Oh hell, that blue vette has been nothing but headaches. Would you believe it is back in a shop again? Not the two that originally worked on it and royally screwed things up. And then went to a third shop (a Chevy dealership) and they put in a pilot bushing and a clutch not up to par, that is being replaced right now. But getting a pilot bearing put in this time. And a triple disk clutch. Had to go that route to get one that would be streetable and still hold the power.
Been there over 4 months now.
But backing up a bit, when I finally was able to drive my car home after the two shops butchered it, I put it up on my lift and wound up spending the next year or so fixing all the crap that got butchered. Then after that, I had a guy come down from Atlanta to see if he could get a tune done on it. Everything was pretty much custom by then, and the second shop claimed that the car was untunable. Well, maybe they couldn't tune it, but the guy from Atlanta didn't seem to have any problems. But he basically just did a preliminary tune, and pretty much just to reassure me that the car COULD be tuned. After that, I spent about another year figuring out the tuning and getting it to actually behave on the street and run like it should when I wanted it to GO.
During all that, the tech at the Chevy dealership discovered that the Pfadt carbon driveshaft was incorrect, and they sent one that was 7mm too long. Screwed up a LOT of stuff. Well, coupled with the fact that the second shop left a couple of bolts off of the bell housing attaching it to the block. That certainly helped things quite a bit.
I think (hope) that this last stint in a shop will get things straightened out. I guess I should have done the work myself, since I have a full sized lift in my garage, but honestly, removing the drivetrain on a Corvette with a torque tube setup is not something I really felt like tackling. Plus I really didn't know what was making that drivetrain noise that was getting worse and worse all along. I sure as heck didn't want to pull it apart, not see anything obvious, and then have to go into "shotgun fixing" mode by just replacing one thing after another until the noise went away. That would have been a REAL pain in the butt. So I decided to pay someone who really knows what they are doing, instead. Besides, although Connie would have helped me in the garage, I am really getting too old to be messing with those heavy components on top of a transmission lift anyway. Too easy to break one of my creaky old bones that would maybe disable me permanently.
Anyway, the 235 page thread about that entire mess is here if anyone has a lot of free time on their hands ->
http://www.corvetteflorida.com/forum...ad.php?t=44697
And that is for the second custom engine. The first one (Warhawk) finally got rejected when I found a crack in a valve stem area on one of the heads, and after all the other crap, decided that the engine was a piece of crap. I will NEVER buy anything that World Products ever has, or ever will manufacture. The 427 engine built on an RHS block just looked so much better in the quality department.
Pretty much this is a very good display of a situation that could likely convince some people to NOT heavily mod their car. This is probably worst case, but it CAN happen to you too. Unbelievably, this has been going on for about 10 years now since I rolled it into the first shop to start the work on it.
It has been a shadow over my entire retirement. What I wouldn't give for a time machine so I could go back then and kick myself in the ass for ever having that idea.
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