Esme gets gets some TLC

As Esme is to be a driver, till her sister Pearl is ready, the main thing is to make things work. She was somewhat, reluctant to leave her old home and all those European sports cars she had befriended over the last four years of her life.When I went to pick her up she absolutely refused to run on more than 7 and sometimes 6 cylinders.......I suspected leads but could not find a way to get it going with the limited resources there. For my trouble Esme gave me a nice couple of burns on the knuckles while I played with her plugs......
         Well, so I drove home ,one very load, very sick sounding car, which was being noticed for all the wrong reasons!!!!!!!!!!!. Thanks Esme.
       The next day I did a trip to my buds at Eagle autos and ended up making a new set of leads. That solved the misfire problem, threw in a set of plugs too.
       But , with no choke and a nasty habit of firing back throught the carby when cold, and a nasty stumble
on the blip to down shift. I thought a bit of a looksy was in order and perhaps a rebuild of that old 600.

600 vac secondaries 6.5 power valve, 66 jets 1986

Thats not to pretty !!

I had a bit of a look at the carby after I took it off

Luckily I also have a few carbs, after a full rebuild of the 3310-3 750 vac, same powervalve

and I up sized the jets  to 68's

its running fine, there is a nice smooth transition to the secondaries now

Hey and I got a choke now too, looks a bit better and we hold about 5 to 7 psi fuel pressure too.

The other job was to adjust the tappits from the noise and the loppy idle I thought I had a solid roller cam.

Man I was wrong...hydraulic . I think they had not been touched in a long ,long time. These are going to give me trouble  I think, later on. Some of the valves have rounded heads, as about three where very, very  loose and floped around,, how could you not notice , well its quiet now,  and runs well.

I will have to try and work out what cam is in this thing.Next is an oil change and a sneak peek to see if she is a 4 bolt or not, thats in a week or two.

Oh this was Esmes best friend while at Brooklands  DBSZ an amazingly beautiful car

not bad for the high $300K ??

Stay tuned ....you too Esme!!

Some Random Garage stuff

I was stumbling through the garage, from time to time I'll add a few photos of bits and things.
Here is a set of heads I have acquired.The seller ,as I bought site unseen,said they were in Excelent condition and just needed to be freshened up ................................Hmmmmmm, I think I understand!!!

                             

Take a close look at the numbers...This is a set of tired LS6 iron heads

the real deal

these inlet valves are, shall we say, large at 2.300" Inlet 1.870" Exhaust

they heads are seriously ported so I suspect they have come of a drag boat.

I still need to think what I can do with them????

Hmm 454 with a supercharger.. any comments?

Oh and I have a wall of BB inlet manifolds now

theres a weird dual plane Offenhauser in there and a LS6 square port low rise

and my holley street dominator low rise and an edelbrock torquer

Always room for one more though

OH, my closing comment for this stuff...buyer beware and there's a sucker born every minute.

Lets just say, he has my money for the heads!!

                        

So we need a fold up Body dolly and attachments etc etc etc!!

Well as we worked out earlier, no more room.. so, the body dolly when not in use ,would need to be stored out of the way.I thought about it for a while and having found a lot of body dolly plans on the net, decided to  as usual, build it in steel and make the legs be able to fold away, so I could store the the whole unit and still get two cars in the Garage when all was done...

This is a pretty standard frame shape for a C2 or C3 body

just consult Noland Adams Body Dolly lift work book, anyway he makes it in wood.

Wood and I don't get along , I find it hard to weld

So my box of goodies to modify the basic design

Well, its about half way done,a few more wheels and we got a nice strong body Dolly.

The body will be living there for at least a year or so, by my reckoning and

I want to be able to move it back and forth to the painters and such without any problems.

The finished dolly, stored away up in the roof line, where it will live

in the dark distant future when all the cars are finished........ha ha

The next problem, now that I have a dolly to put the body on, is to get the body off  The fact that I cannot get enough height to use the lift strap kit from Zip, which I bought and then worked out it would be useless for me, Is that a single point lift from a hoist, means I cannot change the sling length enough while Iam lifting to get the body to lift dead straight. So after spending a lot of time looking at the old photos of the Corvette production facilities and the way they lifted the body on and off  I decided do make something  sililar but with a movable centre of mass device that I could adjust on the fly, much like the engine lift  arms .

This is what I am trying to duplicate

Here are the bits to start making my version of it.

This is the centre of mass unit before the arms are attached.
The nut on the left, drives a T nut up and down the slot,
an eye bolt screws in the the top of it and is attached to the hoist

Thats the main spider constructed, attached to the gantry hoist, next I need arms to attach to the spider

The finished body crab attached and ready to lift on the left, away we go on the right

It worked a treat , luckily I had my technical advisor on hand,

Lexie gave it the wag of confidence and we were away !!

So that gets us to Chassis this side

Body the otherside, I guess Pearl is having an out of body experince for the next year or so!!

Stay tuned more to come!!

