Ben280

I for one, appreciate that the one active thread on this website is a handful of folks coming to defend Derek, and somebody with an ax to grind.

FWIW, when I spoke with Bluemoon Performance (importers in SoCal for the PAMS head) in 2022 they quoted $8-10k for the head with no cam towers or other parts. Do with that what you will, I would expect the PAMS twin cam head to decently expensive.

Also working on getting the radiator extractor wrapped up. This part has been a LONG time coming, and after a lot of pausing since I wanted to do it with carbon fiber, I've cheaped out and will just make it out of fiberglass and waft black paint towards it. This was a pretty fun thing to build, and figure I can get y'all up to speed! First tho, everybody in the way-back machine to March 2024. First thing to do was figure out how to make the shape. I started by cutting two huge holes in the hood, and start taping cardboard and paper to connect the three shapes. The challenge with this method is that I've firmly attached the hood to the car with tape, and because the shape is mostly paper, there was no good way to remove it to do anything with it! I decided here that expanding foam was going to be necessary to keep the shape and give me something to work with. I managed to squeeze a trash bag around the radiator, and bought some 2 part expanding foam from Amazon and started pouring. This process took SOOO MUCH FOAM! So much foam. I had to re-order 3 times to fill the shape out. Two things to note for folks thinking about doing this: This foam expands quite a bit requiring a pretty rigid form, and it gets HOT. The foam expands as part of an exothermic reaction, and will get up to about 180*. This gets worse if you pour a lot of foam on top of other foam, so you really want to let it cure and do it's thing before you layer it up. Once the thing was full, I trimmed the outlet and then took the hood off and realized the Big Chungus (tm) that I had created. Realized here that I forgot we need to make space for the air filter. Also, realizing that all the cardboard and other crap I used to make the shape is now glued forever to the foam. The drivers side channel is also quite a bit bigger than the passenger side, as the passenger side dodges a number of cooling tubes. Some shaping is clearly needed. Luckily because this is 2 part foam (never NEVER use Great Stuff foam for this), it was easily shaped with saws, grinders and other tools, was sandable and fillable with bondo. Ended up with a good shape! Last thing to do was fill in the area where the radiator sat so the fiberglass has a mounting flange. I then wrapped the whole thing in metal tape to promote reasonable release and it promptly sat in the shop for a year. I started fiberglassing it up this week, and have the bottom of the shape glassed in. My plan is to use plastic and more metal tape to create this piece in 2 parts, rather than trying to break, dissolve and generally remove the foam by disastrous methods. It's looking pretty alright, hoping to get the rest of it glassed up today!

Got into the fiberglass over the weekend to start popping out the last few parts I need to get this thing "finished". First up is the 3d printed splitter transition piece. I think in a modern car this would be a lip, or airdam, but we all know the area it's filling! I knew I didn't want to encapsulate the PLA core, since this is just a wind diverter, so I taped down a bunch of plastic sign board to the bench, and then used hot-glue and foil tape to attach the piece to the boards. Polyester resin doesn't like to attach to foil tape, or corrugated plastic sign board, so I was pretty sure I could pop this piece off when I was done. A little bit of fiberglassing later, and we had the piece ready to go! Side note; People who are able to take in progress photos of fiberglassing are wild, and have a huge budget for gloves. Once the glass cured (which took a long time, I'm using a resin that i'm not super used to, under catalyzed to extend the working time), I was able to mark my trim lines, and then pop the part off! Super satisfying de-molding the part like that. For a Positive to Positive process, I couldn't be happier. I do think I'd like to try printing a mold, rather than a buck like this, it might make the finishing process just a little nicer. Needs to be sanded, some filling bondo applied and then primer and paint. This piece will then get a little rubber lip along the top, and likely be "speed taped" to the splitter. The front of the car is already low, if this were attached forever, I'd be in trouble!

My inability to get involved with FB groups has lead me to instagram for a long time, but I think I'm heading back here for a bit. Generally better discourse and certainly better information. In line with the thread, I really wish I was #23! When I blew up my Rebello back in 2022 and made the call to go LS, a small part of my brain wishes I had done more math to see what the LS would actually cost to swap in, vs Dereks head. I think it would have been pretty close at the end of the day, and a whole heap of fun. Thanks for doing what you did, do, and continue to do @Derek!!

No idea on the owner but wow! I would have grabbed that hatch for the history in it alone. Rare to see these in a junkyard these days as well, very cool.

Thanks!! It's been a bit, refinding the stoke has been a challenge, but I'm getting excited again. Life changes (wife going back to school) means the race budget is way reduced this year, but I got my eye on a couple days.

315/30r18 rear and 295/30r18 front. I think the rear wing is 72" wide with a 13" chord length. I wanted the wing to match the rear track width which is quite a bit wider than factory. Got the airdam painted and mounted this weekend, and finalized the splitter wire mounting positions. I have to fiberglass up the blending piece, but that should be pretty speedy once I get material. A couple photos of the mounting/airdam fixed on: I have a radiator to hood duct/extractor that i'll throw glass up while I'm at it in the next few days.

