hey y'all,
sorry i've been a little absent lately. things have been crazy w/ spring break and i've been gone all week. thanks for the big welcome from everyone. i've been doing a few minor repairs recently since we've been out of touch. first off, we were leaking oil real bad from around the head covers so we replaced those gaskets about two weeks ago. unfortunately, one corner slipped up on us and we didn't know. i was down in myrtle beach (aprox. 200 miles from home) when it suddently got real bad. this sucker was pouring out oil like you wouldn't believe. i was leaving so much black smoke behind me i could barely see out the rear view mirror. people were honking and flashing their lights at me left and right, i'm sure they thought i was about to explode. luckily i was able to nurse it all the way home then we replaced the gaskets (big butt cork ones this time) and made sure they were on there good. so far so good, no leaks that i can tell and i've driven it about 300 miles since. we have also changed out the exhaust finally. the man i bought it from runs a corvette repair shop nearby and had the original exhaust so i bought it off him and changed it out. at the time, he showed me that there was an aftermarket catalytic converter on it. it looked quite a bit different from the original ones but i figured he knew what he was talking about so didn't question. once home, i took it to three different places, all of which told me it was a straight pipe. needless to say i was not a happy camper. i called him up this weekend and we had words. he still swears up and down it's a real converter so i'm gonna just try to get some place to trust me and put a sniffer behind it. i had the joy of installing the air pump just a few days ago. something as simple as this surprisingly took almost 4 hrs. we had to redirect a coolant hose so the pump could fit in there. unfortunately, the plug had been in the same spot for probably a good 20 yrs and was a dissimilar metal from the intake so it had bonded. we did everything imaginable to get this plug out. nothing would even fit it, so we had to shave it down to a size we had. finally w/ our amazing luck we snapped the top right off. then we had to drill out the middle and essentially crumble the remainder of the plug. needless to say we were not happy campers. there were several other points that had been stripped along the intake also that we had to rebore. but it works fine now. just have to wait and see how emissions turn out. i swear, the simplest things on this car take twice as long as i'd imagine, but hey, it's a good learning experience. this week i'm gonna try to figure out what's wrong w/ my brakes. they are extremely squishy right now, it only takes a few hours after we bleed the system before they are back to their previous state. after i get that problem fixed though, all i need is a new paint job and a few gagues fixed and we are back to perfect street condition. i'm pretty excited to see how everything's gonna look once we're done. i'll keep you posted on progress and any suggestions for the brakes would be greatly appreciated.

 

I've formulated my own time-calculator(sp?) for working on my vette. It'll probably be the same for yours, so feel free to use it:

1) Estimate time to do job in hours
2) Add 2 Hrs.
3) Multiply by 4
4) This is your new estimated time

Works really well, because a 30 minute job to fix a broken retainer in my steering column took almost an 8hr day :crazy: :eek: And half of the time I finish at the estimate. The other half, not so much. :chevy