BUILD THREAD 87 SS, 305 is the one who knocks

[jakes87SS]

Hello,
so this is play a little catch up as i never decided to do this for the 1st year as that was pretty boring but now i'm ripping this thing apart for reals and decided to make a build thread.
Ok so the story starts i just wanted to wash my shitbox daily 03 focus zx3 as we had a thing and work and i hate having a dirty car at company things unless its flat out caked in mud and impressive. sitting on the front line at the local gmc dealer where i went to sinfully machine wash my car is a minty 87 monte carlo ss bone stock t-tops. i needed this car like the junkie needs rocks. i've wanted one since highschool, and now had the means to possess a "dream car" as it were. so fully engaging my "shrewd negotiator" skills i walked in and paid full asking price and picked up my car.

Here it is 10 minutes after i signed the paperwork on my lunch break and drove back to work:

I legitimately told myself i love this car and i don't want to do anything to it, love it so much i wont do a burnout with it. then at the first stoplight i pressed the brakes and matted the throttle and to my surprise she just started spinning both rear s and went a fuzz sideways turns out i got a cart optioned with a 3.73 posi diff. and out the window went the i wont do burnouts as i was doing mad skids everywhere i went. i later discovered that it's so good at doing brake stand burnouts cause the wheel cylinders did nothing. not thinking a stock 87 305 should not be able to burn out that well hadn't really crossed my mind yet and went out and alleged did some highway runs later on that afternoon till it started getting dark at which point i learned the headlights were original and frightening doesn't begin to describe the feelings i experienced piloting this thing home that night. i also have a thing for parking next to other cars for pictures but you will catch that pattern if you hang around long enough.

I quickly decided restomod was the life for me pulling parts from other gms and generally re-building this car the way i felt it should have been.

 

[jakes87SS]

so the first order of business was door seals and gaskets.
i ordered up every door gasket and seal there was

i got a used dealership service manual i wanted to learn all the things and be prepared for this. what no dealer literature can prepare you for are the things you learn along the way:
from day one my T-tops were trying to tell me things

in that dew soaked picture of my t-tops is a C&C logo this was attempting to tell me my car didnt come from the factory with t-tops. but i didn't notice this till i had removed/destroyed a seal in the tops.....
my car was converted to t-tops in 1987 by cars and concepts, i later learned this was supposedly the same company who made the aerocoupe monte for gm. this was the point where i started learning such hateful phrases as no longer available and discontinued with no alternatives. but ill be damned if i let words stop me this is america for christ sake. so we continue on.

 

[jakes87SS]

after somewhat fixing the leak i created i decided this barge needed better than stock brakes. The stock drums, clapped front disc and totally sacked f41 suspension package made for a hell of a drug on back roads, it was this wish wash of underpowered living room couch wrapping you in velour and disappointment that i found so intoxicating to highschool me. so i decided the first order of business was rear disc brakes, so i could bring my stupidity down to a reasonable speed once i decided i needed to.
I ordered this kit opting to swap the rubber lines up to braided stainless lines

this turned out to be one of those much assembly disassembly and reassembly required situations as even though it specifically lists my axle as a direct bolt on barely any of this kit was. f you are in the market for a cheap rear disc kit stay away from right stuff products, the axle flanges were wrong, they hung the calipers way to close were not clearanced for things right and today as of this i found out they allow so much flex it digs my caliper carrier bolts into the rotors. but it put 3rd gen camaro z/28 brakes on the back of my car then i moved to the front and grabbed a set of 99+ blazer 2wd spindles that use bolt on hubs and got to cleaning them installed new hubs and dust shield and now had larger front brakes with 2 caliper pistons. we are movin on up now boys!

i got this all bled out after dislodging a air bubble from the prop valve that caused me to have zero brakes, after this i took it out for a drive it was good, but it could be better, i couldn't figure it out so i took the front all back apart and discovered i hadn't bothered to read the sides clearly labeled on the front caliper boxes and had installed them on the wrong sides as i built the brakes on a bench and just took the spindle as a whole out and dropped the whole assembly on the car. once those were swapped it felt better but still had more pedal travel than i wanted. so i ordered up a set of front braided stainless monte lines this direct bolted onto my blazer calipers, from there i read online my car only came with a single diaphragm booster, and on came the next part, the b-body caprice came with a dual diaphram booster so i ordered a caprice booster and a new master cylinder just to be safe. this resulted in what honestly seemed like me running over a gallon of brake fluid thru the car before it stopped making air bubbles. i highly recommend one of the motive power bleeders if you don't have one, i took my second least favorite automotive job and made it rather tolerable.

 

[jakes87SS]

i drove it this way for the rest of summer 2017 till it developed a rather large fuel leak. i decided to replace the tank, sender and lines up to the fuel pump and be done with it. This was good and allowed me to focus on how much 4 wheel disc brakes with a solid pedal made that clapped f41 suspension pitch around under hard braking, i can only compare it to attempting to watch a old person emulate elvis and his hip gyrating madness on late night tv, it was distracting at best and frightening at its worst on turns and hard braking. so i decided winter 2017 was the year of suspension.

