• Responding to email notices you receive.
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    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

  • IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ!! About the Google Adsense ads being displayed

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    Posted 08/15/2025
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    Yeah, I know. They are a pain in the butt. But they pay the bills to keep my server running. Just a fact of life, I am afraid.

    Want to get rid of them? Simple. Just become a Contributor level member or above and they will be gone. -> Please click HERE."

    Is that too much for me to ask of you to keep this site running? Well, sorry about that. I too wish I could get everything for free. But alas.....

    =====================
    Addendum: 01/10/2026
    =====================


    Google Adsense ad revenue for December, 2025 was just $30 over the cost of the lease for the server running this site. So, in effect, the money providing the incentive for me to continue running this site is coming SOLELY from the paid memberships and sponsorships here. Which honestly ain't much....

Finally FINISHED!

WebSlave

WebSlave

It is what it is, but certainly not what it was.
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Finally.....

I got all of the mechanical stuff done on my car (2002 Corvette Z06) and finally got it to the point where the car is ready to be tuned.

Short synopsis of what has transpired:

  • 10/27/09 thru 09/17/10 at XtremeMotorsports in Blountstown, FL to have the engine and drive train replaced. Car was in that shop for 325 days.
  • 09/17/10 thru 11/18/11 at South Georgia Corvette in Thomasville, GA to finish up and fix what the first shop did and tune the car. Car was in that shop for 427 days.
  • Car was driven back home on 11/18/11 and thru 05/27/2012 had been sitting on the lift in my garage while I worked on it to try to fix everything to try to get my car in running order to be ready to be tuned. That took 191 days.

A guy from Atlanta drove down this past Sunday to tune the car, and did an excellent job getting my car driveable. Still some minor tweaking needing to be done, but it sure does look like this project that has been ongoing for over two and a half years (943 days, to be exact) may finally be finished.



Sorry about the shakiness in the video in spots. I have NO idea why it did that. It was almost like there was some sort of electronic or magnetic interference in some spots. Probably my car is disturbing the Earth's magnetic field or something.... :rolleyes:

And here are some pics of the engine compartment after I got everything fixed and tidied up:

engine_101.jpg


engine_102.jpg


engine_103.jpg


engine_104.jpg
 
you've got to be thrilled! It's been so long, finally you can rip up the road! whoo!
 
Awesome vroom!!! I don't look at a lot of engines but that one you have there looks like a work of art. I bet you can go pretty fast.
 
Oh baby. I'm not a 'Vette fan (sorry Rich), but that idle at about 45 seconds in just strikes some primal human nerve. We had an old '71 Camaro with a set of glass packs that sounded like that, and I used to love to listen to that bad boy idle around.

Have fun!
 
Thanks, guys. This has been a nightmare I have been living through for two and a half years now. It wasn't until Sunday that I knew positively that it hadn't all been for nothing. And ruined a perfectly good car in the process. Obviously this went WAY, WAY over budget and put this retirement Connie and I were supposed to start on hold for the duration. I had people lie to me, cheat me, steal from me, and been pretty much raked over the coals. The silver lining to all this is that I have been doing my own wrenching on the car since November, and I learned a hell of a lot about what makes a Corvette tick. Not that it is something I wanted to do, but I just could not afford to pay a third person to do what the first two couldn't, or just wouldn't.

There really isn't a whole lot, mechanically, on that car that isn't new. But heck, I am going to have to get it repainted, as one of the shops dropped the hood onto the airbridge and cracked the paint. And left scratches and gouges elsewhere. There are some other small things needing to be done, but to say that I feel that a huge weight has been lifted off of my shoulders, is a vast understatement.... Connie says that I am a different person these last couple of days. She said I had a perma-frown on my face that she is glad is finally gone.

And to anyone I banned just because they crossed swords with me at the wrong time (anytime in the past couple of years), I apologize.
 
I'm impressed that you learned how to do so much on your car.
Any chance you can rake the bozos back that did you wrong? I'll be glad to help.
 
