Another sacrificial lamb to the god of speed
10-09-2007, 11:33 PM
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Another sacrificial lamb to the god of speed Me, that is.
I've been playing with the '57 for about 36 years, the Camaro for 8. The '57 will pretty much stay as it is with slow "improvements" about at the pace of the past 4 decades.
The Camaro has been the "accelerated" improvement platform. I got the car in May '99 with a cracked V6 block from a neighbor down the street. I never drove it in its original configuration. It got the LG4 and TH700 from a rear-ended '86 Camaro, and began duties as the daily driver in August. In '01 I went with World heads, Crane cam, Hooker headers, and more stall, huge improvement in power, a full second off of the 1/4 mile times, and a lot more fun to drive. In '05, the engine came out again for a rebuilt ZZ3 shortblock, the rest of the 305 stuff back on, rebuilt transmission, for another second and a half off the 1/4 time - without a bit of sacrifice in fuel economy.
Last month, my wife asked me what I would choose if I could have any car I wanted - of course Vette came to mind, just too impractical. I figured what I really wanted more than anything else was a good manual transmission - late muscle made sense as well, so '04-'06 GTO's hit the radar screen. But, again, seemed like too much money to be practical.
So, that led to what I finally decided to do - make the Camaro into my own "dream car". Well, at least still within the bounds of practicality. A complete LS1/T56 from a 2000 SS found its way into my garage, and as soon as we get my son's Lumina out of the "hospital" for its timing set transplant, the project will begin.
Although I'm not completely ignorant of EFI, this is my first venture into performance EFI. The engine/transmission have about 50k miles on them, seem to be in decent shape from what I can tell. I'm still figuring out the details of what will be required to get it installed properly and running, I figured I'd do that before trying to "improve" it. Even though things like cam change would be easier now, I'd rather take baby steps and figure out what I'm doing before trying to run.
Well, enough of my long wind. You'll probably figure out soon enough that as soon as you let me talk, it'll be hard to shut me up. . .
I promise to keep it civil, though.
I've been playing with the '57 for about 36 years, the Camaro for 8. The '57 will pretty much stay as it is with slow "improvements" about at the pace of the past 4 decades.
The Camaro has been the "accelerated" improvement platform. I got the car in May '99 with a cracked V6 block from a neighbor down the street. I never drove it in its original configuration. It got the LG4 and TH700 from a rear-ended '86 Camaro, and began duties as the daily driver in August. In '01 I went with World heads, Crane cam, Hooker headers, and more stall, huge improvement in power, a full second off of the 1/4 mile times, and a lot more fun to drive. In '05, the engine came out again for a rebuilt ZZ3 shortblock, the rest of the 305 stuff back on, rebuilt transmission, for another second and a half off the 1/4 time - without a bit of sacrifice in fuel economy.
Last month, my wife asked me what I would choose if I could have any car I wanted - of course Vette came to mind, just too impractical. I figured what I really wanted more than anything else was a good manual transmission - late muscle made sense as well, so '04-'06 GTO's hit the radar screen. But, again, seemed like too much money to be practical.
So, that led to what I finally decided to do - make the Camaro into my own "dream car". Well, at least still within the bounds of practicality. A complete LS1/T56 from a 2000 SS found its way into my garage, and as soon as we get my son's Lumina out of the "hospital" for its timing set transplant, the project will begin.
Although I'm not completely ignorant of EFI, this is my first venture into performance EFI. The engine/transmission have about 50k miles on them, seem to be in decent shape from what I can tell. I'm still figuring out the details of what will be required to get it installed properly and running, I figured I'd do that before trying to "improve" it. Even though things like cam change would be easier now, I'd rather take baby steps and figure out what I'm doing before trying to run.
Well, enough of my long wind. You'll probably figure out soon enough that as soon as you let me talk, it'll be hard to shut me up. . .
I promise to keep it civil, though.
