Originally posted by Archie:

It's been a while since we've had an update.

The last update was when it was very cold outside.

As most know, Troy plans to pick the car up in late May & debut the Perfect Union at this years Dells Show.

If all goes to plan, he will arrive before the Dells Show, inspect the car & then take it to the Dells.

So since it's nearly finished, we've been working on other projects for the last several weeks.

Several weeks ago we found that we had a leak from the Power Steering pump Area. With all the stuff in the car, you can't even see the P.S. pump...... you can see the pulley, but not the pump. We were pretty sure the leak was in one of the fittings near or on the pump. You'll remember that when we were originally fitting the parts into the car, we had to make a little bubble in the bulkhead behind the passenger seat to clear the P.S. pump & fittings. Instead of pulling the engine out to work on the P.S. pump, we made that little "bubble" in the bulkhead into an access panel. With that panel off, we could start the engine & actually see where the leak was & we could fit it right there. As it turns out one of the fittings that was in the pump that we got from Street & Performance was flawed & I had them send a new fitting & we were able to repair it right there.

Back when we 1st got the car started up, the fluid in the P.S. resevour was foaming up. Well this leak was the reason. We have started it & the foaming is gone now.

Another thing we found when we had originally started up the engine, we noticed a rubbing noise when we rev'ed the engine up quickly. It was ok when rev'ing it slowly & when running normally but when rev'ed quickly a noise was there. On investigation, we found that the idler that we set the car up with originally was too close to the alternator & when it moved when rev'ing quickly an area on the back side of the tensioner arm was touching the alternator fan. Once again, we didn't want to remove the engine again to address this, so we had to wait to figure out a new setup until we could figure out a new system to put on it.

We had another LS engine in the shop, so after some planning, we decided that it would be better to remove the relative parts off of the LS7 & build the new mock-up on that engine.

The pictures below show the new system as mocked up on the other engine. We then moved all of the parts back to the LS7 car & put it all back together.

It's all working great now.

Before:


After:


You will also remember that Troy had decided he needed a spot brake to use on the DS1 'Vette brake system.

We'll be putting all that back togetherr this week. To make it all work we needed some special bolts to get the new Spot brake caliper mounts to bolt on with the DS1 stuff. The bolts came in today, so Ill get some pics. as soon as it's all back together.

Pretty soon someone's going to have to put some test miles on it.

Archie