HERE'S WHERE IT CURRENTLY STANDS

02-25-06

Some things just never change...

Every now and then I still have the problem getting it to start when it's warm.  For some reason it doesn't get a crank signal, the signal from the crank trigger that activates the injectors and coils.  It could be something as simple as a poor ground but I have yet to locate the cause.

The only saving factor is the fact that it will start when pushed as evidenced by the following photograh.  That's the nice thing about having a manual transmission - it'll push-start.























03-16-06

It's finally in the shop getting the transmission repaired.  I took it to a shop of a fellow Vette Set member, Rick Jaeger of Inland Transmission in Fullerton, CA, to have him repair second gear synchronizer and install a new clutch, along with a few other things.

I've been meaning to get to some trouble areas for quite a while now, such as having a clutch pedal stop "professionally" built and installed, and changing the oil pan gasket that's been leaking for well over a year now.  I had no money to pay someone to actually do these repairs, and I have been physically unable to perform these repairs myself.  I could have saved quite a few bucks eliminating unnecessary labor charges if I could have removed it myself.  It's sure a bitch getting old!

All-in-all the car's running great.  I still have a few minor issues while cruising, like when I have just a feather touch on the gas pedal and it just doesn't seem to be right to me.  But when I put my foot in it, it runs like a scalded cat!  Man, it sure feels good when I do that!!

One of these days I'll find a tuner locally that I can depend on, until then I'm at a loss as to what to do.  I don't have the money to go to Westech, where I know it will be tuned properly, and it's kinda far.  I'm hoping I can find someone locally (South Bay) who isn't quite as expensive.

Here's an interesting aside to my attempts to purchase a clutch assembly for this job; I have purchased thousands of dollars worth of parts at a place in Bellflower, CA called Team C Performance, so I stopped there to pick up a clutch on my way back from Rick's shop the other day.  In the past I've used my personal credit cards for most of my puchases, this time I wrote a check since I've long-since gotten rid of all of my credit cards.

Of course they're going to call in to their credit checking agency to verify the check information and the next thing I knew was the check was refused.  They had no clue as to why but they did have a number for me to call and check with CERTEGY myself.

I called and was eventually told that my check was refused because of my lack of prior check-cashing history at Team C Performance.  Is this a Catch-22 situation or what?!!?  You can't cash a check until you've established a history of cashing checks?  Doesn't make sense to me so I told 'em to fuck off!

My next attempt was to purchase the unit through Summit Racing, where I had also spent many thousands of dollars in the past, although there too it was with my personal credit cards.  This time I used my brother's card.

The order at first appeared to go through without a hitch, but that was not to be the case.  They needed verification for my brother's card because my past purchases didn't match this credit card number.  God damn it!  What's next?

The end result is that the order is finally in transit after a two-day delay.  I'm just glad Rick hasn't called me asking where the new clutch is yet; I'm tying his rack up with my car sitting on it, and that ain't good for his business.

I'll be keeping y'all updated here as we go along.  Peace!

03-31-06

Rick's still got the car in his shop.

After getting all the parts and having the transmission rebuilt, it was time to put it all back together.  The bellhousing aligned perfectly and everything went back together without a hitch.  It was time for a test drive!

Well, that didn't work.  Rick called to tell me that the clutch was still slipping.  Damn!  It was bad enough that I get bad news like that, but worse yet Rick had to take everything back apart to find the problem.

The problem lay with the fact that the release bearing wasn't coming away completely from the pressure  plate fingers, thereby not allowing the clutch to fully engage, thus causing slippage.  After many calls to both Tilton and Centerforce, we found the solution to be in a thicker engine plate between the block and bellhousing and a longer pilot bearing.  It seems others have had this problem and solved it by utilizing this method of gaing clearance.

What drives me crazy is that nobody in either technical department proffered this solution up front; we had to dig for it.  Why can't businesses today take better care of their customers as their predecessors had once done? I guess that's too much to ask for nowadays.

That's it for now.

04-04-06

Well that didn't work.

The part (the engine plate) came in from Michigan along with the required longer pilot bushing, but the plate is designed for a tube-chassis car - a race car, not a street car.  We were back to step one.

Today I finally got through to someone at Mr. Gasket Group who confirmed that they do not manufacture a thicker engine plate.  He did say that if we machined a plate of our own it would be SFI approved if it was 1/4" thick aluminum.  Steel plates are only required to be an 1/8" thick.  However, machining another plate would be time-consuming and expensive.

