Introducing: Project 1/2-TRAK

[Damn True]

Originally Posted by Neil B

That's a really neat project and a great story behind it. Be careful with the black/satin paint on the hood and front end. With my track cars, I've always had to use wax to get the rubber streaks (from race tires) off the front end and from behind the tires.

Thanks for the input. I hadn't really considered that aspect of the finish. With the "flattened" blacks that are on the market are you able to get a little wax on them w/o staining? I mean they are a catalyzed single stage right? Less glossy than a normal clear coat but not porous. Am I off base?

[Damn True]

So....not a lot happened in September. It was a busy month at work because I was only AT work for about 2 weeks out of the four. My wife and I spent a week in Hawaii, and another week fishing and camping in the Sierra's. She treated me pretty good for my birthday. All things considered I'd have preferred Camaro stuff to going to Hawaii. Having lived there for seven years it feels more like going home than going on a vacation. But it was nice to get out of the office. The fishing trip though was awesome. The planks are 2"x12" for reference.



So as I said a few posts back, I got the sheet metal stripped from the car pretty easily. No broken or stripped hardware and no rust to speak of. As you can see though, the subframe is really grungy.



Not bad considering the age of the car. Really stoked about the lack of rust. This really was a "grandma car" and as such it was never really driven hard so I'm not even finding evidence of severe wear or any kind of stress cracks.



So I stripped all the suspension off and yanked the subframe in preparation for sandblasting and then finish welding.

Here's what we started with



A little quick work with a wire wheel allowed me to inspect the potential trouble spots for cracks before sandblasting and allows me to explain what I'm up to here. You see how the subframe is only partially welded? Well each unwelded bit is a flex point and the beginning of each weld is a stress riser.

[Damn True]

Originally Posted by dolf

How are you going to run a 275 front tire on a stock sub?

Yes, I will be using the stock subframe.

You see, I firmly believe in letting other people do my R&D for me. The simple reason for this is that I really cannot afford to experiment. So for the most part, I am using what I know to work.

Thankfully, one of our own, Carl Cassanova has already sussed out the details of running a 275 on the front of a '68.

You can find all the required information on his excellent website:
http://www.geocities.com/casanoc/

The only differences in my setup will be the use of an ATS spindle and wheels/brakes. I will be duplicating his wheel dimensions and also will be using the Speed Tech upper and lower control arm. More about those later though. I don't want to get ahead of my next update.

[syborg tt]

Looks like an Awesome project.

I have an odd thought (which isn't strange for me). I really think that you should somehow figure out how to incorporate some pink into the graphic / color seperation bar. I think it would cool to way to pay tribute to the car and it's heritage. Plus it's history for your Grandparents.

ps - you've already got the blue know your just need the pink in there

Originally Posted by Damn True

In July of 1969 my Grandparents purchased a 1968 Camaro that had been sitting a while on the lot at Courtesy Chevrolet in Santa Clara, CA. They needed a new car to drive to Arizona where I was to be born in a couple of months and since the car had been slow to sell the price was right. The car was a bit different in that it was a special order that wound up not being delivered to the customer it was originally intended for. Playboy had placed an order through COPO for 50 pink 1968 Camaros to be distributed to playmates through the year. They only took delivery of about 30-40 of them. The rest wound up being sent to dealers. This was one of them....and yes, I said it was pink. This was my Grandmothers car for close to 35 years. They drove it all over CA on vacations and fishing trips. In fact, to this day there are bait shops and mountain lodges that I go to and when I mention my Grandparents people say, "Oh the couple with the pink Camaro!" The car was nothing special other than by virtue of it's color. A basic 327 coupe with a powerglide. But it was cool and I knew that eventually this car would be the basis for my Camaro road-racer project.

Fast forward to the year 2000. I was getting out of the Coast Guard after eleven years and moving back home to the Bay Area. My grandparents at that point decided to give me the car. A couple of years earlier some redneck had yelled something vulgar to my Grandfather while he was driving it and it scared him so he had a cheapo Earl Schieb spray-job done on it so it was now blue rather than pink.

[ArisESQ]

maybe you could paint the exterior of the car blue, and just do some very slight powder pink accents in the engine bay.. like annodize the fuel rails, or valve covers or something?

OR just paint the car pink! there are some pretty badass pink cars!

[Teetoe_Jones]

So we have new goodies at the shop. The guys at LG Motorsports drop shipped a set of their C5/C6 Corvette spindle brake ducts. We will be adding them in place of the wheel speed sensor bracket on our forged aluminum AFX spindles. The only issue we had was that during our engineering process of making the AFX spindle we needed to rotate the forged in brake bracket so we could tie it into a fillet gusset while adding about 50% more material to it to eliminate brake flex. This makes the cut of the duct interfere with the upper brake bracket hole due to our redesign. No big deal, the bolts go in from the back side anyways.

Here are the spindles as we test assembled them with the 1/2"x20x3" long ARP stud upgrade. Hope to have this stuff out to you in the morning True!











Tyler

[Damn True]

Note to self:

Order axles that are compatible with BIG ASS WHEEL STUDS!

[68protouring454]

Originally Posted by Damn True

Note to self:

Order axles that are compatible with BIG ASS WHEEL STUDS!

?????

[Damn True]

Different size wheel studs front/rear = no bueno

[Damn True]

Ok, brief update.

Topic: Fitting new suspension bits on 40 year old subframes.



As previously mentioned, the tolerances on 40 year old cars are......not good. You saw above how fitting of the ATS coil over brackets required widely disparate adjustments to the brackets to get them to fit in the UCA mount stands. The brackets were identical, the mount stands.....not so much. I guess that explains the goofy mix of alignment shims that were in the car when I disassembled it.

So the new challenge is fitting the Speed-Tech lower control arms. I attempted to test-fit them prior to painting the subframe. To say that they required "persuasion" would be a gross understatement. I thought for a second that I had gotten arms for the wrong year Camaro. I measured everything, twice and it wasn't the arms. It was the LCA mount pockets. They varied in width by as much as 3/16" and the angles relative to each other were off as well.

I spoke to Blake at Speed-Tech about this and his reply was that this was fairly common. Though more common in LA vs Norwood cars.

His suggestion:



A 4" length of 1/2" all-thread
Two 1/2" nuts
Two fat washers

This nifty little device is used to "adjust" the width of the LCA mount pockets so that the LCA bushings will slip into place. Like so:



The end result is that the LCA now slips easily into place w/o the need to force, sweat, curse, cajole or grab a BFH to get it in place.

The subframe and core support are now painted. I have a few more photos to take and I'll post an update on that and a more complete review of the Eastwood products in a couple of days.....maybe tonight....depends on what my wife has planned for me after work.