Oh my gawd, that baby is sa-weet! Made my heart beat faster just watching & listening to the power from the back seat! lol
 
Lucille said:
I'm impressed that you learned how to do so much on your car.
Any chance you can rake the bozos back that did you wrong? I'll be glad to help.
Click to expand...

I tried to send the first guy to jail. I contacted every law enforcement agency I could and presented rock solid evidence. They told me jurisdiction was with the local sheriff's office where the crime took place. So I went to them. The sheriff himself told me that this was serious enough to put the guy in jail. But the only thing that happened was that they got the guy to pay me back some of the money he screwed me out of. He removed my transmission and differential, repainted them, and put them right back in claiming they were heavy duty rebuilt units. Was I the only one to file complaints against the guy? Nope, not by a long shot. Did they arrest him? Nope.

Well, interesting to note that the guy who screwed me over held a car show benefit every year at his shop. And guess who was the beneficiary of the proceeds for those shows? :rolleyes: Yeah, the local sheriff's office. Go figure...

As for the second guy, well, I've got nothing in writing. The guy refused to write anything down or even do emails. Now I know why. Without PROOF, the case would go nowhere in court. I filed a complaint with the credit card company, but they denied the claim. Stated that I needed to have a qualified mechanic look over the car and substantiate my claims. Regardless of the fact that I sent them photographs documenting everything. When I got the car home and found problem after problem (fuel leaks, exhaust leaks, fuel lines laying directly against exhaust pipes, wiring harnesses laying on top of the header pipes, missing bolts, untorqued bolts, an axle boot ripped open by a brake line rubbing against it, etc., etc.) and, well the car just was not driveable. Actually it was dangerous to drive, and I was shocked the guy let me drive it the 55 miles back home. So for that kind of proof, first I would have had to find someone who knew Corvettes well enough to know how this custom work was supposed to have been done, then pay that someone to come to my place to inspect it. Honestly, I never even realized the extent of the problems till I just started LOOKING at my car days and weeks after I got it home. Heck, I didn't know that much about the car myself, but I sure as heck learned in a hurry. Lucky I have a lift in my garage, or I couldn't have done a darn thing about it. I would have had to just sell the car and that would have been that.

In any event, I figured it would just be throwing good money after bad to try to do anything legally about it. Apparently this sort of shenanigans must be standard operating procedures for some of the shops that do custom work on cars, I guess. And apparently local law enforcement can't be bothered to do something about it. If it's not a crime against the state, or about very high ticket concerns, they just can't be bothered.

Anyway, if you get bored sometime and want to read this entire sordid mess from beginning to end, here's the thread on my Corvette forum about it -> http://www.corvetteflorida.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44697

And this is only part 2. The first engine I got had problems and I wound up rejecting the darn thing and sending it back to the builder to have him build me a new one. In any event, the part where I brought the car home and started fixing things myself begins on November 18th, 2011. I documented nearly everything I found wrong as I found them while inspecting my car.

Yeah, I learned a lot from this. Top of the list is to NOT trust anyone about anything if there is money changing hands. A very bitter and expensive lesson, but at least I now know quite a bit about the workings of this car. Not what I wanted to do during retirement, but it is what it is....
 
LauraB said:
Oh my gawd, that baby is sa-weet! Made my heart beat faster just watching & listening to the power from the back seat! lol
Click to expand...

Yeah, it will definitely snap your head back when you punch the accelerator. And I've got to be darn careful so I don't wind up in a tree somewhere. It will likely be able to break the rear tires loose even at 100 mph if I were to punch the gas pedal and the turbos kick in. Could be quite embarrassing to have those rear tires decide to swing around to the front of the car in a snap. So I'm going to have to take it nice and easy till I get familiar with managing the power without getting myself into trouble.

