Pretty much me. I have a bulbous head and little bitty arms. Not so bad of a temper these days.

 

Last weekend I put the rear back under the car with my new 1-inch drop Calvert split mono leaf springs. But I didn't bother to take any pics because when I sat it back down on the tires it really looked bad with the stock 14 inch wheels with 205-75s on them. So, I figured this was a good time to order my new rear wheels and tires. They are Weld Pro Stars, 15X10 with a 5.5in backspace and the tires are Hoosier Quick Time Pros, 28X11.50-15s. For the fronts I'm recycling the 3.5 Pro Stars that I usually run on my Trans Am. The new lug nuts for my rears didn't come in today, so I just robbed two off of each of the fronts to bolt them in place to check the fit. So I have the jack under the rear with the weight on the suspension but the tires are off the ground. Overall I'm really happy with how this combo fits. These things definately take up every bit of realistate they can inside the wheel wells. It looks like I'll need to do just some minor massaging on the passenger side where the sheetmetal extends below the seat belt hump. Nothing a few light taps with a BFH won't handle. The seatbelt humps themselves aren't in the way at all. Other than that, the next closest part is the wheel lips. There is good clearance as the car sits, but it may be an issue under full suspension travel so it's somthing I'll keep my eye on. Here's some pics.

 

Damn that looks good! Without an inch to spare. You did a hell of a job measuring thats for sure.

 

Thanks man! I'm stoked about how it looks too. Sits just the way I wanted on the tires. But, truth be told, it took some measuring, some research, and LOTS of luck!

 

It looks good, but not to rain on your parade, I think you are deep into rub town there, both inside and out. The tire will flex from side to side at least 1/2" at the bulge, and under acceleration the back of the car will squat down pretty hard, the flare pinch welds will get into your sidewall. I rolled my fender lips front and rear after having similar clearance on the outer edges as yours only after my tire edges all got little slices in them.
It looks like where the bulge goes by the leaf you are within 1/4", I think thats maybe too close. The outer edge you may be ok if you trim the seam and roll it. I would put the car on its wheels, load the trunk with whatever weight you can, kids, wife, whatever, then wiggle the car from side to side and up and down and see where you are at. If it stays clear great, if not, better to deal with it now instead of after you cut a tire while racing.

 

Thanks Mark, and no rain here......I appreaciate your input. I probably posted my pics a little too early in this process, or at least without the proper context. I knew when I went with these 11.50's I would liklely be signing myself up for some additional tire clearance work. From my research, 28X10.50s on these cars are no issue at all. 28X12.50's require rolling the lip and some surgery on the seatbelt hump. 28X11.50's seem to give mixed results, so it was a 50/50 shot on whether or not they would clear well enough without work. I'm comitted to fitting the most tire I can without tubbing or inboarding, so I'll work with these all I can and if I have to I'll sell them and step back to 10.50's.

I agree I'll need to roll the wheel lip right away. I can rent the nice Eastwood fender rolling tool off of Ebay for $40 plus shipping both ways. That should give me plenty of clearance to the outside. The perspective in the pic of the leafspring clearance is a little deceptive. The "tight" side on these is 1/2 from leaf to tire bulge and the "loose" side is 5/8th. Of course, as you stated, this is without any weight on the tires themselves yet and no additional weight in the trunk. Once I roll the fender lips, I should be able to space the wheels out slightly to pick up a little more on the inside if needed. I have a nice stack of custom aluminum spacers that my buddy laser cut for me to use in fitting 11.50's on my 99 Trans Am. they start out as thin as 1/16th of an inch so I can make very fine adjustments.

I expect there will be downward rear suspension travel with limited normal street driving (bumps and such), but from my experience a good drag race suspension should have more lift than squat under hard excelleration. If it's rolling and pushing the wheels into the wheel well instead of the track, I've got bigger overall issues that will need to be addressed.

Overall, I had just bolted these in place on my lunch break yesterday and took some pics when I got home before it got dark. Still lots of work to do to get them to clear everywhere under all conditions but I wanted to share the pics because I think they look cool. Hopefully I can actually use them without cutting a sidewall and ending up on my lid .

