Stuff I'm working on that has nothing to do with a samurai.

F

Fastspec2

Well-known member
Many moons ago I had a thread of all the random car/shop related things I was up to.
It was kinda nice to have a place online to stash some pictures and whatnot and was also just some random content that some showed some interest in.
So in no particular order or any sense at all , here will by my pics and posts of utter randomness.

This is a small block Chevy I rebuilt and a turbo kit I fabricated for it. Fits a square body 2wd truck.
Started off as a 97 l31, i put a super simple cam in. Cam required cutting the spring pockets down and I used the ovate wire ls1 style spring. Cam is .545 x .550 224x232. Heads are the Vortech heads, rings were gapped at .028.
Turbo is a 62mm unit and a modified Holley for blow through. Engine turned out good, results should be pretty soon to follow. Got it running in the truck last week.
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And this is the next one. I'm putting together a simple 5.3 for a square body truck. It will be turbocharged with a 4l80 and running Microsquirt ecu for control
Gen4 rods, lc9 pistons, Melling pump, ls7 lifters, 243 heads, all the simple but good stuff. Turbo will be a 7875 billet and the convertor will be an A-1t around 3k stall.
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I luv this kind of eye candy!!!!!!!!!!!!! [thumbsup]  [thumbsup]  [thumbsup]  [thumbsup] Always been a chevy fan, sweet 55 in the back ground. Tell me more about it.
 
 Yesterdays projects,

New Dodge Ram 1500 TRX blower pulley and balancer swap.
You have to pull the blower and remove the drive snout. Then you use a fixture to hold the drive shaft for pulley removal. the factory pully has a funky spring loaded clutch built into it that prevents you from being able to pull the pulley off in car. You do the same with the hellcat engines in all the different chassis. The pulley itself is a threaded on deal.
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After that was getting started on a new C8 for a new Titanium exhaust.
These cars are really good. Chevy did a pretty amazing job with them. Lots of fun and just good daily drivable cars really. 
We will see how loud this one is when done. You have to pull the rear bumper and some of the trunk apart to fit the new setup. I've done a few, they are pretty easy, just alot of screws.

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Today will be finishing it up and moving onto whatever is next. There are a few options.
 
MOAR Sweetness!! This stuff is amazing [thumbsup]  [thumbsup]
Really like the rubber band hack! Never seen that done, simply genius.[idea]  [approve]
 
Vette got finished. Its waaaaaaayyyyyy too fucking loud. Old guy thought it would look cool through the rear bumper. Drove it 30 minutes and said no way. So I took it back off. So now I have a 5000$ titanium exhaust setting hear on the bench with no car to attach it too. Which is pretty funny. Hes off to find something different I guess.

After that debacle I had some time to do a bit of welding Downpipe and some IC plumbing for a gt35 on a 2.4 mitsu.
I am NOT a professional welder.
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So I woke up this morning to some ice and freezing rain. This doesn't really bother me, but it means all the appointments will cancel, no one will deliver parts and I will probably get next to nothing done. So I stayed home and actually got to work on my own stuff in my shop at home. 

So first is the shop itself. When I bought this plsace the shop was a mess. I bought it last year and it was full of junk had a falling ceiling made of particle board and was "insulated" with Styrofoam peanuts and old carpet. Here are some pictures of the process as I turned it from a hole into a nice shop.

This is it when i started cleaning it out and making dump runs with my 64 Ford.
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After getting it cleaned out I wanted to raise the ceiling so I could put a 2 post lift in it. I did my research, formed up a decent plan and started going for it. First step was buying a scissor lift so I wouldn't kill myself while doing it.
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Modifying the truss'  And the pre cuts and patterns.
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I wanted the lift in the middle so I wanted to replace the smaller door with a full size one so my trucks would fit. With the lift in though and a car on it all the way up the door would not have been able to open and that was a non starter for me. So I bought 2 new doors and cut the tracks and rewelded them to follow ythe roof pitchg. Now I can put a truck on the lift, all the way up and still open the door.

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This is after the floor is painted before I moved any tools in.


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In all this project took me about a year, 30K and really cut in to anything else I wanted to do. I did all the work myself and what tools i needed and didn't have, I bought.  All that said it was worth every penny and every second. I absolutely love my shop. 
 
VERY impressive!! An absolutely incredible transformation. I thought your mechanical skills were great, but your carpentry skills are right up there at the same level. [thumbsup]  [thumbsup] I enjoy looking at these types of transformations.
 
Thanx!!
Always nice to hear my half ass ideas be validated.

I took the week of xmas off to spend some time at home and get a few things worked on.
First, today I am installing the Edelbrock proflo2 on my 67 gmc.
The truck is 2wd long box sbc truck I bought from a friend of a friend who unfortunately his health prevented him from working on his truck. He made me a great deal on the truck. I grabbed my new to me tow truck and dragged it home. I originally was going to ls swap it of course, but he had already bought the EFI and the engine was suposedly nice and sound. So I figured I'd insta;ll the kit and go from there.

Here is my NPR. I bought it on a really good deal after selling my previous one. The old one was a 03 dt466 international with a six speed manual. It was great, but it was kinda hard to drive, big, and drew alot more attention. It was also way more expensive to run. The npr is great, its small, easy to drive, gets almost 20mpg empty and is pretty comfortable at 70mpg. I use it just for my stuff hense the "not for hire" stickers. View attachment IMG_20220907_173649.webp

And here is my 67 as I pushed it into the shop.
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And the parts it came with.
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Im hoping it runs tomorrow. We will see.
 

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Merry Christmas everyone!!!!