The car scared the heck out of Connie with the old engine in it. I had to tell her to sit on her hands, because whenever I would "get on it" she would flap her arms like the wings of a chicken... :rofl:

Hah! I should run a lottery for the date of my first speeding ticket with it.... :reddevil:

That might help pay back the money I spent above and beyond what I had originally budgeted for.
 
one of my co-workers is really into 'vettes as well, I showed him these photos and the vid. He was quite impressed and said Rich, that you did a phenomenal job. (He has an '01 convertible as well as 2 or 3 other older vettes). His one advise is you should have got a porsche since they have a steel dashboard, that way you could have someplace to clip your tickets.
lol
 
I was never a big Corvette guy but there is no denying there was some work put into that baby. It looks to run great, sounds great, & I could eat off the engine it's so clean. You should be really be proud of yourself. Be careful & prepared for a lot jealous looks.
 
Thanks, everyone.

Just so there is no mistake, I did not build this from scratch myself. It was in two shops prior to November, 2011, and when I brought it limping back home, I just finished it up because I did not get the quality workmanship (in some cases, NO workmanship at all) from neither of the two shops that worked on it. Just about everything I looked at had to be replaced or fixed. I mean, seriously, neither shop thought it might be nice to actually have a FUEL FILTER in the car? That destroyed all of the fuel injectors. I had to completely redesign and rebuilt the entire fuel system. The guy tried tuning the car with exhaust leaks, fuel leaks, and vacuum leaks. Which, quite frankly, just is not possible to do. I had to fix all of them before it would be worthwhile to get a tuner to even look at the car.

Oxygen sensor harnesses spliced using trailer hitch wire and radio shack wire and the guys says, "It's just wire". :rolleyes: Yeah, and certainly leaving them laying right on top of the headers didn't help things much. I had smears of melted plastic insulation at several spots on the exhaust pipes, and had to move away stainless steel braided fuel lines that were laying directly against exhaust pipes, and hot cables coming from the battery. Heck, I'm not an auto tech and I was completely bewildered by what I saw. The car was a ticking time bomb, in my opinion, and the last shop let me drive it home that way, saying it was ready to go.

Ah well, I'm sure I'll have nightmares about this for years to come.

Oh and if everyone wants to read a blow by blow description of this disaster, here's the place to read about it -> http://www.corvetteflorida.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44697.
 
Well, I haven't driven the car since the day it was tuned. For several reasons. (1) Something popped in my right elbow and there was no way I could work the shifter. Guess I just did too much wrenching on the car. Getting better, but not quite 100 percent yet. (2) Connie and I went up to Ashville, NC to tour the Biltmore estate and take a hot air balloon ride. So we were gone for several days. (3) It's been raining here every day. I live on a dirt/sand road, and it is quite messy to drive on.

(4) You know how some things just nag at you subconsciously, but you just can't put your finger on what the heck it is bugging you? Well, I've been concerned about an odd scraping noise that I've heard several times when starting off from a dead stop with this car. I was thinking that there was something wrong with the clutch, so honestly this has been gnawing on me for a while now, thinking I still had something rather major that needed looking at. But it just didn't make sense to me. When Mike Carnahan was here tuning my car, I never heard that noise even once while he was driving it. But when I took it out for a drive after he was done, I heard it plain as day a couple of times. And I distinctly remembered hearing it on the way back from the last shop it was at back in November.

So over the weekend I went over to the garage and put the car up on the lift to poke around to see if I could see anything that didn't look right. Well, yeah.... This doesn't look right at ALL.



I'm guessing that when starting off from a dead stop, the engine torque caused this tensioner to twist and apparently rub against something, making the noise I had been hearing. I'm assuming the tensioner is likely shot so I just ordered a new one, just to be safe. And no, it's not simply a matter of a loose bolt, that bolt won't tighten down any further, so it is apparently too long for the application. Honestly, it baffles me how in the world the guy at the last shop wouldn't have noticed something like this since he obviously had to have been right in there to remove the AC belt. :confused: Even if the too long bolt was put in by the first shop, it should have been obvious to him when he loosened the tensioner to get that belt off of it. It's not like you can MISS seeing the darn thing.

So yeah, the car is not going anywhere till I can replace that tensioner....

This is the kind of stuff I seem to find every time I take a harder look at the car...
 
You ever seen the movie, "The Money Pit"?

I can't imagine the frustration. I'm grinding my teeth and it's not even my car.

Hope you guys had fun on the vacation. :thumbsup:
 
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