Rally Pat

Damn it looks sooooo good! And quite a deal starting at 60k me thinks.

I'm aware

I think you guys are misunderstanding, I already have everything to do it myself, it came with the hydroboost kit, I just need to change one of the fittings since the included ones were meant for clearing F body spacing and placement accessories.

The last thing I worked on I actually forgot to get pictures of. I wanted to take a look at the Power steering lines and how everything was going to clearance. It looks like the fittings I have don't quite fit my setup, as they are meant for all F body accessories. So basically, the AN fittings I got with the PS/hydroboost kit don't clear the Corvette spacing specific alternator relocation bracket I have. I have a few ideas to try and solve this, one is using a banjo fitting on the bottom of the PS pump, and the other is maybe grinding off some of the alternator bracket. The issue with doing that is that I don't think the lines would clear anyway even if I did that. Its pretty tight between the block and the fitting. Another thing that might solve my problem is this metal pipe thing thats meant for like mid-90's Chevy trucks, AC Delco part number 19168825. I think that would get the outlet somewhere where I could better plumb it to the rack or hydroboost, but I am not sure if it will thread into this pump or not. On top of that, its like $60ish everywhere I've seen it. This problem is going to need some more research. If anyone has any ideas please chime in, otherwise its going to be me buying lots of fittings and trying lots of random ideas.

Anyway, back to work. I took a deadblow and tapped in the throwout bearing adapter. It protrudes from the flywheel about half an inch, which its supposed to. Put the pressure plate on with the special clutch disc in the middle and the special clutch alignment tool for it. Again, its a Corvette-sized clutch disc with Porsche 944 torque tube splines in the middle. I ended up taking the torque tube adapter off and attaching the Corvette 2 piece bellhousing first. The clutch slave/throwout bearing assembly thing was making it pretty hard to wield. Little dab of anti-sieze on the dowels just in case. From there, it was pretty easy to get the bolts for the torque tube adapter started and I ran them down a little bit at a time to try and keep it all even.

Cleaned all the anti-rust lube off with liberal brake cleaner application to both the flywheel and pressure plate. Got the flywheel on, used some blue locktite on the bolts as I've read that they can get virbrated out. Torqued everything down on that. Then Sean brought his new toy out and I got distracted for a few minutes lol. Hopefully he creates a project thread for it, it should look familiar to some people on CR.

Unpacking the pressure plate and clutch, literally just found the cheapest of both available on RockAuto.

Why setup an engine hoist to work on an engine when you have a perfectly good lift?

We didn't have a ton of time this weekend, but we manage to get the engine in to try and do a few things so that we have made some sort of progress. We wheeled the engine in on the cart we have been keeping it on at the shop, and got to it. So, apparently Corvette flywheels are pretty hard to machine and we were quoted more than the cost of a new flywheel to machine the one that we had. I figured if I was buying a new flywheel, I might as well get a new pressure plate too. One RockAuto order later and we were ready to attach the clutch.

Pretty sure OpenPilot will support your car http://Comma.ai

Sorry, its a bit dusty. Also its not an iBuypower computer, thats just the case all the components are in. Also definitely an i7 3770 and not an i5.

Bump

Bump

I have a bunch of parts from a 1989 944 Turbo (951) that was rolled that I got for free, and one of them was this really nice radiator. The 951 has a larger radiator than the NA cars, and I was under the impression that they were interchangable, so I figured I would give myself a free cooling upgrade. This appears to not be the case, as the opening wasn't large enough to fit it in the car. We ended up doing a flush on the one we pulled out and stuffed it back in. We will see how it holds up for now, maybe some sort of fancy all aluminum one is in my future.....who am I kidding it will proabably be an ebay chinaboi special like everything else. We were running out of things we felt we could accomplish right this moment in time, so we pushed the car out of the shop, and sprayed the bay down with degreaser foam. Let it soak a few minutes, then rise it off. I had family obligations that night I couldn't be late for, but if I had more time I would have power washed it. We plan to degrease again when we have the engine in. I had no easy way of cleaning the engine at my apartment or any easy way of getting it to a car wash, so I figured in the car is fine. We pushed it back around the shop and called it for that day. The engine is also stored at shop while it waits to go in.

The next thing we decided to tackle was the throttle setup. The kit comes with a pretty generic universal carb throttle cable setup, and it comes with throttle stops for you to customize the length and make it fit an LS throttle body. I was actually less impressed with this part of the kit for what you get for your money. We fished out the two stock throttle cables, and using a washer to help us use a stock hole we fished the new one through. At some point, we need to drill the throttle pedal to make it fit, but that will be another day. We put the carb style throttle stop back on the opposite end to keep it all together until we get the engine in.

