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What would you say you gained on that 71’ LT-1 with the piston swap? I know the ‘71 dropped 40 ponies from the ‘70. Was it a seat of the pants difference, or had you driven it enough prior to the plume to be able to say? I ask as it’s something I may want to do to mine one day. I’m staying low budget with this one, so if just pistons could net such an increase I’d say it would be worth it.
It took different pistons as well as different combustion chambers + cam to affect that power difference.
Taller piston crowns + smaller chambers = Higher Compression Ratio
'70 versus '71 heads are quite different; '70 have much smaller chamber and make more compression
Litevette asked to keep everyone updated, so here we go. I have the car up on my jackstands and now with the engine out and the block/heads being serviced at a local machine shop, I've decided to start at the front and work my way back. The car has one respray that I believe was a dozen years ago. Like most resprays, the overspray is not quite everywhere, but enough to warrant disassembly, refinish/correction, and reinstallment.
Front bumper/grillles, front bumper support brackets and radiator bulkhead are removed to gain access to the headlight assemblies. With all of this removed, there's no weight on the nose to worry about with it 'out there' and unsupported. However, I did put a brace under the nose as a precaution.
Control arms, sway bar, steering linkage are all removed as they were not installed to my liking...not to mention the various chips in the finishes.
Headlight assemblies, actuators, horn and vacuum lines are all removed. I've bought a vacuum line kit from Dr. Rebuild and will be replacing all vacuum line as they are 54 years old. Here's a pic of the car shorn of all those parts and pieces...
First order of business was to disassemble the headlight assemblies, bead blast most everything to remove the overspray (see before photo...), refinish all the pieces, replace all the bushings and then reassemble leaving the adjustments to when they are reinstalled in the car.
Before:
Disassembly....
And after without the headlight buckets installed...
Designer Imagines A Corvette That Looks More Like a Corvette Than the Corvette
Slideshow: A Jaguar designer's personal project imagines what a modern front-engined Corvette might look like if Chevrolet revisited the golden age of the Stingray.