After confering with Brian at Centerforce, who confirmed there was enough meat to their flywheel that we could safely shave .150 off the face (and at the countersunk area at the crank flange) of the unit.  This is the option we're going to take.

Isn't a month in the shop enough time already?  Enough is enough!

An interesting aside to this is the fact that although Centerforce manufactures their flywheels to OEM specs, other companies such as McLeod and Hays make flywheels that are approximately .140" thinner than Centerforce's flywheels.  There's the clearance I need.  Why didn't I just buy a McLeod unit with their hydraulic release bearing as I first planned?  I could have saved myself a whole lot of headaches instead of what I'm having to deal with now.

To paraphrase an old country western song ...  "Mama, don't let your babies become hot rodders."

More later.

05-07-06

I got the Corvette back in late April finally, and right away I knew something wasn't quite right.  The new clutch grabbed fine now in the higher gears, but it as I pushed the pedal in-and-out while sitting with the engine off, it it didn't sound right to me - it sounded like a clutch cable on a motorcycle in need of lubrication.  Sort of a rough sound.

The car took the opportunity at this time to once again give me problems when I tried to restart it while warm.  It wouldn't even see a crank signal even with the charger set to "start" mode.  The engine would spin as fast as the starter would take it, but it just wasn't receiving a signal to fire off.  It started when we pushed it again, as usual.

I had no problems on the way home; I even nailed it in sixth and it ran quickly up to a buck-twenty in no time - no slippage as before.

However, about a mile from home while accelerating from a red light on Artesia, I shifted to second and it seemed at first as though I lost my clutch again, which is basically what happened.  The clutch was grabbing immediately as the pedal came off the floorboards.  Shit!  I limped home and was so disgusted that I just left it and went upstairs.

After talking with Rick the next day, it was decided that the clutch simply needed to be bled again; he didn't think all of the air came out when he bled the release bearing.  Well duh!!!

In the meantime I had torn back into the dashboard to try and straighten out the wiring harness and gain some more room with which to move my gauge panels when I need to work in the area.  Also, I need more of the harness to reach certain areas under the hood.  I just need more room, period!

I also removed the valve covers in order to replace the gaskets because they were starting to drip a little again.  That led to a decision to change my breather setup around and get rid of the braided steel lines that take up so much of the precious little room I have under the hood.

Then I decided to change my wheels and tires to my alternate set of Weld wheels and slicks.

Okay, now we have four projects underway:
  • the release bearing issue
  • the dash wiring
  • the breathers
  • the wheels

What are the chances that any one of these jobs is going to go right the first time out?  If you guessed none, then you've been following along with my ongoing saga of "Ken's Engine Project" and already know that's how it always goes for me - my friend Murphy and I are on a first-name basis.

The release bearing did contain quite a bit of air and after bleeding it off, all seems to be well in the clutch department.  It's not even making that grinding noise when depressing and releasing the clutch pedal and it seems to be grabbing at the appropriate spot too.  Now all I have to do is try to get my seat closer to the pedals; the pedal stop has been reworked as well, so now I can't quite depress it far enough unless I really concentrate and extend my leg to its extreme.  Thats' going to cause some missed shifts unless I address the issue, that's for sure.

The valve cover breathers are going to be a pain to address.  Due to the design of my cast covers, I can't find anything that'll work.  I actually found someone who'll make a set of breathers for my application, but his main job as Chief Mechanic for a major car collector/restorer was going to be taking so much of his time in the near future that I simply reinstalled the braided lines and breather tank for now.

The dash wiring will have to be an onging project which I'll persue as money permits.  Meaning that once I save my pennies again, I'll either take it back to Chris in Murietta, or more than likely take it to M&H Electrical Fabricators in Santa Fe Springs, to have either a new harness or its equivalent installed.  I hope they can cure my electrical gremlins - the bane of most of my problems.

The wheels.  I was having an issue with my front wheels where I experienced an imbalance or shimmy at around forty miles an hour.  I could drive through it, but it was always there just a little.  I thought my front wheels were imbalanced, but I tried three times to have them balanced, by three different operators, and each time I had the same vibration when I reinstalled those wheels.