Lets Get Started April 2009

   The biggest issue, apart from the fact that I didn't want to pull the car apart as I realised I would have started a path I could not turn back from, was the fact I would be doing all the work my self. The fact I had to remove the body logistically was daunting as my roof height was only 2.3 metres, that left me 1 metre of lift of the body to get it over the chassis.
          So as I could not move the car after I lifted it as the driveway has a slope, so........ The body must move side ways across the garage. Hmmmmmm....... well after some time , well about 8 months .Now we had fallen in to 2010. I had put my plan in motion, I did my calculations and a 500kg lift would handle the body and also the stonking great Big Block . So I did what any Aussie would do , improvise and built my self a traveling gantry crane with a 500kg SWL , easy peasy ..............yeah right anyway it took me about a month of weekends and then about 6 months of visits to my acupuncturist to fix my compressed disk from lifting the cross beams on my own.(Age doesn't always make you wiser!!)

I had to give it a name...what else would it be

See that proves it. Safety yellow carn't go past it yeah!

Complete with traveling light

I guess it pays to have 30+ years of experience making things in steel

So I hear you say" that piddly little thing that's not going to lift squat!!! "...oh ,ye of little faith.

You ALWAYS have to test your stuff!!! that was the test load 10% over, well its actually weighed 610KG,

so alls good. Its now Feb 2010

Well that's covered the lifting up bit, next I would have to put it on something !!!!!!!! Hmmmm more thinking involved....headache time

So much stuff so little room ,this wont just be your average dolly .................unless, I buy a bigger house!!

......................nope, thats not going to happen... think harder!!!!!!!!!

   

Esme a girl who's been around

Esme has lots I have to find out. She spent some time in the mysterious lands of Japan and well, I think she picked up a few bad habits.Previous to that I have no history yet.

Take a close look at the speedo, thems there KM in the middle..What the ??

Oh and if you noticed the tacho is well ....lets just say a little different for a 64,no worries I have it in a box to put back in just see the photo below, may need a little work though

Shall we just say some assembly required, we will get back to that

I think to say she  has some carburetion issues is pretty safe.

That's a 600 Holley Vac secondaries, circa 1986

She has had some ink done and theres lots of pretty symbols on the relay box All Japanese!!

Hmm ... and the wires well ... a really nice job but one day there going back to the USA

for now Esme will remain a driver for the foreseeable future, at least till her younger sister, Pearl feels better,then it will be Esme's turn for her I think, 3rd facelift in 46 + years

Pearl the first of my wayward daughters

Pearl, arrived on April 14th 2009. I had been looking for a Vette to buy for many ,many years, a bit of a young mans dream from the age of 16. I had looked from time to time , even driven one or two but, life happened and it remained just that,  a dream. So as time passes you get to a point where you just either do it or....shut up , suck it up and move on.
            So I started looking and looking and looking, I have literally many thousands of photos of C3 chromies. I decided to look for a 70 BB as it was ;
1) the first year of the 454.
2) the lowest production year due to the Strike at GM
3) pre 70's were just to expensive.
          I stumbled across this car in an Add on a web site in SA and enquired if the car was still for sale, it was.So I exchanged emails for a few months with the owner Ross Spurling , but nothing came of it and I let it sit for a while, I couldn't make my mind up really, as it was an Auto and I had my heart set on a manual.
   So time moved on ,a few months went past and I thought I will see if its still there, thinking for sure it had been sold in the mean time.
       Strangely  ..... it hadn't. Go figure I spoke with my best friend..... Jen, we have  been together lets just say a long time. and we decided to go for an anniversary drive to SA to have a look and decide.
     Well Pearl got adopted and that was that. That took eight months..... the strange thing  Ross told me was in all that time the other cars he brought out had sold but not one enquiry for Pearl.
     She had been waiting for me all that time .

this is me on the Left meeting Pearl in SA with Ross and Jan Spurling ,top people

This is Pearl at home, one drawback Pearl didn't run, motor yes, but Tranny no :(

so a lot of grunting and puffing to turn her around 180 degree in the garage, I suddenly realized what a big lump of iron a 454 was, in the front of this old girl .My legs were stuffed for days after working those dollies up front.

One other issue to tackle, as all the fuel and brake lines were ...errr stuffed, I had the body lift off all in front of me to get to them. That was a challenge for another day as the roof height in my garage is low to say the least.

Gotta Love the Emblem!!

There's just no replacement for displacement and that rumble from way down deep under the bonnet



Pearl Adopted April 2009

She was a california girl at heart, Pearl white with red and orange pins striping, moved to LasVegas before
being adopted down under in Australia. She sports a 454 number matching 390hp in front of a turbo400.
The original owner decided to get some more muscle under the hood and changed the spec to LS6 with a B&M tranny to get it there. This is her journey along with her older sister Esme along the road of restoration

This is before she left Las Vegas in 2008

 Its a bit of a mess under the hood but its got potential

Esme , Pearls older sister Adopted Sept 2010

This is Esme Pearls older sister a 1964 Coupe

this is what caught my eye when I met her

but for know she's a  350 out of an 86 truck stamped as a 69 Camaro? Go figure !!

but she has some potential to be great again with lots of TLC