Very nice Jared...everything is looking like it would have been from the factory...only much much nicer!
Will be watching for more updates!
Will be watching for more updates!
Sean's 78 Camaro Z28
- Thread starter Texas82GP
- Start date
Thanks Kevin. I always appreciate the likes and the replies to the thread. We put a lot of heart and soul into the build. Not everything turned out exactly like we wanted but it is a very nice car.
Time to move the thread forward some more. Believe it or not, there were a few items I didn't get to that we got done in December of 2013. It must have been a really good month for the project. Not pictured in the last update was installation of the Lingenfelter converter box. This allows us to run a Gen IV LS engine (58x crank signal) with a Gen III PCM (expects a 24x crank signal). We did this because we had a 58x engine but wanted to run a cable driven throttle body. Most if not all Gen IV PCM's are drive by wire and don't have the software to run an idle air control valve (necessary for a cable driven throttle body)....
We also got the gas tank installed. We went with a Spectra EFI tank. It has a tray style baffle in it and uses a Walbro 255 pump. I wish it had more internal baffles to shield the fuel gauge sender from slosh but otherwise it is great. We've had no fuel starvation issues....
That wraps up 2013. Moving into the new year one of the first projects we tackled was the fans for the radiator. We used an assembly out of a fourth gen F-Body and it fit like a glove. Just a little trimming. We used the stock radiator top plate and just fabbed some mounting straps underneath. Don't worry, we cleaned it up more and cleaned up the wiring loom when we went to wire it up....
Next we installed the exhaust system. We went ahead and bought the stainless system from Stainless Works. It's a 3" system with X-Pipe which is probably overkill for us but we went with it. We did this since they prototyped their system using the same headers, swap plates, transmission and transmission crossmember that we had. Overall the system fit well but it was some work getting it in there and getting it tucked up as best as we could. The ends of the tailpipes were the notable disappointment....
We remedied the situation by bobbing the tailpipes right behind the rear wheels. I think it turned out really cool.....
Next the headlights and trim went in. The headlight rings were a pain to find new. When we got the car back from our Uncle, one of the rings had failed and wouldn't hold the bulb in there....
Work in the engine bay continued on small things like wiring up the fans, fabbing up the air intake, installing the brake booster and master cylinder, installing the clutch master cylinder and reservoir, installing the digital cruise control module and building its wiring harness, etc. By the middle of March of 2014, the engine bay was substantially complete. Many of you will recognize these pictures...
Sean also refinished the upper grill, installed the new lower grill and installed the park lights and their trim...
More to come....
We also got the gas tank installed. We went with a Spectra EFI tank. It has a tray style baffle in it and uses a Walbro 255 pump. I wish it had more internal baffles to shield the fuel gauge sender from slosh but otherwise it is great. We've had no fuel starvation issues....
That wraps up 2013. Moving into the new year one of the first projects we tackled was the fans for the radiator. We used an assembly out of a fourth gen F-Body and it fit like a glove. Just a little trimming. We used the stock radiator top plate and just fabbed some mounting straps underneath. Don't worry, we cleaned it up more and cleaned up the wiring loom when we went to wire it up....
Next we installed the exhaust system. We went ahead and bought the stainless system from Stainless Works. It's a 3" system with X-Pipe which is probably overkill for us but we went with it. We did this since they prototyped their system using the same headers, swap plates, transmission and transmission crossmember that we had. Overall the system fit well but it was some work getting it in there and getting it tucked up as best as we could. The ends of the tailpipes were the notable disappointment....
We remedied the situation by bobbing the tailpipes right behind the rear wheels. I think it turned out really cool.....
Next the headlights and trim went in. The headlight rings were a pain to find new. When we got the car back from our Uncle, one of the rings had failed and wouldn't hold the bulb in there....