So...  I took the wheels and tires to yet another alignment shop that I trusted to see if they could help me diagnose the problem.  As soon as Steve saw the wheel he asked what the size of my spindle hub was and if I had "centering rings" for the wheels to take up the difference if the sizes were far apart.  D'oh!  I had forgotten about centering rings and wheels now being "hub centric" instead of being "lug centric".  The factories once relied on the lug centric style for centering wheels to the spindle but are currently using hub centric specs for most applications.  I remembered getting a set of centering rings with my Borbet wheels when I first got them, but they actually weren't necessary in that case and caused more problems than they were designed to solve.  I have no clue as to what I did with those old rings.

I found some places that stock the rings, both locally as well as online, but none of them had the size I needed; my hub spindle size is approximately 2.75" (70.3mm) and the Weld wheel bore size is approximately 3.25" (82.5mm).  I searched and searched but there were none to be found, so I was resigned to having a set machined when someone mentioned that their long-shank lug nuts were a pretty snug fit into the respective holes in their wheels.  I knew from experience that I had a slight amount of play when my lug nuts were inserted into the holes; I wasn't aware that I had two different-sized lug nuts.

What happened was that I had originally ordered up a set of closed-end lugs nuts when I first bought the wheels and when I realized that the NHRA was going to require open-end lug nuts to race legally, I reordered another set in the open-end style.  However, I neglected to notice the differences in shank diameter.  The amount of difference was slight but it was enough to make centering the wheels difficult when mounting them on the car.

The wheels are now on the car and all seems to be well for the moment.

Okay, the valve covers are back on, the wheels and tires are on, the clutch release bearing has been bled, and the wiring is on the back burner.

I decide to try to start it up and take it out to see if the wheels felt better and the check to ensure that the vibration was gone.  No luck - the damn thing wouldn't fire again; it just wouldn't get a crank trigger signal!  The battery was spinning the starter fine, but the signal to fire the injectors just wasn't getting through.  I got Rick Clewett to come by and we spent three or four hours trying to figure this thing out but couldn't get anywhere with it.  We gave up and I didn't try it again until yesterday, over a week later.

The battery was fine when I first got in the the car and the engine spun freely, but I was still not getting a crank trigger signal through to the computer.  I forgot to mention that when I was taking my dash apart again, I removed the shift light.  Figuring that might cause a problem with the signal getting through, I reattached the light just as it came out (there are only three wires and it'd be hard to cross any due to their individual unique colors) but it didn't help.  At one point Rick even unplugged the tachometer lead to check to see if that had anything to do with it but that didn't help either.  We had tried everything last week!

When I left the car last week the shift light was disconnected so it was still disconnected when I first tried it today.  I figured what the hell, it couldn't hurt to try it again with the light connected, so I connected the three wires, and lo and behold, the frigging car started right up!  Well, it almost started right up; it was acting weird and didn't idle quite right for a while, but that could have been due to fouled plugs or something from trying to start it so many times last week and today.

I took it up the block and back and everything seems to be copacetic for now.  I can only hope.

Stay tuned to see what my Obsession brings next.

05-09-06

My hope that things were well was dashed once again!

I tinkered with the Vette yesterday and tried to start it again.  This time the computer saw a signal from the crank but the damned engine wouldn't fire again.  It's acting very strange and I cannot figure it out.

Rick's coming back over on Thursday.  We'll see what happens then.

(I swear, one of these days I'm simply going to burn the thing to the ground!)






05-13-06

I got it to start Friday afternoon and was going ot take it to Cruise At The Beach at Ruby's that evening.  Well, I went back down to the garage when I was ready to leave about an hour or so later and the damn thing wasn't seeing a crank signal again!  After trying it several times by turning the key off-and-on, it finally started.

I took it to Ruby's but parked it where I could push start it if it didn't fire when I went to leave.  However, not to my surprise, that darned car started immediately, as soon as I cranked the engine over, though once I got home and the car was safely in the garage again, I tried shuting it off and then re-starting but once again it wasn't seeing the crank signal.

I should mention that the battery was cranking it over just fine all along until I tried to re-start it in the garage.  It was sluggish when I tried it then, but that's been a common occurence.

Well there you have it, the latest news to my ongoing saga of building a hot rod Corvette, and it seems to be quite obvious that it ain't over yet!
The "Obsession." Click the image to view it full-size.
UPDATED: June 13, 2006
Click to return to the home page.
Click here for latest entry.