1968 Camaro Resto-mod 6.0/6 speed; Project Penny Pincher

[ryeguy2006a]

It's been a little while since I made an update, so I thought I'd share. Fortunately, this update has nothing to do with further progress on the build of the car, but rather from driving it! Crazy right?? Now that the car is 100% road legal and 100% functional, I've been driving it any chance I get. Here's the first time that I drove it to work. It's funny, I was so dead set on getting this car 100% complete before I drove it, but now that I can just hop in and drive I haven't wanted to do much else to it. No side windows, no door panels, no dash pad, but honestly hasn't bothered me.





I've been sidetracked over the past few weeks with some landscaping projects. Since I live on a side hill, both involved leveling out area's. One is for my son's new swingset and the other is for our brick fire-pit. Both look pretty awful right now, but once the grass seed grows, it should be just what I wanted.





I did sneak out one night last week and started to mock up for the low mount Sanden compressor upper mount. I built the lower mount a while ago, but the upper mount was a little more tricky. Here's what I came up with. I'm going to try and make it out of one piece, but if I can't I'll likely do it with three.







I also built a pair of piston stops one for me and the other for my Dad. We swapped a small cap HEI on his 496 BBC to allow for the Terminator EFI to control the timing, but there seems to run worse the closer that we get to syncing up the commanded spark vs. the actual spark he's showing on the balancer. I'm wondering if the TDC mark on his balancer is off now for some reason. I build this to confirm.





This is the photo from a few weekends ago at the car show. My wife snapped this of my son and I. Definitely one of my new favorite pictures.



I have been at a loss for time recently to work on the car and thought that it would be worth the money to just pay someone to dyno tune my car and be done with it. Well after I called around, I just can't justify a $450 invoice to have that done. Heck, that's halfway to the new Terminator X system from Holley. But the silver lining is that it gave me the motivation to use my tuning software and play around with my own VE and MAF tables to dial in my tune. Thankfully, my car isn't that far away from a stock Z06 Corvette so that's what my base is. I've been playing around with the VE tables and so far it has helped out pretty significantly with my light throttle surging issue. I'm hoping to dial it in further over the next week or so and call it good.

That's about all for now. Hopefully my next update will include a tuning update.