0Jeremy@RPMTransmissions

I haven't had a build thread in a very long time. One of my projects that has been eating my time is my 2006 Z06 Corvette. Some of you already know about it and have probably seen the many times I have tried to sell it.... But I have finally decided to keep it and move forward with the build.

The car is a California car, usually a good thing, but not when it lived all 43,000 miles on the road course. The car was tracked often by its first owner and seen all the major road courses in California. One day the owner was airing the car out down the straightaway and the car decided to drop a valve at a very high RPM. The car immediately erupts into flames from the gaping hole in the block. The owner gets the car stopped and pulls the hood release and nothing happens. In a last ditch effort to save the car he empties his entire fire extinguisher into the wiper cowl....

So insurance pays off on the car. The engine is destroyed, the hood, firewall and all plastic pieces on the driver side of the engine bay are toast. The fire also escaped from the exhaust and burnt the rear bumper of the car. The car goes up for sale on ebay. A friend of mine buys the car and ships it here to Indiana.

Here is one of the Ebay photos of the car. It looked pretty good on the outside but the damage was much more extensive. Lets just say it photographed well lol.

0Jeremy@RPMTransmissions

He proceeds to to a minor tear down of the car removing the engine and most of the burnt bits in the engine bay and sells off all the good/aftermarket parts on the car. He gets in over his head with a huge big budget build. He gets tired of spending money on the car and he and I work out a deal in early 2012. I tell him I need some time to get my ducks in a row and I will pay his car payment for a few months while I get things in order. Another friend/coworker of mine hears of the deal and starts undermining the sale trying to buy the car to the point where the current owner starts to hassle me about the sale after only 2 weeks. I tell him to sell it to the other guy. The other guy buys the car and LITERALLY puts the car in a SHED and lets it sit there for nearly a full year without opening the doors on it. That owner gets into a bind and needs to sell it.

So in February of 2013 I get the car bought and start the journey.

This is the day I drug it out of the shed and brought it home.


I get the car home and proceed ripping it apart.






Here is the major damage to the firewall and the repair process. This part of the fire wall was as thin as a t-shirt. I cleaned the area the best I could and removed as much burnt fiber as I could and laid on a small amount of fiberglass in the worst area and built up many layers of resin. I tried to keep the original shape the best I could but I had to keep in mind that this repair will never be seen once the engine is in the car.








Here is the car seeing daylight for the first time in over a year. Time for a long overdue bath.








To add a little flash to the car I had the upper and lower a-arms and spindles micro polished. Its hard to photograph.


Since the original hood was toasted I had to get a new one. So I opted for something different. I went with the "Monster" ZR1 hood with no window to mimic the L88 hood of the late 60s.



Here is a picture of my second hand FAST 102 intake putting in a hard days work at RPM Transmissions....


Here is my Haltech 112mm carbon killer bee air intake.


Since my car was motorless when purchased I had to start on the hunt for an engine. I found this gem up in Detroit at one of our suppliers shops. It is a prototype C5R/C6R block. It has thick liners and billet main caps just like the C5R blocks but it is designed around the Gen4 architecture. It came with bronze lifter bushings on the intake lifters. I went ahead and installed them on all 16 lifters. I filled the motor with a Manley forged 4.100" crank, Manley 4340 H-beam rods, and Wiseco 2618 dome pistons yielding a 13.5:1 static compression ratio (8.5:1 dynamic). The cam is a Flow Tech Inductions custom grind with 260/272 degrees duration and .660" of lift, Comp pushrods and stock rockers arms that have been micro polished and cryo treated by CRS with a set of BTR trunion upgrades. The heads are West Coast Cylinder Heads Stage 3 ported LS7 castings with stock titanium intake and inconel exhaust valves.

0Jeremy@RPMTransmissions

By this point I have completed everything I can easily do at home. Rodney (my boss) was gracious enough to let me bring it into the shop and use a lift for a little while to do the hard stuff.



The under side of the car was exponentially worse than I expected. Oil, dirt, soot from the fire, grass and sticks from off track adventures.... you name it. It was all there. I spent an entire day cleaning the under side of the car front to back.

Before


After


Here is a better shot of the polished front suspension.


Here we go fitting the oil pan and checking pickup clearance, installing my Improved Racing oil cooler thermostat and plumbing the lines.



I gave some new life to the tired old FAST 102 intake. The white paint is a taste of things to come. I will paint the letters in later once the motor is permanently in the car.


A big thanks to Steve Addison, the owner of Monster Clutch Co. for the hookup on one of their new LT1R twin disk clutches to flog.


Here I have installed my 2" American Racing headers and QuickTime SFI bellhousing to keep my feet in place if that Monster Clutch decides to exit the picture.


Here I am dropping the cradle out of the car and getting ready to install the engine up into the chassis.





This is all for now. This is where I am at currently in the build. I will post more pictures as the assembly continues.

Flyr282

Looks great, Wish i had some shop or garage space to attempt that same kind of work. Cant wait to see what your outcome on this looks like.

0Jeremy@RPMTransmissions

Thanks! I just have a small 24x32 garage at home. I could have done everything there on my back with jack stands and an engine hoist. But thankfully my boss was kind enough to let me work on it here at the shop.

Unreal

May want to heat wrap or do something about the oil cooler lines. They will be very close to the header primarys.

Great job.

LMB-Z

Was the wiring harness and computer fried too? Looks like a great build.

0Jeremy@RPMTransmissions

Thanks for lookin out! I had planned on wrapping them up. Everything is just kind of mocked up at the moment.

Thanks! Yes the harness was fried. As was the coils, fuel rail covers, fuel lines, brake lines, brake booster and master cylinder, wiper fluid res, steering shaft and wiper mechanism from all the fire suppressant.

It was in pretty sad shape to say the least.

AZDANZ06

Nice work, look forward to following this rebuild thread.

c5racr1

Great build. As one who brought a grand national back from a fire, I know the journey

Sébast19X

hello Jeremy, great work !!!
Surely you get the best drivetrain upgrade soon !!!

Seb

FSTFRC

Great job of saving this z06!

NHRA95

Super Great Work!!!!

MTPZ06

Lots of work...coming together nicely though. Question on oil cooler t-stat...can factory lines be used with it, or do you have to swap those lines out?

JShort

Great work Jeremy! Looking forward to seeing the progression

Hirohawa

Excellent! Subscribed

Mr. Gizmo

very nice work. You performed magic on the firewall

RGT

Great thread!

ticat928

I need to find a vette with a salvage title, it would save me $ 5000 in property taxes over 10-years here in KY.

Great find on the block, I hope you will find the burnt harness, computer and peripherals for reasonable prices at the wreckers.

smart move with the blow proof bell housing, people have no idea the damage a 7000-rpm clutch explosion can do.

You were smart to not rush into this deal, no one else that had hands on it had a clue on the work involved

0Jeremy@RPMTransmissions

Thanks again everyone!

Thanks Seb! My goal is to eventually have a faceplated T56 in the car with a 4.10 diff.

The oil cooler t-stat requires AN lines. I imagine you could adapt your stock lines to AN and run a short piece of AN line to the stock lines.

Thanks! I actually already have all the small parts to repair the engine bay. One of the big perks of building a few C6 racecars in the shop

I've always been leery of high RPM launches without an SFI bellhousing.

It has been a labor of love for sure. I've wanted to abandon it a few times. But I had an idea in my head that I really wanted to being to life. It's nice to finally see it starting to come together.