 

[jakes87SS]

I commenced to filling my basement with bilstein b6 shocks, eibach springs, the largest hotchkis sway bars they had and every control arm trailing arm and frame brace umi suspension makes. i had also decided in that moment if it was going to handle well i needed to see at night. so we went full on bro truck and got led 4x6 headlights.

so we got to work on getting all this new stuff hung on the car. While we had it all torn apart i bought a gallon of por15 and got to coating every surface i could reach on the underside of that car. there were spaces i missed and a lot ended up in my hair but i got it done and have since got the spots i missed.

 

[jakes87SS]

while hanging the suspension in late winter 2017 we made some executive decisions. for better or worse these decisions altered my plans for 2018 in a way i wouldn't fully realize until the end of spring 2018. with the new suspension in i wanted more noise so we pulled the mufflers and connected front the rear section of exhaust with straight pipe cause why not this is america after all and bumped the timing to the point where it required 93 all the time, while this made a drastic bump in the power level of my 305 the saying the brightest fire burns quickest became a life lesson, but that can be saved for another post. with all those messy mufflers out of the way i discovered i missed a few spots while doing work with por15

also that rear axle looks like it died with a woolly mammoth in la brea eons ago so i decided that what ever i did drivetrain wise that needed to go even if for a cutlass/ regal gn 8.5 10 bolt axle.

 

[jakes87SS]

i decided the 15s while i love the way they look, was just to much side wall for my liking and hopped on craigslist grabbed a few beers and started the search for wheels. What i found was a set of s10 extreme wheels which made me remember my first project vehicle my old red s10 so i bought those wheels the next morning. i quickly discovered the hub bore was slightly different, not to be deterred i grabbed a dremel milling bit

and opened them up and soon they fit just slightly snug retaining hub centric mounting, and no vibration. redneck engineering FTW!

so with all that installed, the wider tires that weren't old and hard provided better handling but they ended up being taller than stock so it created rub issues and it wasn't the look i really wanted on the car so i popped 1/2 inch taller ball joints into those umi tubular front arms to set the car down just a little bit more in the front end, they are made by proforged and are rather beefy. from there i ordered a front steering rebuild kit from proforged as well. so now it cornered and stopped much better than it ever could before and this made me happy for a while.

 

[jakes87SS]

so the quest for new wheels began spring 2018, with me settling on a set of replica n90s from year one, armed with some sticky-ish tires in 245/45-17 and some black lug nuts and new ss center caps off i went. . we finally added my led headlights and in my infinite wisdom i noticed on low beams just the2 bulbs lit up and only the top of bulbs lit up and on high they all lit up halfway, this for any sane person is more than enough, i decided it wasn't, and bought a lil harness to change things up a bit get freaky with the wiring.

armed only with this chinese wiring device and a rudimentary idea of how this should work i crisscrossed things till on low all lights come on half way and on high they go full on land cessna spam cans loaded with cocaine in empty fields at night mode as their final form:

its legitimately unpleasant to look at so i ordered some headlight covers and intend to tint them a light gunsmoke so there are not so murderous at night. pic of my old s10 cause i still love her, but i had to kill her.

 

[jakes87SS]

pic dump to finish getting us up to speed:

godzilla and dale at work:

abandoned strip near me

Merica

how to spot a 80's coke deal:

 

[jakes87SS]

so this leads us to late spring 2018 i took the monte out to get some pizza and one of my favorite songs off all times comes on pandora and starts blasting thru my speakers:

load this up and then continue reading.

Earlier i said i straight piped it and this changed the course of my time frame on this build. with a wide open exhaust and bumped timing she sounded good for a 305 this lead me to driving like a complete mongoloid. free rev the crap out of it and all that good stuff so i'm jammin down the highway in a very open section allegedly doing about 110 which isn't much for modern cars but in a 80s v8 barely clicking 150 crank hp this is full on giving her the beans. I hit a slight dip in the highway they normally isn't anything special an came down hard enough that my glovebox popped open this made me laugh, i reach over to shut it i had to slam it a few times then get back to flooring it again and paid no mind to the fact that the oil pressure gauge dropped to around 5psi and the check gages light was on, held it to the wood and gave that highway all i had. I continued not paying attention to it till i exited the highway and got onto a road going to my house and promptly got stuck by at a red light for bridge construction and the motor began knocking fairly noticeably. by the time it was turning green the car began puking coolant and began knocking much louder. I ran the next 2 red light just frantically honking and waving to angry people in apology. i ran one more light into my town and by this point its violently knocking and sounds like a farm implement being drug sideways down the street by a open exhaust 12v cummins ram, i back it into my drive shut it off and she immediately stops turning over. I had let my car down but it didn't allow me to get stranded, i never felt so proud of a little 305 as much as i did in this moment.

So walked the pizza i picked up from my fav spot inside and told my wife about what i had done to the car. I cant say she was mad, but she did later ask me if i popped the motor so i could push the time frame up on the motor work as we were talking about doing it in another year, she knew right there we were going to.......