Early Father's day treat

Today spent time fitting up padding and carpet, and putting seat belts and seats in the car. Still need a little final fit on the carpet and to glue it down, and bolt in the seats, but it's beginning to look like a car. After getting the interior semi-functional, I took the car around the block for the first time. Susan was a good cheerleader and camerawoman. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3WVfdkkgos

Still kinks to work out, starting with figuring out what's up with the power steering or lack thereof, but it was nice to make a loop around the block.

This past week I was working on an airbox to make the transition through the firewall. Version 1 met an untimely death on the chop saw along with a saw blade, but no bodily harm. Version 2 took about a quarter the time to get to this stage of prep. Now just need to have a friend weld it up.

 

On the road again

This was the second consecutive weekend of working on the car again after the long bathroom remodel hiatus. There were a number of Gilligan's Island three hour tours, finishing up reinstalling the radiator, replacing the power steering reservoir with one that the hood can close over, securing the 5.3L truck fuel rails on the LS1 intake, and even replacing the battery - new optima has a different top than the old one.

One successful modification was rev 2.0 of the transmission shift linkage arm. This has been done for months, but the dead battery restricted testing. Mutt successfully traversed from the lift to the driveway, engaged park for a well needed interior vacuum, and moved back to the lift under it's own power.

The power steering reservoir was a rev 3.0 - the original bracket for the old LT1 reservoir that ended up not fitting, then rev 2.0 and 2.5 for the new one prior to installing hoses, and a final rev 3.0 with the hosed installed. Fortunately, it's a simple bracket from a piece of .090 gauge aluminum with four holes and a couple mild bends.

The next fabrication is for the air intake. I've been struggling with that one - how to make the transition from one side of the radiator support to the other - with the larger track to the new LS MAF,  the tubing is too close to the radiator to use a nice manderal bend. The solution looks to be to make a nice box for the transition with a tubular inlet, a radiused corner across from the inlet, and a transition on the adjacent side to a tubular exit. I'll fab it up this week and get someone to weld it up for me to solve this dillema.

Bathroom 1, Corvette 0

Between a home bathroom remodel, a trip to China, and a ten day trip to the bay area, the Corvette was neglected for ten weeks. I'm happy to report that Susan and I are very pleased with the bath remodel, and the garage picked up a nice big subpanel and lost the washer and dryer. Can't complain about more power and more space to work, and Susan won't bump into the lift doing laundry anymore.

At this point it was time to start doing some time / money tradeoffs on unsuccessful fabrication efforts. The first was reuse of the 1993 Corvette LT1 dual fan setup. I had tried to make a new aluminum shroud to accomodate the fans and clear the larger 4" air intake for the LS motor. That project was doomed from the moment it put the first blemish in the new paint.


The fan is a 16" Spal with the Be-Cool rebranding mark-up for the included hardware kit. A set of universal brackets mount it to the radiator.

Universal brackets are, well, universal. In addition to trimming off the ears at the fan on all the brackets, this bracket required a notch to clear the mounting pin for the radiator.

The project was a success, with an inch of clearance around the air intake once I rotate the offending hose clamp.