pacotaco345's We're Finally Making Progress Build Thread

[pacotaco345]

Soooo... Where to start, haha I guess with introductions. My names Geoff, I'm a computer science major at TCU in Ft. Worth TX, I actually live in Southern California but for all intensive purposes I live out here now.



This is the only picture of the car that I have in its original, unmolested, virgin-ness. I picked it up like this right before my 16th birthday (I'm now 19) for $2200 dollars. It was owned by a grandma who gave it to her son; bone stock automatic with 180xxx miles on it. Neglected but not abused. If any of you know where big bear is, thats where the car was, so after buying it I had a fun little cruise back down the mountain to my house. Anyways, fast forward to when I started getting stuff done with it.

The climate control doohicky was stuck on defroster, and even though the a/c didn't work it was still annoying so I pulled the dash:



Found the lil motor thing that changes the vents:



And fixed this lil gear:



I also removed that annoying door dinger thing:



After all that dashboard stuff my uncle bought me wheels for my birthday, they were 17x7 +43, but I couldn't complain:



Somewhere in there I compression tested my motor and discovered that it only had 110 psi of compression across all 4 cylinders so I decided that I would find a new motor. After a couple days of searching I found one on craigslist for $100 dollars that "had good compression and was running" when it was pulled out of the car. Great deal right?? Wrong...







After 2 weeks of chasing the guy around he gave me my money back and let me keep the trashed block.. More about that motor later though

Discouraged by my ventures into finding a motor, I decided to paint the car.. and so the 3 month long process began. First the entire car was sanded and gratuitous amounts of hammer and bondo were applied:





Eventually primer and basecoat was shot:



Followed by clear:



Then the colorsanding began..



And finally we buffed the s*** out of it for that nice glossy finish lol







Then a new challenger appeared:



Huh.. I really wish I had taken some pictures of that swap but o well. Long story short I pieced together the whole swap for less than 200 dollars and finished it in a day lol. This was the aftermath:



This is when the bad decisions started to take place:



Stock



Cut springs



Cut springs more.. At this point the car handled and rode like s***, so I bought these:



which made the car look like this



but made it handle even worse... But hey, atleast I was low right? ha...

Anyways, this is still one of my favorite pictures of my car, even though it had my crappy wheels on it:



Then I went to a junkyard and got a piggy lip:





Somewhere in here I started to become more an more adept at working on my car and swapped motors with a relatively fresh ka.





The new motor had 160 psi of compression but it also had a s*** ton of timing chain rattle.

I'll leave the story here for now, my laptop is starting to die and I'm hungry. Update in a couple hours maybe? or maybe tomorrow.. who knows

[jsturges18]

rough start ehh? car looks good tho, paint looks good for being what looks like was done in the garage. diggin' the vette!!

[pacotaco345]

rough start ehh? car looks good tho, paint looks good for being what looks like was done in the garage. diggin' the vette!!

Thanks man! Now where did I leave off... The old motor was pulled and a new (er) one was put in. Unfortunately it had tons of timing chain rattle but at the time I didn't wanna bother to fix it so I drove it with the rattle for about 9 months. Somewhere in that 9 months I attended my first drift event, car rattling away, stock seats, terrible coils, etc.. Needless to say I sucked but I still had fun.









After the event, I realized how terrible the stupid ebay coilovers really were. Lucky for me my friend offered me to buy his gen 2 PBMs for $180 plus my blown ebay junks. Shortly after this, the timing chain rattle began to annoy me even more.. I got tired of going to meets, driving people around, leaving school, and having people thing wtf is this piece of crap, so I bought a timing kit and pulled the motor again.



Unfortunately, I installed the lower chain a tooth off, so the car never really ran right and after a while it failed to run altogether. At this point I'd had the car for two years and was leaving for college, so discouraged that it wasn't running, it got shoved in the garage and left there for a semester.



When I came back for winter break I pulled the motor again.. I was getting pretty good at it by this point, it took me half a day to have the motor out and the front of it torn down. By that night I had it back together and by the next morning it was back in the car. It started and ran perfectly, so I drove it up the street and then nothing. The car stopped running completely. Turns out I didn't tighten the intake cam gear all the way and this was the result:







Anyways, remember that other motor that I mentioned earlier? Well I canibalized it and took 2 intake valves. I replaced all the valve stem seals, ground the valve seats with a harbor freight thingy, and put the head back together.





3 days later the car was running, better than ever. The headwork gave me a compression jump from ~155-160 to ~175 across the board. Since the head has been off I haven't touched the motor other than routine maintenance (I'm scared I'm gonna screw it up haha).

A lil while later I got a used clutch off someone from zilvia, so I put it in:



And it slipped.. So the transmission came back out and the original clutch was put back in. I'll stop here for now, I have class in a few minutes. Another update tonight sometime most likely.