Pete's Camaro

[Monster]

Skills fabricating that lot Pete, looks great too. You should really notice the new set up on track. Worthwhile mods

[pjs65]

Thanks for the comments , iam trying to do a good job with these as i don't want anymore black flags for smoking brakes .
I have not spent to much on this as i wasn't sure if the parts would fit but at a guess and including the bias bar stuff i would say about

[pjs65]

Iam still plugging away at getting the brakes finished and i reckon 2 more weekends should see the job done . I haven't booked any TD's so its all been a bit slow going with nothing to get a move on for , i didn't want to rush the brakes as they are not something you can take chances with .
I brought some new halfshafts and bearings as the old one's were worn and the oil seals leaked abit , i also think that the shafts weren,t totally straight . I ordered some OE spec one's as iam not running huge power and unlikely to be in the near future:frown: . I thought that they would be a straight swop being OE but they were 3mm shorter than the old one's "f*ck", you'd think they would be spot on as they've been making them since the 60's . 3mm out with drum brakes might be ok but with disc's not really , so i had to remove the brake backing plate and rebend and skim it 3mm. It went back together ok and is all finished apart from bleeding the calipers , i also replaced all the pipe from the front to back and turn up some locating rings for the hubs .
I now have a proper handbrake with one i can reach and that works , real pleased about this as i wont get moaned at by the MOT guy for having a useless parking brake . Iam use to old english cars so having a dodgy handbrake is nothing new but the contraption that chevy came up with is real stone age stuff .
I got an E39 handbrake off Ebay for a tenner and a pair of new cables for

[pablo]

Great work Pete:thumbs: What were they smoking when they came up with that excuse of a handbrake:willy_nilly:

[john B]

Great stuff Pete I know what you mean about the stupid parking brakes on Yank cars I had to replace the cables on my Trans am years ago I could have re fenced my garden with the amount of cable they used....
Hopefully you will have it all ready for Modified live then ?

[pjs65]

Great work Pete:thumbs: What were they smoking when they came up with that excuse of a handbrake:willy_nilly:

I don't know about drugs but i think they might have had a liquid lunch and left the trainee to finish the job off .

Great stuff Pete I know what you mean about the stupid parking brakes on Yank cars I had to replace the cables on my Trans am years ago I could have re fenced my garden with the amount of cable they used....
Hopefully you will have it all ready for Modified live then ?

When i got the Camaro it was a shell with all the bits in boxes and i was never to sure that i had put the parking brake together properly , but as you know that's how they are .
I will try and make the Snetterton event but i haven't put my name down because i wasn't sure i would finish the car in time .

I have put a new module into the dizzy and that will be all i do to the engine this year . The standard HEI dizzy has a rather wimpy module as they were only ment for low powered emission regulated smog motors . Its got a higher output coil but needed a better module to go with it . The modules are like the Honda ones as they are known to fail sometimes , so i will keep the old one in the glovebox as a spare .

The top one is the new part and is about half the size of a matchbox , this should provide sparks to 7k+ not that the motor gets to the sunny side of 6k anyway

This is it fitted into the dizzy

[russ979]

Nice work pete! Fingers crossed you do it finished before the modified nationals. Our club area wont look right without the mighty camaro to balance out the jap stuff.

[pjs65]

I didn't get to go to ML @ Snetterton because of a faulty master cylinder and also because of my own stupidity . I had spent the last 2 weeks finishing the brakes and had finally got to bleeding the system , doing the rear cylinder and calipers went well but i had trouble with the front . The front wouldn't bleed properly and also the cylinder kept getting stuck , but instead of junking it i carried on trying to get it to work . That was my stupid mistake because a brief test drive proved that the cylinder was junk and that i had poor brakes , so back into the garage and pulled everything apart and started again . I removed the cylinders the calipers and some pipework that i wasn't happy with and also the disc's , basically everything got taken off .
I put it all back together carefully and used feeler gauges and verniers to get the caliper brackets square before refiiting , i bled the master cylinders before bolting on and replaced the bad master cylinder . Everything got checked and measured before being put back on , took a day to do but i should have took more care in the first place:iamwithstupid:
Time for another test drive which started off a bit tentative but i soon gained some confidence in the car and was alot happier with the brakes . I still have too much pedal travel which is down to the front .625 cylinder being too small so that's getting changed for a .70 , that should also make the rears work a bit more as they aren't doing as much as they should . But generally with some tinkering and changing the OE pads for track pads i think the brakes should be fine and ready for a track session .
Whilst on my little test drive i noticed that the motor seemed to run really good , it tends to splutter about town and doesn't like traffic . It was almost splutter free and on the way back i was having to resist putting my foot down . I had replaced the ignition module with a better one and did a minor jetting change , but wow what a difference as the torque that left last year has returned and with just a little bit of throttle coming out of a roundabout got the wheels spinning up . Usually a slow corner in 2nd gear would be accompanied by a stutter before the engine did anything worthwhile but a big surprise there and a big grin, it stops and it goes .Pete

[john B]

Great news pete well done I bet you can't wait to get her out on rack now then.

[pjs65]

Great news pete well done I bet you can't wait to get her out on rack now then.

Yes iam looking forward to using the car properly and i need to do some trips and TD's.

I have changed the .625 front master cylinder to a .70 and that has improved the braking loads , initial bite is nearly as good as with the servo but with far less pedal travel . I have also slightly increased the pedal ratio to 6.25 up from 6 because iam using the bigger front cylinder and so far all the little adjustment have worked . I put Yellowstuff pads on all four corners and i know not everyone here might do that but i spoke to a guy who used them on a corvette and he liked them . The Corvette is going to be similar handling and grip to the Camaro well more so than 4x4 turbo jap cars or front wheel drive euro stuff , so i went with what the Corvette guy used .
Since switching to the manual box i haven't been getting any engine braking when i back off the throttle and also the engine sometimes ticks over quicker . I guessed that something was sticking in the throttle linkage to the carb but with a bigger return spring and the throttle linkage moving freely i couldn't see why . The only other thing was to remove the carb and check that the butterflies were seating ok , and they weren't so i reset them and i now have a stable tick over and engine braking:hurray:
Still with the carb i could never get the idle adjusted to how i wanted and having done some research i found that the idle circuit could be rich . The idle jets on the carb are a fixed size and not changable and the only way i could weaken it was to put a piece of wire onto the jet . This is really low tech and crude but i couldn't think of another way to do it , if it didn't work i can also remove the wire . Amazingly it did and the engine ticks over way better than it ever did and when i turn the idle mixture screws they actually work , the idle jets must have been way to big . After 5 years iam finally getting the hang of the carb although a dyno session is what it really needs .

Picture time , front brakes with Yellowstuff pads