 

Cool. The wheelwells look nice when they are stuffed full of tire. I went for the same effect but wish I had just a little more offset into the car. It looks nice and wide (on my car) and the stance is right, but I clench when I hit a bump while cornering. I guess I'll just have to save up and buy some forgelines...

 

Cool. That looks great! So what are your actual wheel/tire sizes then? I assume you can get a custom BS with Forgelines, or do they just have a shelf wheel that would have fit a little better? Luckily I won't be going around turns nearly as fast as you, but my tall thin sidewalls will flex and sway a lot more when I do.

 

You could do like we have done in the past, use a baseball bat and wedge between the tire and the fender/quarter and roll the car back and forth until the lip is rolled. Get a short bat like the ones used for tee ball so you can access the smaller diameter of the neck and work your way up to the larger diameter until the desired gap is made. You could lower the air pressure in the tire to allow it to give some too. Just a thought from the redneck from North Carolina. Bats are cheap and do the job rather well.

 

My fronts are 18x8 with 4.517" backspace, 235/40-18 hoosier R6's
My rears are 18x9.5 with 5.031" backspace, 275/35-18 hoosier R6's

The forgelines are all custom , but at over $1000 each, I expect that... I'll be saving for a l o n g, l o n g time!!!

 

Yeah, I may have to consider that. I've heard guys talk about doing that way over the years but had never actually seen it done. I searched it on youtube last week and the first result I clicked on was some guy ripping all the bondo out of his (or his buddies) quarter panel when they tried it. Pretty funny. My son does have an aluminum tee ball bat out in the garage.......hmmm.

 

Damn! Yeah.....those are a bit pricey. Nice wheels I'll bet though!

 

An adjustable wrench works great on sheetmetal. It will bend it clean if you take your time and work it a little at a time. Get it started as far as you can with an adjustable wrench and then roll the lip with a bat. Seems primitive but it works.

 

I wasn’t gonna update this since I didn’t do much last weekend that was worth taking pictures of. And lets face it….most people would much rather look at pictures than read what I have to say about what I got done. But, since I don’t want to lose track of what I’ve done each week, I guess I will update anyway.

Friday my rear lug nuts came in so that evening I installed them all and set the car back down on it’s tires. But first, I reinstalled the parking break cables and adjusted the drums back out. Saturday I was in more of an organizing and cleaning kind of mood, which led to some pretty random progress. It seems I have to just take a step back every now and then and just clean things up and think a little. I started the morning by going through all of my boxes of parts to take a mental inventory of what still needs to be blasted and cleaned and what still needs to go back on the car. I also wanted to make sure that I still know where all of the hardware is for each item. Then I separated out all of the stuff that I’ll be keeping from the car but won’t be going back on the car and boxed that all up separately. All of that actually took longer than you would think and killed most of the morning on Saturday. I finished off the morning by bleeding my brakes since I recently had the rear end out of the car for the posi and gear install. My Mighty Vac tool made pretty quick work of that.

After lunch I installed my door lock cylinders and then decided to pull my rear bumper out of the corner and remove all the bolts and brackets. The driver’s side bracket was slightly bent because this car had been tagged in that corner at one point and it had pushed the bumper in slightly. I straightened it out and set it aside with the others. All of these bumper brackets will need to be blasted and repainted before the rear bumper can go back on the car. Then I turned to the tail lights, rear marker lights, and license plate lights. Each lens was separated from it’s housing and was cleaned, dried and reassembled to it’s housing. Well, all but the license plate light lenses. They seem to be almost melted; definitely yellowed and warped, so I ordered new lenses along with gaskets for my marker lights and all the hardware for my trunk lock cylinder that was destroyed when someone attempted to break into the trunk at one point. After that I cleaned up and painted the steel brackets for my rear marker lights along with the license plate light housings that mount inside the trunk.

