Chevy Nova Chassisworks - It's Saturday Night

Then the stock brake/clutch assembly bracket was disconnected and removed. This will be discarded, since we plan to run a new set of pedals that will pivot off of the floor. If you're planning to do the same frame tie-in, you may want to save this piece and use the stock pedals.

After removing the front sheetmetal and engine, the first step we did was to set the car on jackstands. To be sure that the front clip didn't move on us after the floor and firewall were removed, we measured the distance from the garage floor and recorded it for future reference.

With all of the extraneous brackets and hardware out of the way, we fired up the slick little HTP America Micro Cut 250 plasma cutter and started slicing through the floor's sheetmetal. Since our original plan before deciding to take the car to Vegas was to do one side at a time, that's the approach we took at removing the floor section and transmission tunnel.

HTP's Micro Cut 250 made short order of the Nova's floor. The only problem we discovered is that where there was factory seam sealer we might get a little flame or fire started. An easy fix was to use a gasket scraper and remove as much of the rubber material as possible.

Our last cut inside the car was at the base of the firewall on the driver's side. From there, we turned the cutter's tip on to the firewall.

Once the majority of the firewall's sheetmetal (of the half we had planned to cut out) was removed, all that remained was the unibody's structural boss. Since we had left the front framerail mounted to the boss, all we had to do was loosen the fasteners and remove the hunk of metal.