We turned our attention to the braking system. Using the factory brake booster is not an option, it doesn't clear the driver side head and coil packs. In this instance, you have basically 2 options: you can run a hydroboost setup, or you can convert to a manual brake setup, be it with a dual master cylinder configuration or a big single one. Many people were complaining about the braking effort of the manual setup, so I went ahead and purchased the whole hydroboost kit from Texas Performance Concepts to compliment the rest of the kit. It comes with a Ford Mustang (I think) hydroboost unit with accumulator, bolts, lines, and fittings to terminate those lines. It also has a thick reinforcement bracket to help with firewall flex under heavy braking. It also has an aluminum adapter on the end to allow the stock Porsche master cylinder to be used and spaced our correctly. We also started to see how the heater lines were going to work. The kit comes with a pretty generic control valve, a Ford style one we think, and hoses and clamps for attaching both hoses to the engine, control valve, and heater box. I basically just attached the hoses to the heater box end, and left them tucked out of the way. I didn't want to cut them up until we have the engine in.

Dave, the owner of Northend Wrench, suggested maybe trying to turn it the flywheel on the shop's brake lathe, but we weren't happy with the results, so we resigned ourselves to the fact that the engine wasn't going in today, but we have other stuff to do so we got to work. I started with the foam heat insulation on the hood. This stuff is just flaking off of the car, and it smells absoutely horrible. The best way I can describe the smell is it smells like really bad BO. I ran the shop's industrial shopvac along where it was and it luckily came right off.

More pics of moving the car

Saturday morning, we loaded up all the parts I had at my place, loaded the engine up on the trailer, and headed for the shop to hopefully make the majority of the mechanic progress. The plan was drop the flywheel off at Midstate Auto Parts and hopefully get it machined while we got the car pushed in and did some small stuff to make progress while we wait, like Sean and I have done with projects for years and years. Except we hit our first roadblock. Apparently, the owner of Midstate has decided to start not being open on Saturdays. Shit. We weren't sure what we were going to do, but wanted to still make some progress. So we moved a bunch of the shop cars, and pushed the car in.

At this point, the engine was esentially as ready as it was going to be in my garage. Were ready to transport it to Northend Wrench and begin the process of putting the engine in the car. One more test fit to make sure that nothing was hitting each other in this mashup of Corvette/truck/F body/custom bracketry.

Happy Monday! On Friday, the $70 no core charge Chinaboi F-body alternator showed up, and I could work on finalizing the mounting for the alternator and bracket and check to see if I ground off enough in the right place to clear. As it turns out, I actually still hadn't ground enough off, and had to take some more material from the block. Eventually though, I got there, but something still wasn't right. The directions suggested that the plastic shroud on the back may need removed, but mine didn't seem to be hitting any thing. I trimmed it a little where it came near the block, but something still didn't seem correct about the way it was sitting. I inspected it for a minute before noticiting that the corvette idler that I was trying to repurpose was rubbing one of the water pump bolt heads. I double checked the directions, and it said to use a specific idler part number. $20 later, the alternator was finally mounted up and cleared everything properly.

Next thing was to attach the water pump for the final time. In my small apartment garage, I don't have a bench grinder with wire wheel setup to clean up bolts and the like, so a brass brush had to do. I had to text Scott, because I couldn't figure out why the hell my gasket set had both metal and paper gaskets for the water pump. He literally said to throw the paper ones out, they were meant for early LS' and the metal gasket is more bettah. Can do. Ran the bolts down with the harbor freight cordless rattle gun, and torqued them to spec for the final time. I turned to the power steering pump to check the clearances and make sure things like that low mount alt bracket wasn't hitting. Bad news is that the stock Corvette pressure line does appear to hit, but the good news is that I am pretty sure the kit for the power steering and hydroboost uses banjo fittings, so I think I can snake that through and make something work, but we will mess with that before we drop the engine in. I also plan on running AC on this car, although it probably won't be plumbed up right away, that will be a "nice to have" down the road, so I went ahead and bolted up the bracket and compressor for that. I also decided to toss the header on that side to make sure it clears. I will pull it back off because we have a couple of broken studs to extract, but it looks like it will work just fine. Plan for tonight is hang the alternator, rent the tool for pressing on the power steering pulley and get that on, then maybe finalize

The next thing I needed to tackle was grinding the relief needed in the block for an F body alternator to fit properly. I am a total noob with a big angle grinder, as I really haven't had a need for one until this project, only ever using a small air die grinder with 3M bristle attachments for cleaning gasket surfaces and the like. At this point, I have already returned my super expensive AutoZone alternator and the RockAuto Chinesium one won't show up until later today, so I ground some of the block away based on the measurement pictures I took while I had the alternator. Hopefully I took off enough in the right spot for it to clear, but I will finalize the check on that tonight.

We are aiming to try and drop the engine in the car this weekend, so I am trying to get the last little bits of things like the accessories sorted out this week. I started with the powersteering/stock alternator bracket. Since the low mount bracket takes the place of the stock idler location, I had to trim it off of the factory bracket.

This is awesome!