Part XVII

1989 RS Camaro

Well, here's hoping that everyone of our readers is having a wonderful Christmas as this is being written on Christmas afternoon. Wishing you the best of the New Year to come, stay safe and well.

Just a technical note for you. We recently upgraded (?) to the new version of Internet Explorer 7.0 and have noticed that our pages are not rendering correctly now. Everything in each page appears to have a right-handed adjustment in them. After doing some research we have found that IE 7.0 does not conform to the latest CSS guidelines which our webpage tool (Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.0) does. So, at this time we are now recommending Firefox 2.0 or IE 6 for viewing our website.

We managed to get out to VMP for one more round of testing before they and we pulled the plug for the year. And while we ended up with a little bit of a comedy of errors on the final day, I think we learned a few things about our car that are going to really help us reach our performance goals when the season cranks back up. Project Camaro came off the trailer that day with an 11.78 @ 114 performance that had us looking for more; unfortunately things went a bit downhill on us after that, and it proved to be our best number of the day. So, it was back to the garage where we are going to make a few performance changes and get started on our bodywork.

The performance changes that we decided to make include moving up from the Holley 140 gph blue pump to a Barry Grant unit pumping 280 gph; while we're not sure the Holley was a problem we wanted to make sure that we had more than enough fuel flow down track. One of the things that we had been running into was the car's consistent laying down in high gear. The second change that we made was moving the convertor stall speed up from a unit that supposedly was 5500 rpm to one that better matched our engine specifications on cam, head, intake and carburetor. The 5500 convertor never showed us much over 4800 in our combination and since that convertor was one we acquired off of Ebay, the engine that it had been fitted to might have had a bit more torque than ours and truly reached the 5500 number. We scored another 8" B&M convertor off Ebay and sent it up to TSI in Maryland to have it re-worked to a 6000 rpm stall speed that should really help our combo. The last change we are making is in the headers that we are using. Our original set were Hedman units that were your basic street car type of header with a lot of accommodation for ease of fit. These things would slip in from underneath or from above with very little problem, yet we still had to ding them here and there to clear certain components. They were also 1 5/8" inch tubing with a very short collector that I felt was hurting the HP potential of our engine. The new tubes are Hooker Super-Competition units that required lifting the engine out of the car to get them on, but didn't require any dings in them to clear anything. They are equal length primary tubes of 1 3/4 inch with a longer collector. Very nice units, but also about 4x the cost of the Hedman units. As they say, you get what you pay for.

But hold on, stop the presses, there is always a step back in our project car and this time it really hurt. As we were removing the transmission to install the new convertor, we discovered that the bell housing area had suffered what at first looked like a surface crack, not too bad but worrisome. As we got the transmission out onto the floor and checked it a bit closer, we realized that the transmission case was done. The crack had spread back into the bolt area for the pump, basically dooming the case. We will transport the transmission back to ATI to have the internals removed and placed in a new case - there's nothing else we can do.

Our next stint of work involves the bodywork and this is something that we just got started on this past weekend. Nothing too exciting at this point as we are just going through the procedure of knocking down the current paint coatings to get to a level of flatness that will provide the proper foundation for our new paint job. There has been a little bit of complaining from the crew about having to do this manually with sandpaper and block, but it is the very best way to get the car "blocked" out properly. And as I am the one that will be swinging the paint gun for hours on end laying down almost endless primer, color and clear coats, I want a surface that is going to be worthy of that effort. Here's a few shots of the surface work that we have done so far. Notice the various small areas that still retain some of the previous coatings, those are dimples, dings and depressions in the surfaces that need to be filled with just a touch of body filler to make them level with the surrounding area. There are also a few places where the metal is sitting higher and they need to be ground or tapped down. Each panel will be worked until it is as flat as possible to provide a good paint foundation.

Stay tuned for our next update, we should have most of the bodywork done and at least in a single color of primer at that point, plus the transmission will be repaired, installed and ready to go again. We still need to do a good front end alignment on the car and we're going to show you how you can do one at home with just a few low cost tools. See you then.

Proceed to the next installment of Project Camaro