1967 Nova SS

[RadLS67]

Oklahoma State fan I see.....I am a Mississippi State fan. I look forward to our matchup on the 31st.

If we win ill come back in and talk crap.

If you win ill continue to comment on the car and act like that game never happened.





Oh and sweet car!

HaHa, yea my dad and i were wanting to go to that game pretty damn bad but we will be out of town for a trip to the lake with the whole family that weekend... It should be a good game though.

[RadLS67]

Looking forward to see the Nova finished. Bet you can't wait.

I am chomping at the bits to see it all smoothed out and painted! It should be out of paint late next month so im slowly cleaning up the engine/trans and wiring harness to get ready to get the car back into the garage.

[RadLS67]

Oklahoma State fan I see.....I am a Mississippi State fan. I look forward to our matchup on the 31st.

If we win ill come back in and talk crap.

If you win ill continue to comment on the car and act like that game never happened.



Oh and sweet car!

Looks like miss state choked a little! lol

[RadLS67]

So i decided the little ls1 needed a cam swap... Got a comp cam kit (cam, pushrods, trunion rocker upgrade, springs, retainers, keepers and spring cups) Now im trying to track down a decently priced used LS6 intake with a ported/polished throttle body to slap on top.

[rickpaw]

Any new updates Radley?

[RadLS67]

Yea, the guy that was painting my car turned out to be a real winner... After 9 months of excuses and the guy not caring i pulled the car from his shop and am currently taking him to court... I feel like ive wasted 9 months of my life. Ill probably give more details after the court case is settled. On a lighter note i took the car to another guy that taking care of buisness.

I ended up picking up a matched heads and cam package for the ls1 and pulled/sold the cam and springs i already installed in the motor. Should be a really fun little 430-440RWHP street setup.

Meanwhile while im still waiting and i have garage space i went crazy with my corvette and im doing a TSP cam, PRC heads, TSP longtubes/xpipe, intake, throttle body, clutch and a tune.

[RadLS67]

A couple of pics with the car stripped back down


Etching primer down

Getting the body work knocked out


I decided to kind of splurge a bit on some billet hood and trunk hinges.

And like i said from my last post i started tearing into my corvette. For any of you that have done heads and/or cam swap on a corvette you know how truly fun this job is...

[rickpaw]

Glad to hear you're moving forward again, despite the 9 month delay.

Keep us posted.

[RadLS67]

Wow, its been a day or two since I last updated this thing. ALOT of big life changes have came up over the last year. But after working a lot on the car it is finally back on the road!

To start paint was finally finished up in October, here are some pics from when I picked it up.

[RadLS67]

Here I cleaned up the engine and gave it a good 2 coats of silver engine paint. Once it was in the car I had my painter smooth out and paint the Katech LS valve covers and slapped those on. Also threw on the headers/intake/fuel rails/radiator etc etc.

[RadLS67]

I made a little panel/pcm holder out of an aluminum jegs electronics tray. The pcm sits directly below where the hvac controls used to be, the control panel sits in front of that. Planning to make a center console to conceal all of it but still have accessibility through a removable cover/door.

Here I was going through some final soldering/wire grouping to maintain some of the chaos of both chassis & drivetrain harnesses


Here are some real pieces of art! A huge shout out and thank you to Jason @ Rushforth wheels for working with me on my order. These have to be the nicest wheels i've seen in a while! (Rushforth "livewire" wheels with brushed/cleared centers, perimeter hardware and polished lips)


A view of them with Nitto NT555 (285 35 18)rear and bf Goodrich g force TA's (245 40 17) up front.

