Back on line....hot summer, delays on the electronics, out of town trips, and just plain old fashioned procrastination...

There have been several comments since my last post....I've had a slow down for various reasons. I've been adding new requirements on the internal electrics that VettAid has been working on.  In all fairness to Jody, it has been a long wait, but the mods and retro-fits that he and I have discussed have caused him to take longer than we both anticipated...and, a lot of the interior re-assembly work depends on what holes in the firewall I'll use and which ones need to be filled. I was on the road for most of Aug and about half of Sep. I've also been gone the last couple weeks. Anyway, here's some of the small items I've been working on:

1. Mounting the fan kit to the radiator.

Fan kit mounted on radiator and radiator in mounting bracket.

Universal brackets supplied w/kit. They'll be trimmed down once the radiator is fitted and mounted.



Drilling holes for the mounting bracket bolts through the upper and lower radiator cases.  



Cutting the bracket spacers from round stock.

  

Spacer fitted between bracket and radiator casing.

OCC with their multi-million dollar equipment ain't got nothing on me.....I hand made two more brackets to mount the fan kit since the kit only came with four and I wanted the bottom two corners firmly attached and the kit's brackets are too thick to fit in those locations.





The following pix show the radiator/fan assembly mounted temporarily w/clamps, boards, and a huge twistee.

Now that I have the ECM and harness back, I'll be ready to install all the interior firewall mounted assemblies and do a test start and run to check radiator/heater hose integrity, brakes and pwr steering, AND clutch/tranny.  When VetteAid gets the modified dash harness and new gauges to me, I'll be able to test them. I might even be able to roll the car in and out of the garage and THAT will be the first time this car will have moved under its own power since before I owned it.

Anyway, here are some more pix to show that I haven't been completely idle the last several weeks

Water temp and oil temp sending units. The LS2 ECM uses the factory temp sending unit so a separate one had to be installed for the gauge - same for the oil temp and pressure.

Drilled and tapped into the oil bypass cover.

Water temp sending unit drilled and tapped into P side of water pump. The square fitting on the right is for the coolant vent line from the heads.

I did some experimenting with the the C5 seats and determined that they sit too high,





 so I cut these stock risers on the C5 seat tracks off, but they still sat too high.

I then removed the factory seat tracks from the P side seat and bolted on the stock C3 seat tracks. They will fit well with some minor mods. I'll have to drill new bolt holes to mount the C3 tracks to the C5 seats and drill new mounting holes in the floor board. That works for the P seat, but the D seat is power and the motor/mechanism assemblies hit the hump in the floorboard, restricting the pwr seat movement and the seat still sits too high. So, on the D side, my options are to use the C3 tracks and not have a pwr seat (which was the whole point of buying the seats) or cut the  hump in the floorboard and fabricating new seat mounts.  I'll decide on that and provide more pix of the C5 seat install in a future post as I get them installed.

Now for the engine covers. The following pix show where I had to trim the C5 engine covers to clear the AC pump, AC box on the firewall, and the brake booster box on the D side of the firewall.

The pix show them rough cut for initial fitting. They are nicely trimmed now.

The custom Russell hose heater hoses and the step down/up solution where they attach to the stock 3/4" and 5/8" hoses.  They are not clamped in these pix; when they are they will run along the frame and will not be close to the headers.



 Comment to Clint: Sorry, I know I owe you an answer to your last comment. I haven't broken the code on how to answer comments.  So, I'll try again and if it doesn't work, I'll do another post.

There have been several comments on the blog over the last few weeks. So.....

I have a post in draft that will bring the blog up to date. I haven't been completely idle, but I haven't gotten as far as I had hoped. So, bear with me while I work on the draft update. Mo' to follow.....




Aging Special Forces Warriors.
L-R: Jay Massey, me, Al Davis, Eddie Gleason

  BTW, My name is Carl. Here's a pic of some of my buds and me at Barrett-Jackson in Vegas on 22 Sep. For those of you who don't know, I'm a retired Special Forces Soldier (that's a Green Beret for those of you who don't know the difference; not Ranger, not Seal, but Special FORCES - not any other Special Ops unit you may think that it means) and those are fellow retired SF Soldiers.  We were in Vegas for the SOA Reunion.