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Original Turbine Wheels
Some time ago some people convinced me to make an investment into better wheels. Coincidentally, I just met with Western Turbine Wheels 15x8 rims on ebay. They were produced as a replicas of original turbines (YJ8). But the reserve price was too high in my opinion. In a few days I found original ones (15x7), over $200 cheaper. The only requirement was to set my alarm clock to 4:45 AM and stay cool while bidding. Then, just few seconds before the auction ended, I put my decent maximum sum and hoped. Just for the imagination, the wheels was presented like...
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Fuck the Winter
I just wanna the winter to leave, now!
May the summer come again, please :-)
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Brakes? One minute to midnight!
Such words came into my mind after examination of current disc brake pads. They look like originals from 1979... well now I'm exaggerating a little, they must be from 1980.
My colleague with his mighty 1978 helped me out with...
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First Public Appearance
In the end of August, me and my friend visited my first public motorshow ever. It was held nearby Chomutov city in Czech Republic (map). Considering the pitful condition of my car I was very surprised of that count of curious buddies around my car. Moreover, how they started shooting the engine bay once I opened it.
For those who are interested what the event name U.S.tecka Motorshow means:
U.S. in the meaning of United States (cars'n'bikes built in the US)
Ustecka is an adjective describing a county of Usti nad Labem city.
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Moroso - Air Cleaner Ok, Breather K.O.
The idea that using products from one and the same company should fit at 100% was obviously wrong....
Not based on the Filter Selection Poll I selected Moroso air cleaner and while ordering I also put in the basket their breather which has an input from (or output to?) an air cleaner. Furhter I had to buy fuel line kit to be able to put the cleaner with lowered base onto freshly installed carburetor. Let's look what had arrived after several years...
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Camaro Goes Legal
This is the end of illegal drive outs. Recently I obtained registration plates intended to be used on old-timers or in this case better said young-timers as well. Now I can deafen streets legally and I won't be afraid of cops and informers hidden behind each tree and bush nearby the roads.
Well, and because this is an action web site :-) I won't deprive you of a cool movie celebrating this great event.
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Edelbrock 1405 Installation
This article is meant as a how-to for dummies therefore you won't find here any deep technical details, physical analysis, differential equations and similar stuff. As you could notice from the title, yep, I purchased this non-expensive carburetor from well known quality company. Concretely, the performer 1405 carburetor is recommended for engine ranges from 305 till 350 cubic inches. It makes 600cfm which should suffice for my "small" application.
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Poll: New Air Cleaner Selection
In a few days or weeks I should start driving around the county and it would be very shameful if a potential curious person would like to see the engine and spotted the ugly and nasty cheapest air filter built by Edelbrock. To avoid this drama, I decided to purchase new and shiny one. In the following poll you can add an influence to my final decision which one to select. Currently, my favorites are Proform Chevolet or Moroso. The last poll option means "None of listed", select this if you do not recommend any of these. Thanks and good...
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Preparation For Second Attempt At Vehicle Safety Inspection
According to old-timers review commission I needed to install that famous new exhaust system and as a second condition for vehicle approval were a little bit thinner rear tires. Therefore I replaced the two 275 Firestones (first pic) for 255 Bridgestones (second pic). Stone for a stone. The new tires were a little "polished" by a silicone oil and now they shine like they just left the rubber factory. On the last picture, you can see that not even single sticker goes to waste :-)
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Finally, Brand New Exhaust System
The time's up and I can finally introduce you a radical breakthrough in renovation. Mr. Orange was transported to a car body builder and the immodest objective was just the installation of new exhaust system. As a additional value for the Camaro I asked him to spray the car's bottom chassis with anticorrosive protection fixture. The result can be investigated here, herein or there.
In case you can't remember, you'd like to look at the one of archive posts - how did the original headers look like. In case this did not even help, here is a shot of the bottom...
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Just Before We Go To Vehicle Safety Inspection
The Vehicle Safety Inspection is a required pre-requisite in order to ged valid license plates for older cars here. I'd like to please the inspectors' eyes so I decided to make some small improvement on my old exhaust. On the first image can be seen the original state when I bought the car, following with cleaning process and painting with 99% aluminium high temperature resistant spray.
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Mirrors and Window Cranks
The migration to a new domain is almost done. I'm just waiting for the hosting provider to launch the domain. In the meantime, there can be accomplished little things. Let's pick up an example - slight renovation of door mirrors and window cranks. This is regular Chevrolet Camaro, which means no extra accessories such as A/C, power windows etc. Thank God the windshield wipers are electrically controlled. Ok now, let's look what arrived recently overseas:
You can spot on the image a very important tool designated for removing window handles. The demounting is then question of few seconds....
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First Spring Drive
Because of oil leakages and intermittent aversion of the transmission to engage when it is cold I decided to change the fluid and oil filter. And because this should be done right after the famous Turbo-Hydramatic THM350 gets to its operating temperature, I utilized this fact for short-time-after-winter enjoy drive. And also because I'm not a selfish one I prepared for my intermittent visitors following vid.
While exchanging the oil we found out the most probable cause of the leakages - stripped and therefore loose thread. But we're tough boys and so we rebored it to a bigger european...
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New Right Bullet Door Mirror
This winter is not that unpleasant although I would still call it awful. It's because the cold weather disallows greater work in the garage. But some days are really shiny and I can do some little work, such as at last weekend, when I begun to prepare new right bullet door mirror. It's from a two-set I got from the eBay.
So, what did I get... I started to disassemble the mirror because I planned to repaint it. Quite a surprise - there were, let's say, fare dodgers - dead wasps inside of their gen nest. I hope...
