Alright I'm back since my last post. Sorry for the delay but I have making a bunch of good progress on the car so I need to catch up on my posts. The good news I was able to get the car started! The bad news is I immediately had clutch issues:
Right after I got the car started, my clutch pedal was very stiff. It was so stiff actually that I snapped the rod going from the clutch master cylinder to the pedal. I was not happy when this happened! As with most cars the car is pretty much built around the master cylinder so I wasn't looking forward to taking everything apart that I had just put together. The show must go on though so I took off the brake master cylinder, the booster and everything else that needed to come off to get at the master cylinder. One positive though is I took the opportunity to upgrade a Tilton adjustable master cylinder. This helps a lot on these third gen cars retrofitted with LT1 T56s, as the stock 4th gen hydraulics bolt right up, but leads to clutch engagement really high in the pedal travel. I really didn't like this feeling and it made it hard to shift quickly, so this should be a nice upgrade.
Tilton adjustable master cylinder kit from Hawks Motorsports:
Bleeding the master cylinder before installing in the car:
One thing I did to make the installation 1000% easier was replace the bolts that come with the kit with studs. I struggled for a LONG time trying to line up the master cylinder in the engine bay and then thread the 2 bolts in from under the dash... talk about a frustrating experience! The studs made this so much easier because I could place the master cylinder in place with the studs through the firewall and then go underneath the dash and thread on the nuts. Worked liked a charm! I also needed to grind down the bolt holding the master cylinder to the bracket as it sat a bit proud on the mounting surface preventing the bracket from sitting flush on the firewall. You can see the grinding marks in the picture here:
Once I got the clutch master cylinder back installed, I devastated to still find a rock hard pedal. This meant something was wrong with the actual clutch. So, out came the transmission. What I found was my throw out bearing seized to my clutch disk and the throwout bearing was actually cracked:
It turns out I had my clutch disk in backwards, so instead of having clearance between the disk and the throwout bearing (which is what should happen), the disk was interfering with the bearing and eventually seized itself on there shortly after I started the engine..
The problem wasn't that I installed it incorrectly, but the sticker saying "FW SIDE" was on the wrong side of the disk! I found this out by comparing my old clutch disk to my now useless one:
So, I ended up getting a new disk and a new throwout bearing and, this time installing everything correctly, it should be working OK now. Just a pain in the rear to have to go so far backwards on the project! Now I can get back on my regular to-do list.