After getting through xmas morning and doing all the family stuff, opening presents, making our phone calls to friends and family not present, and making breakfast, Basically fulfilling my social responsibilities my dad and I got to do something really cool.

The back story,
In 1970 my dad was stationed in Vietnam on his last tour where, through the PX he ordered a 1970 Camaro Z28. He finished up his tour and headed home to get his new car at City Chevrolet in Great falls Montana. Unfortunately, the chevy factory workers had gone on strike, so his car was not actually built. (Thats why you hear of a 70 1/2 camaro). The plants were only running for half the year before the strike.Well in order to try and make it right, chevrolet offered hoim a 1969 z28 that was already built and had not yet been sold. My dad said sure and they cut the price and shipped his car. He took delivery at City and for the next 15 years it was his daily driven hotrod. He loved the car. 15 years later it was parked on the street in front of his house when a drunk hit it and mangled the rear quarter fairly badly. At the time, times were pretty tough in Montana and my folks did not have the bandwidth to fix it. 
At this point my dad sold camera equipment and my mother was a waitress. One day, my dad was at work and my mother sold his car to a guy who walked up to the house and asked what was up with the Camaro on the side of the house. Dad wasn't happy about it, but was surprisingly understanding about it. They flat needed the money.
Fast forward to about two years ago, my dad is semi retired from an extremely successful self owned construction, heavy equipment business in Alaska,  and the guy who ended up with the car any numbers of owners and 40 years later contacted my him in Juneau after somehow tracking hm down. He was calling to see if my dad had any of the original paperwork for the car as he had repaired it and restored it and any of that kind of history can add some value to the car when its put up for sale. My dad still had it all but instead of selling the stuff he made an offer to buy the car back.It took two ish years for the deal to get hammered out, but last week pops bought his original car back. Him and my mom came down to vancouver to stay with us through the hollidays so last week he borrowed my tow truck, drove it up past Seattle somewhere and retrieved his car.
Here is the car on the truck.
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He brought it home and has been thrilled ever since. I've scarcely seen him happier. 
After we got through xmas morning with the fam,And dealling with all this stuff.
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Dad and i grabbed the car and took it to the shop. It didn't run as well as it could, so we put it on the dyno and gave it the business. It had a bad stumble that a combo of accel pump and powervalve took care of, was too lean at wot and the timing was far too low. The secondaries didn't open properly and it did not have WOT on the linkage. We spent 3-4ours on it and ended up with a great running DZ302. 

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We made about 35 ish more HP and fixed the drivabilty issues. 

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Honestly one of the best xmass days Ive had. Was super fun hanging out with him and working on his car. Alot of Karma had to go his way to end up with his very own, original car from 1970 52 years later. Dude must be living right.
 
What an absolutely great Christmas story!! I'm a little on the sentimental side and grew up in the Vietman era. Those veterens did not deserve the treatment they got from alot of the American public. So any time karma pays back a Nam vet I'm all over it. This was very heart warming to read and I personally want to thank you for sharing it with the rest of us. A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your family.
 
Yesterday I was able to get the GMC finished, running and tuned. Seems to start fine, run good and do what a efi SBC should. I'm kinda inpressed with the pro flo actually. There is definately some goofyness to it, but it all laid out pretty well. Only thing that came up was the "drop in" fuel pump and sender for the early tank. The new sender was far too large in diameter to fit. Rather than butcher the tank and try to scab something together, I installed an inline pump. All the wireing was the same just a few fittings I had lying around anyway. Now that its finished i can post it for sale and see if I can make anything on it. 

Awhile back i bought a 07 gmc denali with a blown motor for my girl friend. I put a motor together in it and got it running.Its a iron 6.0 block bored .065 over to run some factory used ls3 pistons i had. I used a btr cam, 630x615 229x244. Wanted to not have to deal with fly cutting any pistons and this cam is about as big as you can go with doing it. I used the original l92 heads with some .660 springs. Melling 296 pump, new bearings ect. The engine turned out good and ran great. My dyno is only a 2wd one so I had to borrow a friends AWD unit. With some pretty big tires and wheels, and AWD it still made 415 at the tire. Pretty darn good if you ask me.
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Anyway, yesterday i spent some time fixing the liyttle stuff. A neat enginer ois fine, but if nothing else works, its hard to talk her into being excited about it. So I got the rear aut opening hatch working, replaced a front diff mount to fix a clunk, made the windows work properly and get her phone to blue tooth to the new deck. I really like this thing, it hauls ass and is super comfy. Mileage sucks but thats not a shock at all. 
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Last year at the Portland swap meet my folks came to town as my dad loves this event. My mom stoically entertains him by  hanging out and wandering around, but its only sorta her thing. He on the other hand loves it, well she was walking the track for 12342232 time that weekend before she saw this thing. between being tired enough to not want to walk the 2 miles back to our spot and really liking this little rig, she bough it and drove it back to our swap spot. Its pretty fricken awesome. Its a (I think) 1958 cushman from a local mill out in washougal. It runs an apposed twin (I think) mercury motor like an outboard and a 4 speed trans.
Anyway, we wanted to get it tready for this year and even amybe cruise it around a bit. It needed a new flywheel, starter, some exhaust work, and all the lighting wireing. So that was todays project. Need to order a few more bits but the lions share got done today. it starts well now, the e brake works, the battery got swapped, brakes bled,  carb cleaned and serviced, and some stake bed sides built for it. It looks really cool and is really a hoot to drive. 40 is no problem and aside from re-learning a tree  shifter, is actually easy to drive.

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Its almost the same size as a sammy.
 

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