bitz has parts to allow us to do a chassis car like a mid 50’s Chevy, 48 Anglia, Willy's gasser ...... or a mono construction vehicle like for example Ford Falcons, Sprints, English Ford Anglia’s and more.
Kustom Bitz can supply you with just the axle ends through to setting up the whole front end and steering for you at our factory workshop in Croydon VIC. POA. Shown here in the pics is our own workshop dragster the Kustom Bitz Anglia Gasser.
Kustom Bitz gasser axles are solid with precision machined axle ends. Axle widths can be made to any length, all we need is a wheel bolt face to bolt face length and the centre to centre of the springs for the mounting pads and the pads angle relative to the king pin. Or the spring mounting pads can be fitted but not welded, allowing you to set up your axle and spring package and set the king pin angle [caster] once the springs are in place. All our axles are tig welded [neatly fuse welded] in our own purpose built welding jig for accuracy and strength. It is important to remember though that although the gasser front end seems simple in appearance, it is still easy for the novice home builder to mess up the front end geometry and end up with an unsafe, poor steering and unpredictable car. So seriously consider Kustom Bitz doing the main part of the work for you.
Setting up a dragster to hook up properly is more than just the front end set up, you have to look at the car as a whole. Engine position, steering, rear end, tyres, gearing, chassis rigidity, etc ....... there is quite a bit to it. Even for the guy or girl who just wants to muck about at the hot rod drags, you will enjoy it more if the car is set up properly so have a talk to us about your needs.
You can see the Kustom Bitz Anglia Gasser build photos if you navigate to the the "Project Cars and workshop stories" section on the main menu on the left.
Gasser Axle Kits
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Kustom Bitz is doing an EV conversion on this 1955 MG ZA Magnette. The job is a complete restoration and driveline conversion, it doen't look much at the moment but we have been pulling it apart to completely strip the paint for a full rotiserie restoration on the body. The sills need replacing and the rear guards need some rust repairs but apart from that the body is mint.
You can follow the restoration on https://www.facebook.com/MGEVMagnette
We will be installing an air cooled Hyper9 AC motor and controller with two LFP battery packs, one in the boot and one in the front engine bay. The electric motor will sit in the gearbox tunnel with a Torque Trends USA Long tail housing reduction box, with integral park lock, like an auto trans has.
The base EV technology that is going into this car has been around since the 1990s and I have been selecting, repairing and working on IGBT drive technolgy in the automation industry since that time, so combining my restoration skills and EV technology make sense to me.
Intended as a city run around it should be a pretty stout combination as the Hyper9 puts out a similar torque to a stock 289 Windsor but from zero rpm all the way up. Rated at approx 200hp. The body is light weight at just on 1080kg stock, weight gets pulled out, engine and gear box [all cast iron], and the batteries is similar in weight so ends up around the same once finished.
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.
