Re-Flange It!

We check out the fab skills needed to run a flat hood on a 1970 Mustang with a very unique and too-tall engine.

- STEVEN RUPP

Hot-rodding is a game of trying to figure out how to get from idea A to result B. Having a vision of what you want is the easy part; figuring out how to make it happen is the challenge-but it's also the biggest reward when you pull it off. Mark McDonald runs a fab shop called GforceFab and his mission in life is to turn ideas into reality.

Right now, he's working over a 1970 Mustang Fastback for customer Eric Vibe. Vibe wants his 'Stang to have a Boss 429 look, and part of that is fitting the engine under a flat factory hood. To complicate things, the engine is a 9.5-inch deck 351 Windsor punched out to 427 inches and running heads from Greg Brown over at Hammerhead Performance Engines, who is also going to build the final engine. He makes insane hemi-style heads for a variety of engines, from LS mills to this Ford small-block.

The engine, with its tall Edelbrock Super Victor intake and billet EFI throttle body, wasn't going to squeeze under the hood, and changing from the flat hood wasn't an option. That left only a few choices on the table: go with an expensive sheet metal intake that wouldn't have the right look, or go to town on the stock Edelbrock intake and lop off some height. As McDonald told us, "I wanted to use a unique engine in this build, and what better than a Hemi-headed small-block Ford that looks like a Boss 429 under a stock flat hood? The Hammerhead Hemi heads do have a downside in that they raise the intake 1.5 inches, and I'm going EFI, so without making a full over-the-top sheet metal intake I felt it would be easier to modify an existing intake."

McDonald is always up for a fabrication challenge, so he fired up the Bridgeport, loaded the spool gun on his trusty Miller 210 welder, and got busy doing what hotrodders do.