[RadLS67]

So drove the car up to the local tuner by my house (with no glass, headlights or stickers) and got it on the dyno. After a bit of tuning I ran out of injector at 4k rpm. I guess I wasn't expecting a set of heavily ported/milled 853 casting heads with larger stainless valves and a tweeked 228r cam to do so well on power. The 28.5 lb Z06 injectors are from what I here good for 375rwhp and maxed them out. Ordered and received a set of FAST 36lb injectors but have been pretty lazy to put them in. I started cleaning up all of the glass for the car with some foaming glass cleaner, a razor blade and some lint free rags. I took the window tracks and regulators cleaned them up with some WD40/wire brushes/alcohol gave them 2 coats of rustoleum flat black, all of the tracks/gears/wheels got a liberal coat of grease and went to town installing them. Still have a lot of work to do on the car but for the first time in a long time I think I can see a tiny light at the end of the tunnel!

[Blue Bayou]

I know this is an old thread but I'm looking for some updates... Very nice build!

[RadLS67]

Alot of update action. I will try to break it up into segments as much as possible.

I got all the glass installed, all of the trim and bumpers were powder coated a flat silver and ironed out a few kinks after putting a few miles on the car.

[RadLS67]

Feeling confident and happy with the cars performance i signed up for the optima search for the ultimate streetcar in mid July for the Circuit of the Americas event in Austin TX august 6-7. I was still missing a few pieces of trim and hadnt finished the interior but felt confident in the mechanicals enough to beat on the car.

I purchased a "built" 4L60E and converter from what i beleived to be a very reputable builder several years ago. I put around 2K MAYBE 3k miles on the trans with an appropriate sized transmission cooler and good fluid over the several years since i purchased it. During paint i sealed up the transmission and put it in the corner of my garage. After assembly i took the car out one day to a car meet a few miles away and when i went to back in I placed the car in reverse but it took extra throttle to get the car to move. It acted like the brakes were on or a band in the trans was applying when it shouldnt. When i drove the car home it acted fine for the first half of the drive but then started to not want to shift into 3rd at wide open throttle. I checked the shifter detents and all felt firm and clunked into each gear, i repositioned the shifter linkage to make sure it wasnt in a bind, checked hot fluid level, checked with a scanner to make sure there weren't any DTC or the trans was in limp mode. Next i dropped the pan and checked all solenoids and changed the oil and filter. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary but the problems still persisted.

Being a few weeks before the optima streetcar challenge i decided it needed to be pulled and at least fix what was wrong with the trans. I called the builder and since it was out of the warranty date they said they would go through the trans and rebuild it completely for the cost of shipping and $900 or so in parts and labor. Not wanting to ship the trans to pennsylvania being so close to the race i got in touch with a friends trans builder here in texas. During dissasembly he sent me a few pictures that made my skin crawl.

[RadLS67]

So after seeing the trans needed serious help i had the new Texas builder (Grimm Performance Transmissions) order parts needed. List included new wiring harness, clutch packs, bands, billet oil pump, Sonnax smart shell, valve body seperator plate and seals.






All of the parts came in rather quickly except for the billet oil pump which delayed assembly a good solid 2 weeks. Once the pump came in he assembled the transmission, threw a quick coat of paint on it and had a friend go pick it up.

[ah64pilot]

Moar!

[RadLS67]

While waiting on the transmission a buddy of mine suggested i swap a set of ARP rod bolts for stock LS rods i got in a trade into the motor since the trans was pulled. Being a weak point of the LS1 i agreed so we pulled the motor, swapped out the rod bolts, cleaned everything up and evened out the paint.






Went ahead and bought a new beefier flex plate, a circle D 3200 single disk billet stall converter and some ARP converter bolts as well.

[RadLS67]

Before we got the transmission in i went ahead and added a trans cooler in series with the current one in the radiator and a power steering cooler, lines and new adjustable pump since the LS1 pump seemed to be overpressuring the rack. I also cleaned up the headers, installed new spark plugs along with all new fluids.

[RadLS67]

We finally got the car driving around and breaking in the new transmission for a few hundred miles 2 days before the optima streetcar challenge. Not really completely happy with the tune i got a remote tune from Pat G (the absolute best LS tuner around here IMO) did a few data logs and car was acting great.