Work in the engine bay continued on small things like wiring up the fans, fabbing up the air intake, installing the brake booster and master cylinder, installing the clutch master cylinder and reservoir, installing the digital cruise control module and building its wiring harness, etc. By the middle of March of 2014, the engine bay was substantially complete. Many of you will recognize these pictures...
Sean also refinished the upper grill, installed the new lower grill and installed the park lights and their trim...
More to come....
Here's a shot of the engine bay from the passenger side. You can see the fittings I had to install in the water pump so the heater hoses would clear the passenger side upper A-frame....
Here is a look at how things were progressing under the dash. We have the PCM hanging on the passenger side under the permanent metal part of the dash. Don't worry, its not exclusively hanging by that zip tie. That zip tie does support the front of the PCM but mostly holds it in alignment. As you can see, there is much work to be done under the dash....
The pictures become spaced further out during this phase of the project. The wiring was a lot of work. We had to integrate the Painless harness with the stand along PSI engine harness, with the Vintage Air A/C harness, with the keyless entry harness. We had to build from scratch our own cruise control, power window and power door lock harnesses. Thankfully, the Painless harness had provisions for power windows and locks. They did a great job with flexibility in their harness for popular upgrades to the car like power windows, locks, fuel injection, aftermarket gauges, etc. Here's how it looked in mid-May of 2014. Progress made but a long way to go...
We managed to shoe horn 6"x9" speakers in each of the kick panels. That was fun. Hope we never have to replace them....
Going into June, more wiring....
And some stereo install. Note the blower motor on the package tray for the old school rear window defogger...
We really went all out on the wiring on this car. We have a window switch that cuts out the A/C compressor above 4,000 RPM to protect it. When you unlock the doors with the keyless entry, the dome light stays on for a little while like a modern car. We put power windows and locks in the car when it had neither from the factory. We upgraded to the digital cruise. My pictures become pretty sporadic at this point so I will have to download some more from my brother or use my laptop at home. That makes this a good point to leave off for now. Stay tuned. More updates to come. Thanks for following.
Here is a look at how things were progressing under the dash. We have the PCM hanging on the passenger side under the permanent metal part of the dash. Don't worry, its not exclusively hanging by that zip tie. That zip tie does support the front of the PCM but mostly holds it in alignment. As you can see, there is much work to be done under the dash....
The pictures become spaced further out during this phase of the project. The wiring was a lot of work. We had to integrate the Painless harness with the stand along PSI engine harness, with the Vintage Air A/C harness, with the keyless entry harness. We had to build from scratch our own cruise control, power window and power door lock harnesses. Thankfully, the Painless harness had provisions for power windows and locks. They did a great job with flexibility in their harness for popular upgrades to the car like power windows, locks, fuel injection, aftermarket gauges, etc. Here's how it looked in mid-May of 2014. Progress made but a long way to go...
We managed to shoe horn 6"x9" speakers in each of the kick panels. That was fun. Hope we never have to replace them....
Going into June, more wiring....
And some stereo install. Note the blower motor on the package tray for the old school rear window defogger...
We really went all out on the wiring on this car. We have a window switch that cuts out the A/C compressor above 4,000 RPM to protect it. When you unlock the doors with the keyless entry, the dome light stays on for a little while like a modern car. We put power windows and locks in the car when it had neither from the factory. We upgraded to the digital cruise. My pictures become pretty sporadic at this point so I will have to download some more from my brother or use my laptop at home. That makes this a good point to leave off for now. Stay tuned. More updates to come. Thanks for following.
Opie Knievel
Rum Fueled Midnight Mechanic and Moderator
This thread is great so far Jared. You guys put a lot of work into that Camaro and it's looking really good. Great job writing all of this up. Keep up the good work!
Thanks Opie. I appreciate the kind words and positive feedback. It truly does mean a lot that some of you guys are interested.
Jared,
The work quality speaks for itself. Everything is done so methodically and sanitary. It's amazing the amount of work and detail that went into this extraordinary build.
