FrankenJeep

I am sure those of you that have been perusing these pages maybe have wondered who, or what a Mad Mac is. Or maybe you have not even noticed. Then again, it could also be that you just do not care. Regardless, I can assure you that it is not a diseased pair of all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.

It is, however, another crazy build conglomeration that was suggested by my youngest son, Jaiden. Actually, it would be the crazy build that started it all. Maybe to say he literally “suggested” that I build a 2004 Chevrolet Impala 9C1 (General Motor’s designation for the police package) into something that would find itself comfortable as a car seen in the 1979 Australian dystopian action movie, Mad Max… well, that may be stretching the facts.

— Hang on! We are going to jump into our Delorean, and see if we can get this baby to 88 mph! —

Mad Max has been one of Jaiden’s favorite movies for quite some time now, (second to the sequel, The Road Warrior). It was 2011, and Jaiden was just four years old when he first saw these movies. Immediately, he fell in love with Max Rockatansky’s highly modified 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT Coupe, an Australian made car also known, in the Mad Max Universe, as the V8 Interceptor.

(read all about it here – http://www.madmaxmovies.com/mad-max-interceptor/index.html)

It was during our first father/son viewing of Mad Max when a four year old Jaiden excitedly called out, “Cool cop car, Dad! Like yours!”, and that was the beginning of Mad Mac’s. I suppose it was not necessarily what Jaiden said, as much as what I interpreted his words to be, that caused the beginning of the end…

Meet Mac. I confess, he does not have the flair of Max’s V8 Interceptor, but he does have… character.

As I mentioned before, I was planning on this car to look as if it were to play a part in catching the bad guys after World War III happened. So, I started in the front, with the lights and the bumper. I took headlights from three different vehicles, and spent 18 hours fabricating those bug eyes.

And, what Pursuit Special would be complete without a supercharger?

Check!

I took an Eaton M90 Series III supercharger and top end off another vehicle, and put it somewhere more deserving… a retired police car.

The conversion was not as difficult as I thought it might have been, basically a direct replacement, plug-and-play. However, it was shortly after this same time that the AZ summer was coming up, and 114°F was going to be commonplace during the day.

I started having engine issues – the motor would sputter quickly and die. Minutes later, it would let me start up again, and it would drive normally, until it would sputter a few times and die. After all the checking, rechecking, and replacing of parts, I found it was the stock coil pack computer that was bad. It was “cold soldered”, and when the heat would get to it, the electronics would separate from the board, causing an incomplete circuit.

Unfortunately, Mac was to meet an early demise, and I never got to finish this project. But his name lives on infamously, this build started a whole new thought process on the way I do vehicle builds. From this one on, all vehicles built under the Mad Mac namesake, was going to be very comfortable in a post-apocalyptic setting.