Brendon's '67 Firebird thread by Tuske427

7 minute(s) of a 286 minute read

One thing I am conceding on doing myself is the build of my engine. Sure, I could throw parts onto it, but I don't have equipment or experience to really build an engine right. So I took my engine to Superior Automotive Engineering for one of their LS 383 stroker kits. I stopped by on Sat to see the progress, and I am excited. That shelf is a combination of the parts I had collected for it, as well as their parts to be used in the engine. That ziploc bag is just some of the metal shavings removed from porting one of the 243 (LS6 heads).

I had a few more hours to play in the garage so I decided to build a spanner wrench for my coil over shocks. I've had cheap ones bend on me, and didn't want to special order an expensive one, so I figured I'd build one.

Today I assembled my front coil overs, and recovered my rear armrest panels. I used some of my foam insulation as padding and reused my original covers. They're in decent enough "driver shape" for now, as I have to save $$ somewhere to pay for my engine :p The areas that used to hold the ashtrays now serve as the cut outs for the rol lcage. I will need to build some plastic trim pieces to go over them.

7-7-2013

So I took advantage of the holiday weekend we had to try and get the rest of my car "temporary" painted. One day this car will go back to the Verdoro green it originally came with, but for now, it'll get a coat of clear to keep it from rusting and let me drive it/ tweak it/ tune it/ and ease the burden on my wallet. (still have many parts to buy) Besides, I'm more interested in driving my car than making it a pretty show car. Been there, done that, and this will have a nice "raw" look to it, with gouges, dents, weld marks and all. I gave my "clear" parts a quick sanding to give it a consistent grain, and used KBS diamond clear as they advertised it could go straight over bare metal. If only I knew how to paint... I'm sure the fact that I don't really know what I'm doing didn't help, painting in my garage didn't help, nor did using a new gun (not used to it, etc) and it was clear which made it difficult to see. Needless to say there are many runs, fisheyes, and orange peel all over the place despite my best efforts to seal the garage up, use filters, clean everything and wipe it down before spraying. Good thing this can always be removed and repainted. I only put on 2 coats, so there isn't a lot of material to polish back down, though I may attempt to practice the process of fine sanding, cutting and polishing the runs in the paint just for the experience of it.  

I also painted more pieces black (I seem to have better luck with rattle cans) and I installed the trunk weatherstripping, and put more weight on it to help train the seal.

7-14-2013

Thanks, guys. I need to learn how to gas weld so the next time I do sheet metal it will come out even better (and get a planishing hammer, and an english wheel, and a shop to put it all in....)

Got a little bit done this weekend- I put some of that foam insulation inside my doors. It helps take the "tinny" sound out, and unlike dynamat it's really light, and some seam sealer along the bottom edge, and hung them on the car. I had to drill out and tap the door mounts on the bottom to the next size up as they were stripped out. I also put the rear bumper on, but it's not quite aligned yet. I'll need to mess around with that, after I take the clamps off the trunk weatherstripping. It didn't seat well so I'm taking a different approach this time.