Part VIII

1989 RS Camaro

Happy Anniversary!!

Well, it's an anniversary to us, we just finished our 30th. day of working on this project. That's right, a grand total of thirty days, of course that time has been spread over several months but it's still pretty remarkable that two guys in their home garage can take a running street car and convert it to an all-out drag car in so short a period. We're not really sure if that speaks to our mechanical abilities or insanity level; maybe we'll know more about that later. We have a pretty good update this time around as once again we had a solid weekend of time with half-way decent weather.

It all started out on Saturday morning by deciding that we finally had to do something about the amount of space we had to work with. The old engine, transmission, wheels, and rear end assembly just had to go. I checked with a friend earlier in the week and they wanted most of this stuff, so we loaded up the truck and carted it over to his place. In our last update we mentioned having room for the parts, well I should have mentioned having room for the stuff you don't want anymore too. It takes up an enormous amount of your working space. We had tried a few times to unload the stuff in the local weekly trader paper, but didn't have much luck so it had just been sitting as Phil and I both dodged and weaved our way around it. Sure, we would have liked to have sold it to recover a few dollars on the project, but now that's it gone and I can walk a straight line between the workbench and the car, we shouldn't have waited so long.

As promised we finished up the fuel cell installation and as you can see, we have it mounted with 1" wide aluminium in four places to the car with a back brace to keep the cell upright. Part of that is due to the slope of the trunk area and we wanted to keep the cell level. If we had just mounted the cell to the back of the truck area, the fuel feed for the pump would have been pointing at an arkward angle upward, not the best thing when you are trying to feed an electric pump. You can also see some of the wiring for the fuel pump and tail lights along with another look at the battery cutoff switch. This entire area will be covered with an aluminum panel that will hinge just off the edge of the sheetmetal area in back of the fuel cell. The AN connection at the top of the cell will be fitted with a braided line connected to a bulkhead fitting that will allow the fuel vapors to vent outside of the car.

Here we see the bottom of the fuel cell with the -8 fitting on the left closed off and the Peterson Stainless Steel mesh fuel filter connected directly to the cell. Coming off of the fuel filter we take a -10 braided line to the inlet side of the pump. A bit of overkill really, but the one thing that you do not want to do is skimp on getting fuel flow to an electric pump. The original idea was to have the connections support the fuel filter, but once it is full of fuel we think it will be too heavy, so we're going to provide some type of additional support to keep it in place. You also get a glimse of the 9" Ford rear that has managed to find it's way under the car too.

Just another view of the filter and fuel pump installation. -8 AN line will carry fuel all the way to a Y-splitter near the engine that will provide fuel to a pair of Holley regulators and in turn the fuel bowls of the 750 Holley carburetor.

Looking rearward we can see that big 9" Ford nodular iron case that is going to take the output of our 355" Chevy motor. The two mounting points to the lower right are for the torque arm assembly. This was supplied by S&W Race Cars and attaches to the rear on these points and to a crossmember that connects between our frame rails. Once we have the rear located with the lower control arms, we can start looking at the torque arm installation. The crossmember for it has about 4 points that must be welded to the the frame members for attachment. We started to install the lower control arms, but found that the metal sleeves for them were left out of the box, they should be here the first of this coming week. The bolts are larger too, so we need to drill out the mounting holes on both the frame connector and the rear end housing.

Not a great photo, but somewhere in the march of the jackstands you can see the torque arm assembly. The link is adjustable and should provide us some flexibility on loose tracks. Most of the comments that we have gotten on this setup is to use a -2 degree pinion angle as a starting point. We have also been told that we may want to add a set of lower control arm adjustment points to give us some additional chassis tuning ability.

And a quick shot of the underside of the car and the installation of the sub-frame connector. The connector has been welded to the car in just about every place that it touches it and in some that it hasn't. At the rear of each one, I felt that there simply wasn't enough tie-in with the original rear frame or at least what GM calls a rear frame. So we did a little additional plating in that area to make a stronger connection and come up with something that is close to a full frame vehicle. You can also see from here how nice and clean the underside of the car is with it's new coat of paint. Once again, it's much easier to work on a clean car and if something is going wrong such as fluid leakage or other carnage, it's a bit easier to find the problem.

more photos and updates......