Part XVIV

1989 RS Camaro

Project Camaro has already had a few up and down moments. We hit the track again this past week, but the results were far from what we expected. With the new converter, we thought that we would move closer to the 10 second mark, but instead went the opposite direction. We need to go back to the basics at this point with the car to find our tune-up. I think a solid session of good runs will get us where we want to be, but until then we're just taking shots in the dark. The car did receive another coat of primer as we had some decent weather one weekend, but the paint job is on hold until we get the car sorted out and running right.

But, we had a question from one of our readers about the rear bulkhead area and how we finished that off. I promised some pictures of it and thought that it warranted a quick update here. We had talked about it in other parts of the project, but we never really provided any additional information about it or pictures of the work, so here we go.

The first thing was to get this piece of aluminum made. Our buddy Kevin knocked this out in a couple of hours for us using a pattern from his own NHRA Camaro Stocker. The only knock to this piece is that we could have left a bit more material in the areas on each side that are trimmed out. His car retains the plastic surround pieces in the truck, so this shape would be perfect and in fact once you had it in place, you would be finished. The beading on the panel helps to increase the stiffness and reduce the amount of "oil canning" that the panel will do.

We picked up a 3-foot length of piano hinge at the local home improvement store, riveted it to the edge of the panel, then lined up the panel with the back edge of the trunk. Once everything looked square, we drilled a few holes and riveted it to the back edge of what was the original gas tank cover area. As you can see from the shot below, we had to skip around a bit on where to rivet the panel to the car due to the shape of the stock sheetmetal.

Our next issue was to make up some sheetmetal side pieces to finish off the area and "seal off" the battery and fuel area from the driver. So far this has passed NHRA/IHRA technical requirements.

We built the left side piece first, just cutting a pattern from cardboard until it fit well and then using sheetmetal screws, attached it in several places. We had to make a small angled piece and attach that to the back of the fenderwell to have something for the panel to lay on and attach to. We can get the battery out without removing this panel, but it's only 4 screws to take it out completely.

Here's another shot of the same panel. When the center panel folds back, it covers most of this one and we have a small strip of velcro (soft side) on the back of the panel to keep the two from beating each other.

The right side was next and actually a bit easier. We took a larger panel, cut it to shape, then put about a 1/2 edge along the front angle to hold the larger panel, once again we have a small strip of velcro in place just to cushion the two panels. This one is attached in a similar fashion, 4 screws hold it to the side of the well, and two small L-shaped brackets attach it to the back support sheetmetal.

Nothing real special here, it does the job, meets the rules and of course we can get the battery in and out without taking everything apart. Plus when we fuel the car, it's very easy to just flip the top panel out of the way.

That's it for this time. Our next update should have a better status report on the car's performance. We checked the engine's condition with a leakdown tester and everything looks good, so it's simply getting our new combination worked out.

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