Just spent the last two days reading the Rich Z thread. He had the Blue Z with the 427 RHS motor and the last i heard his TT was to long and It ruined everything. Does anyone know if he ever got that dang car running or did he sell it.

 

That poor guy... I'd like to know the conclusion to that story too!

 

It was hard to read. He wanted a bad azz ride and got junk. Just goes to show its worth the extra money to get it done right the first. He should of sent the car to Vengeance Racing or LPE

 

His thread got locked here but he did continue it on his local Florida board if I recall correctly. It got better as far as his car went but the amount of money he spent fixing that thing was nauseating !!

 

link to the thread??... if it was locked it should still be there to read unless it was deleted, now I'm interested

 

https://www.corvetteforum.com/forums...lxr-heads.html

 

oh wow it's a couple of years old already, I was thinking this was something more recent... thanks though, I'll have to take a look at it

 

I read the last 2-3 pages....HOLY COW!!

 

I talk with him regularly on his own forum. Here's the thread about his issues there.

http://www.corvetteflorida.com/forum...ad.php?t=44697

Just sent him a pm on his board linking him to this

 

Hey guys.... The car is doing just fine now. Well, there is still an intermittent drive train squeal before everything heats up, but I'm not too concerned about it. It will either get better, get worse, or stay the same. But other wise the car is running just great. I mean REALLY great!

I had Mike Carnahan (http://www.vengeancepcm.com/) come to my place to do a preliminary tune on the car and afterwards he helped me get started with figuring out this tuning stuff and I took it from there. After a good 100 new flashed tunes along my learning curve, I think I've got it the way I want it.

My friend who posted above provided the link on my own little club site for the "part 2" (the current engine is the second engine after the Warhawk engine got rejected) of the saga, and I added another couple of threads as I moved into the tuning aspect of it all.

http://www.corvetteflorida.com/forum...ad.php?t=92956

http://www.corvetteflorida.com/forum...d.php?t=102142

I thought that sometime I should create a sort of "cliff notes" version of the saga separated into three main categories: (1) The Chris Harwood (XtremeMotorsports) saga, (2) the Aaron Scott (South Georgia Corvette) saga, and then (3) the Home Wrenching (me) saga. But not sure I have the stomach quite yet to relive the entire thing by reading through all those posts in that endeavor. Sometimes I will just lean against the fender looking into my engine compartment and get lost in the recollections of all the work I had to do on that car. It's actually kind of overwhelming even today looking back at the big picture of what I went through after I brought that car back home. But I had to do what I had to do.

To be honest, I still carry a card for the local towing company in my wallet when I drive, but primarily just because of that drivetrain noise mentioned above. Other than that, since the only failure I have had with the car while driving was a fuel line connection popping off of my fuel filter (which I know was my fault), the car has felt rock solid.

Yeah, it cost me a lot of money. A lot more than I had planned on. But at the end of the day the course I took to, well, "never give up, never surrender" was the only path I could have taken and still be able to look myself in the mirror in the morning. Had I just given up I would have allowed the two above mentioned shops to take something away from me. I probably would have sold the other vettes and been done with the entire mess because of that. It would have been actually painful to ever see another electron blue C5Z on the road.

Yeah, there are some bad memories, particularly of people I had never harmed or said a bad word about would lie to me and steal from me. And honestly every now and again I do get some pretty wicked nightmares about all this, but in the end I've got a really special car and I learned one hell of a lot along the way. About a lot of things. Had some people who were, in my opinion, grossly incompetent and/or practiced con artists take advantage of me, but I also met some very nice people who went way above and beyond to help me out of the jam I had gotten myself into. Truth be known I believe I am now a jonah in this neck of the woods because I had the audacity to publicly state the truth about South Georgia Corvette. Ah, but the truth is the truth, no matter what.

So at the end of the day (or in this case I think it was four years) it has all worked itself out reasonably well. Except for the scars that itch every now and again, I believe I handled this as best I could.

 

Thanks for the update. I read every page of that thread here and on the local forum. Glad to hear all is well !

 

Wow I just realized that was you on the Florida forum ! I was living in B'ham two years ago when I first started following that thread, now I live in Destin Fl and just recently joined that Fl forum. Small world !

Smaller world still is I know Mike and Ron from my time in Atlanta at Vengeance before there a Vengeance

 

RICH im glad everything is going well. I feel your pain. You wanted a nice Show car and paid those shops good money and they just lied to you and took your hard earned money without producing a quality product. Im glad you finally got it fixed. That is one bad Azz car you have now! How much power do you think its producing now? I bet its close to 700rwhp.

 

Heck I don't really know. When Mike Carnahan was here he said his seat of the pants estimate was around 850. Other than that, I haven't had it on the dyno, and honestly there isn't anyone close by that I know of with a dyno that I would trust them putting their hands on my car. And that was before I replaced the 10 lb wastegates with 14 lb. ones. While the car was at South Georgia Corvette, Aaron Scott told me he saw close to 700 rwhp on his dyno, but based on the shape the car was when I got it, I don't believe a word of it. Matter of fact he had the wrong throttle body on it (gold plate LS3) and I doubt it ever hit the higher rpm levels without getting a REP fault. For being a vette tech, he didn't even know about that LS3 throttle body issue with the reversed motion throttle plate. And I guess maybe you saw the pics of the trailer hitch wire he spliced into the O2 sensor.

 

How about some recent pictures for us?

 

I would suggest checking the links provided. I have oodles of photos and videos I've posted on YouTube linked in those threads. I was documenting everything every step of the way. Sorry, but I can't see too much reason to copy them here. I'll be perfectly honest, after my thread here got locked because I called the manufacturer of the wrong torque tube to the carpet (site sponsors are obviously heavily protected), I've lost a whole lot of incentive for participating on this site.

But here's a video I took running the turbos into boost while doing data logging.



The first half of the video is just me riding to the turn around point to check out the road to make sure there were no "hazards" lurking. Then after turning around, I just put it into fourth gear when the car was moving enough to keep from stalling and ran it out to around 6200 rpm, if I remember correctly. Boost kicked in before 1800 rpm and was linear all the way to 11.6 psi when the wastegates kicked in.

 

I bet your running around 800 850hp with the turbos. If you were running around 700hp with that crappy tune and bad install after it left Aarons shop. I bet you gained alot after you fixed evreything and had Mike tune it. From what ive read Mike with Vengence is one of the best tuners in the country.

 

That was some saga. Glad your at least enjoying the car now!!!

 

I once had a low quality person, a car mechanic by trade, tell me, as he pulled the opener on a can of beer, " Some people are just begging to be ripped off".

An astounding statement, but it has informed my judgement since.

 

And I'll bet that he was willing to help them, most likely!!