Kiwibirdman

I used Driveshafts NZ in Church St Penrose. They were pretty helpful.

Las drive shaft I had made was $750, everything new except the gearbox yoke. 3 inch good for more revs and horse power than my 5 litre V8 will ever do.

For anyone who cares, here it is with the new wheels. Opinion is divided. I don't hate them and basically I got the lot for the price of the almost new back tires. Car does need some low.

Found some cheap 17 inch wheels. Best option for the money.

@Snoozin Here it is. Waiting for the ferry when I drove it up from Timaru

It has tires, just a bit bald.

I'll sell you this one.

I would go for those if I could find dome at a reasonable price. Trying not to spend too much on this car.

That is a good question. There are a couple of different offsets on the 16 inch wheels and some cars came with staggered sizes, 8 on the front and 9 on the back. I will check.

Option of last resort. I like the 16 inch aero wheels.

The bugger is they only have 1. I even rang the guy to check

The 245/50 are already a bit lost in the wheel well. It is an option though.

I have a 1990 C4 corvette with the early 16 inch C4 wheels. It needs new tires, the original for these was a 255/50/16 which are either unavailable or $620 a corner. Considering the car is $14k on a good day I'm not spending that. Currently it has 245/50/16 which is the common fit and also becoming pretty hard to find. If anyone knows of some new ones I'll buy them. The real question is, there are 235/60/16 available. does anyone see a problem going with these. They are 1 inch narrower and 1 inch taller than the 255/50/16.

@dr.wyldeBefore you pull the motor to bits, a quick and dirty way to check the cam timing is to get TDC on the change over and both valves should be open the same amount or close to it. Also are you running enough initial timing factory is 6 degrees, the old 308 I had with a mild cam in it was much happier at 12 degrees. You will need to stop the total advance at about 36-38. Also do you have the vacuum advance connected?

Nice work on the wheel arch. You forgot to mention that from the factory all those bit were somewhat welded together and left in bare steel. A good bath of fish oil when its finished will keep it good for another 50 years.

Good to meet you at the drag wars last night. Bike looks great and goes well.

Is alright because I only have the factory lap belts, so this thing is an absolute deathtrap from every direction. I want to be comfortable before I become a statistic.

Has anybody out there used autotecnica seats, in particular the ss65 low back that folds forward. I'm thinking that a pair might be a good fit for the Firebird.

That would be Darryl. It was a lot of fun.

Over the long weekend I took the Firebird to Napier with a bunch of other American car owners. My son took our 1990 Corvette. The Firebird did really well. In the nearly 29 years I have had it this is the longest trip it has ever done, total was about 1200 km over the 4 days we were away. Over the time the stuff settled down, the brakes feel better, more to do with all the crap being burnt off the rear brake shoes than anything else and the gearbox is shifting much better. I have a list of things that need looking at, clutch needs slight adjustment, brake light switch keeps working loose and leaving the brake lights on, the drives seat is bent (always been like that) and gets uncomfortable and the 2 really annoying things, an oil leak on to the headers an both tail pipes hitting the diff and the back springs. I worked out the cars does somewhere between 12 and 13 litres per 100, the corvette looks like it does 9. I'm pretty happy with the economy, even with EFI its still a 60 year old design with pretty low compression. Just as an aside, the Corvette used to do about 10/100 before a set of headers and a full twin exhaust. The increase in torque was very noticeable, I certainly didn't expect the economy to get better as well. There is probably more in it, I know my son was giving it the Welly every chance he could.

Plus 1 for Bumper Replacements. They have a lot of my money from the Holden build.

Doing a bit of thinking out loud here. Since the cars are all 90% finished, certed, reg, wof etc it must be time for another build. I have always wanted a HT or HG Holden ute. They look cool and have reasonable space in the cab for tall buggers like me. The downside is the front suspension is very average, power steering is pretty much a non starter and space in the engine bay is limited because of the steering box. My questions is about the CRS replacement crossmember with R&P steering. On the surface it looks like and answer to the challenges I see. The but is I have heard conflicting views on if one of these would pass certification. They meet the Australian rules but that means bugger all over here. Anyone of our certification brains have insight? Thanks Mike

Here is a photo from the other day. It is amazing how the wheel arch trims change the look of the car. I had been playing around with the EFI, it was still pretty much at the default settings. The Edelbrock user interface is really easy to use. I leaned up the cruise AFR and gave the engine some more advance, especially the vacuum advance. Driving on the motorway I had my sone in the passenger seat watching the real time display. (this is sitting in the garage with the engine off) It took about 5 kms driving to learn the new AFR which the target had gone from something like 13.8 to 14.6. I was really impressed. Sitting on about 70 mph on the motorway north of Albany it was on 9% throttle. The other thing I found was the throttle was only opening to where the secondaries on the throttle body just cracked. A 5 minute bend on the accelerator pedal and throttle goes to 100%. Not that a mild 350 Pontiac needs 1000 cfm, it did need more than the guestimated 400 cfm it was getting to. On Sunday went for a drive out to Hunua to see @sheepers and collect a Holden workshop manual. The car is a joy to drive and even gets reasonable fuel economy. Its only going to take 35000 miles for the fuel savings to pay for the EFI conversion. Considering its taken me 28 years to do 17000 miles I better drive this thing a lot more. From a its so much better perspective the EFI is an absolute win and worth every last cent.

Not sure where this year went. Didn't get to take this to Americarna. I thought the alternator had died. Turns out it was the battery. This happened the night before we were due to leave. Ended up taking the Silverado instead. I took the car for a WOF last week, passed with a warning thatvthe brake lights would sometimes stay on. Turns out tge switched needed adjusting. The car did a massive 365 miles between WOF checks. Been working on making it better. The noise from the fuel pump was annoying. I dropped the fuel tank out and covered the top of it with sound deading. This has stopped a lot of the noise transfer into the car. So that was a win. Also played around with the clutch slave cylinder. It was very close to one of the header pipes and I was worried about it getting cooked. I had made a heat shield, which seamed to make things worse. I have moved the slave so now ther is 20 mm gap to the closest pipe. Hopefully this will be ok. Also fitted the wheel arch trims, i wasn't sure that I liked them. They are on now and will stay. As usual I forgot to take photos.

Check the torque converter bolts. The other one, harder to do is the flexplate to crank bolts. If you get to that point, check the flexplate for cracks. Unlikely to be the box if it still drives OK.