How well does the F-body fans work? The reason I ask is that I have the same fans in my garage that I was originally planning to use on my car, but went back to using a mechanical clutch fan.
The work quality speaks for itself. Everything is done so methodically and sanitary. It's amazing the amount of work and detail that went into this extraordinary build.
How well does the F-body fans work? The reason I ask is that I have the same fans in my garage that I was originally planning to use on my car, but went back to using a mechanical clutch fan.
Update time! Going into July of 2014 we took a badly needed break from the wiring and worked on restoring the steering column. We really went all out on it. It was pretty much completely torn down, refinished and rebuilt with new ignition switch, ignition tumbler, turn signal switch, turn signal canceling cam, etc. The upper and lower bearings were in good shape. They were cleaned and greased with a high quality, long lasting grease. Here is what we started with. This column is something Dad pulled out of a junk car to replace the column in the car after it was stolen in about 89 (the theft that lead to my brother selling the car to our uncle). When it was stolen, the thieves did the usual smash the column to get to the rod going down to the ignition switch. When my brother bought the car, the column was busted up and he and dad repaired it, but it was never quite right. When my brother sold the car to my uncle, the column and dash were still busted up from it being stolen (89 theft). Instead of attempting to repair the column again, dad found a junk car with the right color interior and sourced the column and the dash parts needed to patch the car up. He did this for my uncle in the early 90's. Long story short, this seemed to be a clean, unmolested column that had never been apart. A really nice candidate to restore for the car. Here's what we started with....
After complete teardown, my brother got it fairly fanatically clean for paint....
Followed by primer....
It looks like we may have lost a few pictures or got slack with taking them. The next picture I have is with it painted, assembled and in the car. The steering wheel is original to the car if I'm not mistaken. When we got the car back from my uncle the wheel was dirty and very sticky. After some careful experimentation, we found that 3m adhesive remover cleaned it up real nice without damaging the finish. The color is slightly off but it is a very nice wheel considering it is a 39 year old survivor. Here are a few pics of the column in the car....
It's hard to tell with all the spaghetti in the picture above, but progress on the wiring under the dash continued. I'll be honest, I slowed us down on this. It was hot. I didn't enjoy it. I had wiring fatigue. I needed the wahmbulance. You can see that we have the power window wiring pretty well wrapped up in the pic above. That's the four-relay wiring that some of you have seen in the fast power windows thread. It works really well. One thing I didn't mention about the column project is that this was a floor shift column. It was the same column whether the car was a stick or an automatic. However, with the T56, there was no way to connect the shifter to the column the way the four speed cars were set up. Our answer was to put a neutral safety switch on the clutch pedal and to remove the column mounted neutral safety switch and reverse light switch. We fabbed up a little plate that bolted in place of the neutral safety switch and had a little tab on it that inserts in the column and won't allow the collar of the column to rotate the way it would if the linkage from the shifter were hooked up to it. The backup light switch is on the T56. The only negative, and it's minor, is that now that the collar on the column is always in the 'park' position, it is possible to lock the ignition cylinder and steering wheel while driving the car, but you would have to intentionally do it, as far as I'm concerned. The little arm at the base of column that used to hook up to the shifter to rotate the collar of the column was cut off. If it isn't going to work or be hooked up, we don't want it.
Moving into October of 2014 we got a battery installed in the engine bay and made up some custom battery cables....
For gauges, we went with a setup from New Vintage. They are out of Detroit. The gauge set comes with a carrier that allows you to use the factory instrument panel bezel. We preferred this over just an aluminum panel since using the factory bezel better matched the look we were after and more importantly give you a way to mount the wiper switch, headlight switch, defroster switch, etc. The gauges are all electronic and LED backlit. There are very nice. It was quite a wiring project to get them ready to go in...
And here they are hanging temporarily from the dash....
The spaghetti is so bad for my OCD. Around this time a new project showed up...
