Part X

1989 RS Camaro

Oh the pain of it all....and the best laid plans of mice and men. I believe that is the old saying. Anyway, we had planned on completing two things this weekend. One was to get the torque arm installation finished and the second was to complete the motor. You guessed it, neither happened and I am not sure why we ever thought it would work out that way either.

On the torque arm deal we got the assembly in place, but after studying things for a bit, we felt that we might be making a mistake nailing everything in place with the car suspended in the air and no motor to put weight on the car. We have never installed one of these, so we think that the best plan is to get the engine/trans into the car and have it sitting on it's tires before marking the installation point of the torque arm. It's a one shot deal and we don't won't to get it wrong.

The engine misfired on a number of fronts for us this week. Geez, you'd think that after building these things since I was 16, that they would just fall together by now, but no - of course not. Seems like we have another strange arrangement of parts, so a little bit of that old time hot-rodding stuff is going to come into play again.

There appears to be a slight problem with the pushrod guideplates and the 3/8 inch pushrods that we want to use. The plates simply do not line up correctly with the valvetrain and it looks like we will have to do a bit of work on them to make sure everything clears correctly. It also looks like we have a slight interference problem with the heads that is going to require a little bit of grinding work. It's amazing really because if you just look at things you would think that you could drive a bus through that area of the head, but it simply doesn't line up right. We did get the crankshaft clearances checked and installed along with a teflon seal for the rear cap. The camshaft was installed in the last segment, but we somehow ended up with the wrong timing chain set, so it's back to the store for the correct one. The pistons were checked for clearance against the heads and we have plenty, so we're good there. Phil and I also gapped the entire set of rings setting the top ring gap at .016 and the secondary gap at .013. Very tedious work as Phil found out, but it makes for good power.

The heads on this engine are Dart Iron Eagles with 215 cc volume intake runners, 2.05 intake valves, roller springs and 64 cc chambers. They should flow decently for this engine in stock form, but if we find we're down on ET or speed, we can do some work on them over the winter to improve them a bit. This is as far as we got on the engine for the weekend so we moved on to other items.

We finished all of the wiring but a couple of minor connections for the neutral safety switch, linelock button and temperature sender for the transmission. Overall it went fairly quickly and I will state again that buying a kit to help with your wiring is a huge plus. The money spent on the kit just doesn't compare to the time that it saves. And having wired another Camaro last summer for some friends that was done completely from scratch, I am making a true comparison here.

The picture above shows the mounting board for the electronics and wiring running to it for a number of connections from the switch panel. There are some leads going forward to the engine compartment and others running along the front firewall going to the coil and remote starter button mounted in the cowl area.

Another view of the electonics package and you can also see the battery feeds coming from the rear of the car going to the starter solenoid and then coming off of that and going to the firewall connector. The other side of this connector will have another battery cable running to the starter.

This shows the wiring installed for the fuel pump relay, and another lead that connects to a Autometer voltage gauge so that we can keep check on the condition of the battery charge. You might notice that we have not connected the cables to the batteries yet, but that should be handled sometime this coming week.

A bit tough to see, but that's the the voltage gauge in the center of the picture. With the hatchback closed, we can simply look through the back window of the car and see how we are doing on battery voltage. Pretty trick installation and was easy to accomplish. You can also see that the battery trays are installed, which were made from some 1/2" angle iron with 3/8" hold down studs welded to the sides. Each tray was welded into place and then the entire area re-painted. Nice and clean, does the job and the cost was really reasonable. Two lengths of 1/2" angle were about $5.00 and the 3/8" rods came from the parts box.

One last item on the wiring and that is the instrument panel. Everything is wired to a connector block and then a cable bundle is run from there down to the electronics panel where connections for ignition, ground, lighting and the senders for the oil, tach and water are hooked up. This way we can made a few quick disconnects and the entire dash panel can come out of the car if needed for quick repairs.

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