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Head Lights, Second Attempt
In one of my past posts I was boasting about flawless functionality of the parking lights after the installation of 2-filament bulbs. But as we usually say: "Don't prise day before the dusk". Of course the brand new fuses burned out after a while. It was because I had not used proper car fuses that are slow (less sensitive to voltage amplitudes) but super-fast ones which belong rather to semiconductor based electronics. I'm not gonna explain further the electricity theory but I will rather offer you a proof instead of promises ;-)
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New Headers, Mufflers & Horns
Exhaust System
Finally, I obtained new batch of Camaro stuff, more than required for my orangeade. Let me begin with the exhaust headers, pruchased on eBay (great source of such things btw), exactly Flowtech 31100FLT - ceramic coated. They should not rust, unless the coating is scratched and have good heat retention value (compared to steel).
Together with the headers I received also set of Summit fully welded mufflers. I choosed them because of reasonable price and good feedback from the Nasty Z28 community. Now I only need to get the rest pipe stuff somewhere.
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Rear Window Molding Refurbishment
It really looks like while I finished that ugly garage renovation stuff I can quietly and smartly publish new and new quality articles based on a car restoration theme. In the meanime when I was removing that chic (not sh*t) chamois from arm rests (first and second parts) I also began with trying to make the rear window molding to look like original. I assume that you've already explored your detailed archives with photos of my Camaro but for those who have not or have had poor memory I'll try to make an overview:
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Arm Rest & Headlights - Completed
I would like to continue from the last post, where I talked about dirty job of a previous owner of my Camaro. After total exhaustion of two glue and paint removers I finally completed a purgatory of an unsuccessful attempt to efectively tune up the arm rests. Well they are back installed but now I see another bad job - totally f!@#ed up door panels. Looks like the comrade from NDR wanted to recycle an old baby buggy leatherette.
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Chevrolet Camaro 1978, Type LT, 383cui - 400hp
I have one Camaro fellow who owns this jewel. The only thing I can do around his car is to envy his top restored interior and tuned stroker engine. To manifest my impudence I've edited his own video from one small race event in Most city's curcuit. But this was not enough; the impudence was so high that I also created a cheap post on this cheap blog...
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Arm Rest
A smaller task awaited me last week. So I said, what about repairing one small jewel which left for me the previous car owner (let's say "a pig"). I decided myself to remove a chamois leather from originally beautiful doors arm rests. They looked like follows before the refurbishment:
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Something did really happen!
This is strange... looks like something changed...
Oh Yea! Chevy Camaro Restoration Notes changed its underlying system after months of searching for alternative for before installed crap and now I hope I suceed. Now we're powered by Subtext! I was forced to change the system because of casual pleasant situations, for example when more than half of my blog suddenly disappeared. I would like to give my huge thanks for the Google Team, whos great search engine helped me to restore original texts found in its archive.
But to rebut your thoughts that I'm doing everything but the car, this is not...
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Garage? Mission Accomplished!
And now we're done! After neverending and exhausting work we finished with a majestic final. If it's not a problem to spend some time here, please take a look at the following action movie:
Bellow I'm putting some photos where are better visible the final modifications. I won't delay you any more with pointless mucks cause nobody read them either.
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What the hell? [Bonus photos]
I admit that it's somewhat dying here but I'm still waiting for my friend - "A bricklayer". In next 14 days he should make some time for me and then we can begin this war against old building.
Still you can enjoy some photos from the recent trip in the meantime ;-)
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Some New Stuff from the US
Between 26th January and 4th February I was on some kind of training of my company directly in the US and opportunities likethis need to be utilized for buying some stuff for the car. Unfortunately I could not take with me home bigger things like engine, exhaust or driveline parts so I selected some new smaller things:
Accel 5048 Ignition Wires - 90°Degree Boots which I need due to described burning of my old ones
SoffSeal Weather-strip Kits - mine need replacement
Windshield Wipers - they are worth...
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Garage, The First Episode
If you are serious with your car you cannot leave it staying under open skies for sure. Also my sweetheart is sheltered from breeze, blizzards, cruel rainstorm and from red-hot sun too. Unfortunately the garage booth does not look very good because no man have touched its interiors for decades. The garage metamorphosed to a warehouse of types like "never know when you can use this" or "put it into the garage temporary".
Thanks to purchase of the Chevy things got moved. Firstly it's needed to sort and dump all that stuff like materials, chemicals and quality oil-waxed furniture. The photos...
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1st Test Drive
As you were long awaiting I prepared some short movie edited from shots taken from the test drive. Unfortunately my daddy is not natural born cameraman so please apologize a little frisky movements, image downfalls and another great things. Second bad point is that the camera has a microphone switched off (omg, who could think this up as a default option???) so I added some funny child music into the background. Please do not enjoy:
Direct Link
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Day Second
As I promised in the last article I will show you today how the car really looks like when it's home. I made a request to the seller that I will take it, but with another hood. Finally we made an agreement that he will repair it and I was really surprised how good the job was done! Except the color (which gives the car another spirit too) it's almost impossible to find out how that there was a hole before. Just look at those photos and try to find it.
On the other hand the car needs...
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Chevrolet Camaro Restoration Notes
Hello visitors!
You are now probably a little surprised what happened to those pages and what happened with that great and unpopular Versicolor Mentions. Well I thought it's time for a little change and the second reason was my recent purchase of classical american muscle - Chevrolet Camaro from the 2nd generation, year 1979. And because it's not in a perfect condition (except renovated rengine) I want to share this space with my renovation process. For today, I'll show you how was the car looking out just before I bought it, following photos are from 16th November 2006:
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