This gets us to the end of October of 2014 and is a good stopping point for now. The car was close to coming to life. That's where I'll pick up when I get back on it, possibly this time tomorrow. Thanks for following along. More to come....
After complete teardown, my brother got it fairly fanatically clean for paint....
Followed by primer....
It looks like we may have lost a few pictures or got slack with taking them. The next picture I have is with it painted, assembled and in the car. The steering wheel is original to the car if I'm not mistaken. When we got the car back from my uncle the wheel was dirty and very sticky. After some careful experimentation, we found that 3m adhesive remover cleaned it up real nice without damaging the finish. The color is slightly off but it is a very nice wheel considering it is a 39 year old survivor. Here are a few pics of the column in the car....
It's hard to tell with all the spaghetti in the picture above, but progress on the wiring under the dash continued. I'll be honest, I slowed us down on this. It was hot. I didn't enjoy it. I had wiring fatigue. I needed the wahmbulance. You can see that we have the power window wiring pretty well wrapped up in the pic above. That's the four-relay wiring that some of you have seen in the fast power windows thread. It works really well. One thing I didn't mention about the column project is that this was a floor shift column. It was the same column whether the car was a stick or an automatic. However, with the T56, there was no way to connect the shifter to the column the way the four speed cars were set up. Our answer was to put a neutral safety switch on the clutch pedal and to remove the column mounted neutral safety switch and reverse light switch. We fabbed up a little plate that bolted in place of the neutral safety switch and had a little tab on it that inserts in the column and won't allow the collar of the column to rotate the way it would if the linkage from the shifter were hooked up to it. The backup light switch is on the T56. The only negative, and it's minor, is that now that the collar on the column is always in the 'park' position, it is possible to lock the ignition cylinder and steering wheel while driving the car, but you would have to intentionally do it, as far as I'm concerned. The little arm at the base of column that used to hook up to the shifter to rotate the collar of the column was cut off. If it isn't going to work or be hooked up, we don't want it.
Moving into October of 2014 we got a battery installed in the engine bay and made up some custom battery cables....
For gauges, we went with a setup from New Vintage. They are out of Detroit. The gauge set comes with a carrier that allows you to use the factory instrument panel bezel. We preferred this over just an aluminum panel since using the factory bezel better matched the look we were after and more importantly give you a way to mount the wiper switch, headlight switch, defroster switch, etc. The gauges are all electronic and LED backlit. There are very nice. It was quite a wiring project to get them ready to go in...
And here they are hanging temporarily from the dash....
The spaghetti is so bad for my OCD. Around this time a new project showed up...
This gets us to the end of October of 2014 and is a good stopping point for now. The car was close to coming to life. That's where I'll pick up when I get back on it, possibly this time tomorrow. Thanks for following along. More to come....
Thanks for the kind words Jack. It's been fun reliving the project by creating this thread. Its funny how you forget how much you've done and what a journey it has been.
The F-body fans work and fit terrific. Believe it or not, the whole thing is a used setup off of Ebay. One thing I forgot to mention is that we have it installed upside down to make it fit the way it does in the Camaro. As I recall, when we tried to put it in right-side-up, there was interference with the left side fan and the power steering gearbox. We have each fan on its own relay and both are controlled by the PCM. The 'high temperature' fan is also controlled by a pressure switch on the high side of the A/C system. Once it reaches a certain pressure, that fan kicks on, regardless of temperature. For our cars, if not LS swapped, I personally prefer the look of the clutch fan and shroud. I know some on here think I am a dinosaur for it. I'm not going to run my car at sustained high speeds so the clutch fan is fine for me and gives me the look I want. On Sean's car, we used the Corvette front accessory drive and used the production PCM so going with electric fans was a no brainer and matched the look or theme of the engine compartment.
Funny, I used the same Griffin LS-swap and F-body fans in the wagon. Worked out surprisingly well.
The bobbed tail pipes are perfect.
