Well a lot has been happening since I got the car - a lot except actually driving it. I managed to go through less than a tank of gas before planting it on the lift where it has been gathering dust for some time.
Right before I did that, I bought a used set of wheels and a hood vent that I got a little discount on for Black Friday after reading about the sale on one of the e36 m3 threads here.
It had had an awesome template, replete with lines to guide the cutting and holes to drill a specific sized hole. I assumed that the cutting lines would hit the holes just right to make perfect, radiused corners. I didn't double check and I remembered why I shouldn't assume anything :( At least you can't see the corners with the vent in.
This is what it looked like before undergoing some semi-major surgery:
Even though I completely fit the demographic these are known for (middle aged man who wants to look cooler than he is), I really fought getting one. I didn't need to confirm anyone's suspicions that these things were true.
Well, in the short time I drove it, I loved it. And I drive a lot of cars for work, so driving something cool isn't foreign to me. I just felt like I was in an awesome supercar. Which I was. But it was mine! And what is funny to me is that it cost the same or less than most of the other cars on the roads around here. But when other parents pick their kids up at the elementary school, they don't have crowds of boys yelling and pointing. My daughter said she was embarrassed but didn't roll the window up. Made!
So with the plan to build a streetable car that can really move around a track, I started to think that maybe there were some companies that might be interested in teaming up for some exposure. I decided to reach out to a few companies and, to my surprise, got mostly positive responses. In the interest of full transparency, I will gladly talk about which products were donated and which ones were purchased.
I chose the Corvette, and the Z06 in particular, believing that they would be out-of-the-box ready to rock on the track. After some research (which I should've done before forking over more money than I had ever spent on a car before ) I learned that these cars have some pretty significant weaknesses. Oil pressure loss, valves dropping and taking out motors, and overheating brakes were at the top of the list.
So the first thing I did was pull the dry sump oil tank and send it out for modification to increase the capacity. The Internet says that these tend to develop problems using stickier tires on long left-hand turns. The oil is pushed away from the outlet and the g-force in the turn causes the pick-up to be uncovered. So adding more oil to the tank, like they did to the ZR1 and later z06's, allows for more time before the oil starvation occurs.
The other modification was adding a baffle to the tank to help prevent the oil from being pushed away from the pick up in the first place. I managed to do these before pulling the car off the road and, as expected, noticed no difference when I was driving it. Which is a good thing.
I reached out to a local suspension manufacturer called Alden American and met with the owner. Garrett is a super nice guy who's working hard to make a good product and he agreed to give me a set of his coil overs in exchange for using the car for some articles in Vette magazine. His stuff looks really good and is available for all kinds of cars if anyone is interested. I told him I thought his stuff was actually priced too low and might turn some people off because of perceived value. So check out his stuff before he takes my advice and raises prices. :)
The next issue was the heads. While there are many people who say there is a problem with these heads, there are many people who say they are fine. The way to measure the valves to determine if you have a problem is also contested and I really didn't know what to believe. My car had high miles (90k) and I figured if it was going to drop a valve it would've already happened by now; especially since many cars ended up dropping valves with less then 2, 3 or 4000 miles on them.
One of, if not the, best shops for doing work on the LS motors is American Heritage Performance in Torrance, California. It turns out they're very close to me and I contacted them about possible sponsorship. They were open to it and I went down the shop to meet the guys. The owner, Kohle, and his manager, Jake, are incredibly cool and intelligent guys. The shop is amazing and they agreed to help out.
Pulling the heads wasn't that difficult but since I hadn't planned on doing any more than an oil change, it was a lot more work than i had expected to do to the car when I had first purchased it.
A friend of mine, who is been building his 73 challenger in my garage, turns out to be a friend of the worst/best kind - an incredible enabler. He told me that since I've already got the heads off it would be foolish of me not to do a cam at the same time. So I agreed to buy a cam and all the related components from AHP.
To get the cam out of the front of the motor I would need to pull the radiator out. In preparation for that eventuality, I pulled everything out of the front of the car. Not super thrilled about putting the old radiator back in I did some research and found out that Dewitts makes a very high quality unit. I contacted them and they agreed to help with the radiator and I thought it was a good idea to buy a set of their fans at the same time. These things can overheat and southern California can get hot so I figured that this could go a long way towards keeping everything in check.
I ended up going out of town for a few weeks at this point to work on mile 22, a Mark Wahlberg film that will probably come out in about a year. The heads were nearly ready when I got home and I started working on prepping the front cradle to drop so I could put the cam in.
Yes, that's right. To get the front cover off of the motor requires you pulling the harmonic balancer. Of course; they all do. To get the balance or off requires you to remove the steering rack. Oh man. And the easiest way to do that, according to most people, is to drop the front cradle about 6 inches. Argh
I realized while I was disconnecting the lower a-arms, it was good of a time as any to put extended studs on the hubs which require pulling the hubs from the car. And thanks to GM's amazing foresight this also requires popping all the lower ball joints loose to access one of the bolts holding the hubs in.
Another issue with these cars is that the clutch slave cylinder fails. There are, again, many theories as to why, but fluid contamination seems to be the culprit. Unfortunately, the bleeder valve on the clutch slave cylinder is virtually impossible to access without lowering the motor. So I figured this would be a good time to lower the motor enough to add a remote clutch bleeder line.
Once again, my enabling friend pipes up and tells me that now is also the perfect time to do a clutch and that I would be a fool to trust a 90,000 mile old clutch to handle track duty with all the new power that this thing should have. Two nights later, I'm talking with a friend of mine about the project and he offers up, unprovoked, that if I need a clutch to let him know as he has connections with Centerforce. The next day I get a text that Centerforce is my new sponsor!
And now, since I'm gonna go in there, I'm might as well replace the clutch slave cylinder and throwout bearing. I reach out to Qartermaster who agrees to send me one of their nice units with a billet bearing sleeve which solves a fairly common problem of clutch engagement issues when the stock plastic sleeve deforms.
To address the front brakes I built cooling ducts through the fog light holes. I bought a used spindle duct and am piecing together the rest of the kit. I was hoping that this will be enough to keep the brakes cool and solve the overheating issues that the stock brakes have but I came across a pretty good deal on a used set of front racing brakes so I bought them
Making the scoops:
One thing is for sure – very few things for this car have been cheap. There really is a vette tax and I've kind of decided to not be as frugal as I usually am when I build my cars. I usually will just make do with what I have but I've decided that I can spend bigger chunks of money if I get a good deal on something because I can make back most if not all of it back by just pulling and selling the part in the near future.
So instead of me running stock wheels that I can find for $400 like I usually do, I'm buying some pretty nice aftermarket wheels that I can sell later for what I paid for them.
I have purchased a set of wheels to run the 285 width 200 treadwear tires as required by some of the lower time attack classes but I don't anticipate that i will be there very long. . So I simultaneously placed an order for four very sticky and very not-cheap Nitto NT01's. There are definitely more expensive tires out there but this is the most I've ever spent on tires.
I also picked up a new water pump that came on a crate motor but was never used as well as a new silicone hose kit. Knowing how important a good seat is, I found a good deal on a used OMP carbon fiber seat and a passenger side seat mount that I will modify to use on the driver's side. A harness bar and a set of harnesses is also waiting in the garage for installation.
That pretty much gets us where I am today with the build. I'm still planning on hitting time attacks and local autocrosses but my enabling buddy has convinced me that I should look into running one of the local Optima events.
Needless to say, I am very ready to get this car back on the road and see how it handles on the track. Hopefully those updates will come sooner than later!