Well, winter was quiet! Spent most of the winter skiing, rather than being cold in the shop, but spring has sprung and we have some exciting progress on the car. Since the car is in good mechanical shape, the big to-do's have been cosmetic. Mainly the air dam! It's such a cobbled together thing that I knew I had to make some improvements. To that end, I bought a 3d printer, whipped out my iphone and got to designing some new end areas. I'm keeping the same spirit of the airdam as before, but symmetrical sides (just flipped this piece and printed again) meant that I can be confident in the tolerances that I'm working with on both sides of the car! Pretty impressed how well this lined up fresh off the printer, and from a medium quality iphone photogrammetry scan of the front end. I opted to use the PLA as a core for the fiberglass layup, we'll see how that does long term. People have issues with PLA as a finished surface as the "glass transition" temperature is pretty low, and normal temps for sunny car parts will result in significant softening. I think inside 5 layers of fiberglass it should be just fine. (Glassed, sanded down and filler primer. It's easily the nicest part of the airdam at this point!) There is a pretty good gap between the bottom of the air dam and the splitter, so I printed up another whole piece that I will use to pull a direct positive part from. I don't want this to be super heavy duty, so I'm not going to encase the PLA core. (printed and glued) This piece had some scaling issues, even though I modeled it from the same references as the airdam pieces. Oh well! Final bit was that I really needed to make the car all one color again, and install some of the fun stuff I had made up before the winter. I had aspirations of painting the car, but when that plan met with the reality of budget, I opted to go back and vinyl wrap the front end again. The hood might get a re-do, but otherwise I'm rather happy with how it all turned out! Hoping to have the car mostly back together this weekend, and then aiming for an auto-x event at the end of June to shake out the cobwebs from car and driver!

The Megasquirt wasn't wrong. It was working well enough, but it wasn't able to provide any higher level diagnostic functions, effectively run the IAC valve, run drive by wire, or integrate a comprehensive traction control strategy. My tuner was also moving away from tuning megasquirt, and as someone who relies on a tuner, I figured giving him want he needed to succeed was important. The Megasquirt is a powerful computer than can do a lot, but I was running into those limits. The Haltech also provides a lot more I/O functionality, which I was out of on the Megasquirt.

Hijack away Cary! I like the Howe Racing as i knew it would work with the balljoint I wanted to use, and it had the correct thread for an inboard heim joint. I had to modify it enough at this point, I think next time I'll have some fully custom ones bent up, and use a spherical bearing on the inboard side.

If you are near a SCCA/NASA group that runs the "Track Night in America" or whatever the NASA equivalent is, I HIGHLY recommend it! Much more laid back, and geared towards beginners. If you apply mechanical sympathy to your car you'll be in great shape. Big braking zones are the hardest thing with these cars initially, so just go out, take it slow, and enjoy hearing that straight 6 roar! Thanks man! There are a handful of builds on here that have been going on long before I started and are still far from done. I have a newfound respect for the patience those folks have. For the Howe Racing arms, they are extremely not for the Z platform. haha. They are for the Trans Am cars (tube chassis) but they manage to utilize a similar lower arm configuration. I had to add some additional brackets to mount the tension rod in the right spot, remove some "stock" brackets, and design a sway bar attachment point (still not 100% happy with that one). Was hoping I had a photo, but no such luck! I'll do a photo dump here shortly!

Howdy HybridZ! Seems like the trend, y'all get an update at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year! Might need to reframe my temporal perspective and do every 6 months. This was a slow year for the car and myself. First year since I've owned the car that it hasn't gone to any events! Wish I could say it was because I was doing a bunch of sweet mods and we're hitting the track hard next year, but that's not how it went. Overall, since 2020, the "smiles per $" has been way down, and I think I probably burnt myself out doing the V8 swap as quickly as I did it. Combined with the wreck, I felt like I really needed to step back, re-evaluate and take the year off to figure out how I want race cars to fit into my life! A big thing I've found is that since this just isn't a street car, and has no ability to be a street car, it's tough to get that "just gonna go drive the dang thing" and get excited about the project. Starting to find motivation again, which is nice, and I'm aiming for an event or two next year. That's not to say I didn't get ANY mods done this year! I got the Haltech 2500 into the car, and got it tuned. That was a fun small project, with a bigger price tag, but I'm hoping that it solves a lot of problems moving forward. It did reveal that some of the problems with this current engine are just that. The current motor is a L33 aluminum 5.3, but it's just not making great power. Compression and all that looks fine, but it's only putting down 330hp, when we'd expect closer to 400. Putting that out of my mind for now, and going to run it like this. A new engine is just not in the budget right now. I also did quite a bit of work on the front suspension. I've been running the Apex Engineered arms up front, and have been happy with them. Full disclosure, Ohm is a supporter of the build, you may have seen the car on his page! After running a handful of events, I felt like I had 2 problems to resolve. 1) I needed more track width. I have a 1" spacer in the front, and it's just another thing to check on the car, also while making scrub radius work. 2) I needed a beefier ball joint. The Apex arms use a factory sized ball joint, that is a better material, but after running a few track events, getting up on curbs and getting pretty spicy, they were just not up to the task. Bigger is better, so I went and upgraded to a Howe Racing TA2 front control arm, with their thread in ball joint. The arm is 2" longer than factory, and allows the use of an improved ball joint, the design of which is derived from a 3/4 ton truck. I feel pretty good about this mod! I got some work done on managing airflow on the front of the car. With the freshly chopped fenders, I needed a way to get air out of the wheel well, and made up some Kevlar pieces to help with that. I also made a plug for a radiator extractor vent that will help direct air out the hood, rather than spilling around inside the engine bay. I'll need to snag one more fitting for the dry sump, but otherwise, things are looking in good shape. I'm excited to let the car be "done" for a little bit this year.

@walkerbk Sorry for the necrobump, but any updates on this? I'm particularly interested in how the rear fit up!

This has been such an exciting build to watch! Parts are looking spectacular, looking forward to seeing progress continue.