Next I moved on to my old dash pad. From the very beginning of this project I had planned to replace the stock dash pad with a new replacement OER unit since this one is (1). Ugly brown, (2) cracked, and (3) warped along the front edge. However, after having a full cage installed in the car (NOT part of the original plan) the dash pad had to be coped out to fit around the a-pillar bars. So I have since decided that I don’t want to buy a brand new and expensive dash pad, just to cut it up…..well at least not at this point in the build. At this point, having a perfect interior is not a financial priority. Next I considered covering this pad with a dash cap as a much cheaper alternative…..but I’m just not a huge fan of the looks of them on this particular style of dash…..and though they’re cheaper than a dash pad, they still cost $$$$. So I dove into cleaning up my original pad to prep it for black SEM dye/paint….figuring that if it turned out really poorly I could still cap it.

This dash pad had the typical sticky “goo” coating all over it that is a real pain to clean off. So I started by using a bucket of hot water mixed with strong floor cleaning detergent and wiped it down several times. That really wasn’t doing much but softening up the “goo” so next I used a ton of wax and grease remover all of the pad to loosen this stuff up even better and then used a stiff vinyl cup brush in my drill to literally dig the stuff off of the dash. I would basically alternate between wiping it down and using the cup brush. This was a long and messy process, but by the time I was done I could run my hand across the entire dash without it sticking anywhere, so I knew I was done. Here are some pics of the dash pad before I started cleaning it. It’s a very typically well worn, warped and cracked 2nd gen dash pad.





I left the dash pad sit overnight to be sure no more of the goo was going to resurface. By Sunday it was still bone dry and smooth; in fact it was extremely dried out and ready to soak up some SEM. So I stated by applying light coats to it about every 5 or 10 minutes before finishing up with a little heavier coat the fifth or sixth time around. It didn’t make it into a brand new dash pad, but I’m much happier with it now because it’s at least a better color and your hands don’t stick to it anymore.





Like I said, it’s far from perfect, but it’ll get me on the road and all it cost me was a $10.00 can of SEM and some elbow grease.

 

The dash looks fine. Whos looking at the dash anyways? The shine off of that grin you will have while driving will surely blurr out the imperfections on the dash. **** you wont even need an interior light!!!!

 

Thanks man.....I like how you think! The ironic thing though is that I just snapped a brand new interior dome light lens in the car tonight. Guess I'll send that back and just pull the bulb......

 

Progress is coming along nicely. That is the same wheel and backspacing I used on my car and its perfect. You will have to roll or cut the outside lip. I would also consider a 1/4" spacer to bring the tire away from the leaf springs. Its very close as they were on mine. My car is leaving on Saturday in a trade for a 02 Procharged T/A. I enjoy seeing other 2nd gen builds. My car will be gone, but not forgotten.

 

Looking damn good!

 

Thanks man. Yeah, I've still got work to do with the wheel/tire fit, but overall I'm really happy with them. Sorry to hear your Camaro is leaving. That had to be a tough choice....but the Procharged TA sounds fun! Best of luck with it!

 

Thanks.

Here are some pics of my parts that showed up yesterday. First here’s my reverse light lenses and gaskets from NPD. Also shown are the factory housings that I painted silver. These originally had a nice gold finish on them but they weren’t removed when the car was re-painted back in 87. So they were badly oversprayed with the ugly cream color that was on the car.



And here they are assembled with the new lenses and gaskets.



Next is my new trunk lock cylinder, bezel, gasket and rod.



And here is the new stuff next to what came with the car. It’s obvious someone tried breaking into the trunk at one point. The lock cylinder was punched out with a screwdriver. When that didn’t work the must have tried prying it open with a pry bar because the trunk rail is dented in front of the latch mechanism. Then, someone must have tried to remove the broken lock cylinder with a cut off wheel because the front half of the bezel was sliced off clean. Notice how the original has threaded studs for attachment while the repop part only has clean studs. I guess they expect you to cut your own threads or use a speed nut?



I also got some new gaskets for my marker lights. The old ones were dried out and hard as rocks. I also picked up some new windshield molding clips for when the glass goes back in. I have the old ones but it’s not worth my time to clean the sealer off of them and reuse them.



And finally I got one RJS 5-point harness and some CE mounting brackets for mounting the anti-submarine belts to the floor. I only bought one harness for now because I’ll use it to mock up floor mount for both sides. I wanted to get the mounts welded to the floor before I paint the floor pans with rustoleum and lay the carpeting.



This should be enough to keep me busy this weekend….as if I didn’t have enough to do already.