It won’t all fit. That was the diagnosis when Ralph sent me a long email with lots of photos. Although we didn’t have the new radiator and its attached electric fan and shroud, we knew that there was only so much room. The radiator goes inside the grille shell. In front of it is the AC condenser which is about an inch thick. Condensers look very much like radiators, just a little thinner, and since they also depend on air flowing through them, are usually located in front of the radiator. Behind the radiator is the fan and covering the fan is the shroud. All in all we guessed about 5 inches. Ralph was worried it wouldn’t fit.

Decision time had come. Fundamentally the only way to get more space is to cut into the firewall. Firewall–that’s the name, now appropriated by the electronics industry, but originally the domain of every automobile with a gasoline burning engine under the hood. The combustion of a volatile air/fuel mixture is supposed to take place inside the engine. That’s why we call them internal combustion engines.

Sometimes, not often, but experienced by most every hot rodder, is external combustion and that isn’t good. Hence the need for a firewall between you and that hot lump of iron in front of you. By recessing the firewall deeper into the interior of the car or, in this case the pickup’s small cab, we bring all that heat and noise just a little closer to our legs.

But in reality the whole firewall isn’t moved rearward from its original factory provided position. That’s possible but not necessary and really not desirable. Just a portion needs to be cut out.

Pickups were working trucks. Utilitarian devices not the 3-ton luxury behemoths you see today posing as work vehicles. Okay some of them are. But in the “old days” the only reason you bought a pickup was because you needed it for your job. Pickups were worked hard and used up. As for creature comforts, there just weren’t many. The cabs were tiny in order to give more real estate to the working portion of the little truck, its bed. It needed to be big to carry big loads. Pay loads or payloads. Good reason that “pay” is in payload—that is what truck owners wanted—a vehicle that could help them get better pay. Look how long the bed is on the truck as compared to the cab. Our government is said to have three equal branches. This pickup cab isn’t quite a third and may even be shorter than the hood area.

When you cut into the firewall to make more space for the engine, you take away the same space from the interior of the already small cab. But I wanted the hemi engine. And even though it is a baby hemi, it demanded more space. We relented. The firewall had to be cut in such a way as to gain about 2.5 inches of space under hood.

The first cut used the factory embossed structural reinforcement lines to guide the cut. The angular result allows some rearward movement but looks sharp, unappealing and hard to access.

Ralph tried to do it artistically, this time gave the recess a simpler, smoother look. This preserves excessive intrusion into the cab’s interior while allowing us to cram that engine into its new home under the hood of an old Dodge truck.

What is cut on the outside must be repaired from the inside. In other words we can just leave an open hole there or the idea of “firewall” would be compromised. Ralph welds in place a homemade steel cover shaped simply to fill in the portion removed. When this is ground smooth, cleaned and painted, the recessed part of the firewall shouldn’t be noticeable from the inside. A

It may look rough and dirty now but stay tuned. Making it all pretty is coming. This area may eventually be covered in fine German square weave carpet.