67 Butternut Build

[sjaroslo]

It's hard to believe that ONE YEAR has passed since I started this thread. It was Fourth of July weekend of 2012 when I started on this journey. In the big picture, it seems so very little has actually transpired--certainly not the amount of progress that I had hoped for, but my wife keeps reminding me that it is a HOBBY and it isn't meant to be all wrapped up in a few weeks. Goodness knows I have not been nearly as energetic about getting out there as I thought or hoped that I would be. My brother has been a great assistant and has made the 90-minute drive down to my house on numerous weekends and I wouldn't even be nearly as far along with the build without having had his support.....

After much consternation, I did receive my hard lines back from Inline tube, so they are the next major item to be installed. I'll need some extra help from my son-in-law on that one, I think, and maybe that will come up in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, we've 95% completed the parking brake installation, and I wanted to share with you how I did it, since the Art Morrison folks weren't extraordinarily helpful in providing suggestions that an amateur like myself could follow, and Frank and the Prodigy crew have fallen off of the face of the Earth, and I had been hoping to leverage my relationship with him for some ongoing advice, so in the end, I was left up to my own devices. Right or wrong, this is what I chose to do.

I used a stock 67 Camaro front cable (in Stainless Steel, from Inline tube) and a Wilwood (Lokar) kit for the rears.

In the first photo you can see the cable snaking down from the stock location and crossing under the Art Morrison subframe; I felt like I needed to get inside the framerail in order to have an effective installation.


Here's where I got tricky (as tricky as I am capable); knowing with the stock installation that the front cable is held tightly from moving as it passes through the subframe, I decided to do a similar thing. I drilled a hole in the side of the crossmember mount that was just the right size for the front cable to fit through, so that the collar of the cable was flush against the crossmember. Then I used the same Mickey Mouse clip that the factory used to secure the housing to the hole. It worked really well! I drilled a second large hole at the other end of the crossmember mount to let the spring and the threaded end of the cable pass through, and made it large enough so that it wouldn't bind up upon release.


I bolted the Wilwood bracket to the floor. Now, one of the minor issues that I had run into was that the Wilwood connector blocks were threaded 5/16" fine, but the end of the stock front cable was threaded 5/16" coarse.... what I ended up doing was taking a 5/16" drill bit and drilling out the connector so that it was smooth; I also used 2 connectors to try to improve the grabbing force, since a lot of you guys have commented that the single block doesn't grab hard enough. I used 5/16" coarse nuts on either side of the blocks (which now slide up and down the threaded end) and now I should actually have one more point of adjustability for the entire set up--which may be important as well, since many of you also report that this entire setup doesn't actually work that well, and I suspect that will be the case for me, too, unfortunately.



One of the things that I noticed, that I just don't have time to focus on right now, is that the pedal doesn't snap all of the way back to the fully released position. I suspect that this may be because I put a couple of fairly tight 90* bends in the sheaths as I ran them from the connector block back to the rear wheels. I needed to avoid the exhaust, and I did that by routing up and over the driveshaft tunnel and hugging close to the floor under the rear seat; only time will tell if there are too many bends, and/or if there will be any driveshaft interference (driveshaft is yet another paid-for, Prodigy-promised piece that will never happen...). I decided to use the factory parking brake bracket holes that were in place and found a couple of perfect grommets from McMaster-Carr that filled the bill.



I still need to Dremel off the ends of the rear brake cables to length.



So that's it--not a lot of progress made, but we had a very productive day on Friday. In addition to fairly wrapping up the parking brakes, we were also able to get the headers out (so that new 0₂ sensor bungs can be welded in) and also installed the flywheel stop http://www.lateral-g.net/forums/showthread.php4?t=36828 in anticipation of the removal and replacement of the harmonic balancer for the Wegner pulley kit. Still need to tweak this a little bit.



Anyway, life from here into the foreseeable future will be focused on doing what it takes to be able to get the engine running. There's a LOT involved with that, but I'm going to try to defer anything not directly related to firing up that lump until later in the build. If nothing else, I want to be able to wander out to the garage at any time and at least hear it make some rumpety-rumpety noises! Thanks for listening.