village idiot

seems like a good time for a suspension upgrade, or at least Z06 brake upgrade. It looks so accessible. May want to consider painting suspension components black too. I always thought they should do that from the factory.

Very cool thread. Very nice work so far.

SLOWRYDE

Conventional wisdom is sell your Stingray and buy a Grand Sport or Z06...

But, conventional is boring and so,,,well,, generic.. This is personal, gratifying, entertaining, and educational all in one experience... Well, that my friends, is the very definition of PRICELESS! Looking good my Corvette brother! Keep us posted with the updates. If I was close, I would lend a hand!

joemosfet

The weird thing is, nobody says this about installing a supercharger, and installing a supercharger is more work.

FYREANT

I would certainly disagree with that. I can do my supercharger kit in my sleep but cringe at trying this. You sir have iron cohonies LOL

village idiot

lol what? Supercharger is a few hours. This is a few days.

joemosfet

^Nah, supercharger is definitely much more difficult, maybe less time overall, but certainly more difficult. Perhaps I should qualify that with "supercharger, headers, methanol" install. The panels may be more "daunting" but definitely not as difficult.

With the body panels, never have I gotten frustrated at the fact that I only have one elbow per arm. There is no getting on the ground crawling around, under the car, draining the oil and the antifreeze, swapping out sparkers, no yanking of ABS module, or using a breaker bar on the harmonic balancer... yeah, supercharger is definitely more difficult.

Seriously, this is pulling panels off, putting panels on. Easy, all the screws are easy to get to, the aperture panels come right off (with the correct tools) and the new panels go right on.

Johnp94

I'll be doing the same. Used Zo6 is out of my price range. 2017 GS doesn't come in laguna blue, and 2014 doesn't have Torque converter worries.

joemosfet

Only worked for about an hour today on the car, but got ready to put the new panels on. Updated Post #2 with pics. I'll get more done on Monday, it's a holiday. After that, it will be another two weeks before I work on it again, too much stuff going on in the meantime.

Oh well, I got news from C7Carbon that they're still working on my Z06 spoiler, so it looks like a delay on my end isn't all that bad.

7LitreC5

Looking good. Thanks for posting your progress.

NoOne

Excellent work and your rocker arm method gets me interested in this again. After seeing JetMech's posts I was all over it but then I heard the C8 was coming sooner rather than later and backed off.

Plus I get excellent traction on the stock PSS's at 645rwhp with a SC. I don't know why my car hooks so well, but its near zero wheel spin, so that also pushed this to the back burner.

Then coupled with the DCS MRC controller and their launch mode, another step back.

However your saying you paid $4,700 for all the WB parts including paint?

That changes a lot of things because I was thinking this was near 10K. wheels/tires are easy as many take off their brand new wheels/tires and sell them cheap.

My PSS's now I bought with 30 miles on them from a forum member for 1K shipped, seeing wheels and tires going for about double that.

jimmie jam

This is a great thread...it will help someone else tremendously. Looking very good!

joemosfet

Just the panels, from Trunkmonkey / SubChev. Paint was another $1300, still less than the $10k you're expecting.

I chatted with my dad, asked him point blank without any lead-up, "do you think this is easier or more difficult than the supercharger/header/methanol install?" His reply? "Hands down, easier."

NoOne

New parts?

I looked on Ebay, didn't really care since they were going to get painted anyways and the savings at the time did not seem to be enough.

Johnp94

I have all the parts I bought used from forum member. I need aperture panels, trunk monkey doesn't have them listed. Go parts direct and cheapest CM parts are not listing this item. How much did you pay the dealer for both aperture panels ?

joemosfet

Yeah, new parts. I didn't want to deal with the chance that used parts were damaged in some way, or injured in shipping, etc. Probably not something one really needs to worry about, but, alas.

As for TrunkMonkey not having them listed, they do, but its difficult to know exactly where they're at: http://www.trunkmonkeyparts.com/auto...ure-panel-scat

The part numbers listed on this page are probably old and new part numbers are out. Don't order directly from the website, send SubChev a message and tell Rick exactly what you need and the part numbers you have. He'll find the latest part #s for you and get you a proper quote.

At the time I bought my aperture panels, they were around $500 each.

robert miller

I would like to know where he got his parts from. I paid over 5,k now for just the parts for me to do this. Then not sure yet how much for the paint of them. All the other is on me in just time we will see what it end's up at. I just got all my parts but I did get them from the same place & vendor in here. Robert

village idiot

Looks like I won't be installing my own supercharger anytime soon

Foosh

I think it all depends upon the person. Some who are very comfortable doing engine work, wouldn't touch any kind of body work, and vice-versa.

However, in this case, and with the possible exception of the aperture panels, this doesn't look terribly difficult.

joemosfet

I got a few hours in today, I got the aperture panels glued on, the interior reassembled and cleaned up, and I was able to mock up the front fenders and get the hardware transfered over from the old ones. I've updated post#2 with the progress.

I found something interesting that I think deserves repeating here:

If you want to Z06 / GS widebody, you must do the front fenders as well. The Stingray fenders do not line up with the Z06 aperture panels, at all. It has been suggested here (and I think even a vendor is selling a rear-and-aperture-only widebody kit) that it was possible, and unfortunately it is not. At least not without dramatically modifying either the aperture panel or the fender.



Anyway, I'm headed on a vacation and won't be around to work on it again until next week, or the weekend after that.

Thanks for reading!

From his photos, the back of his parts have a lot of yellow overspray. Considering the parts come primed in grey from GM, and his car is shark grey, I'd guess maybe he had take-offs or maybe purchased somebody else's canceled widebody panels.

gwalsh88

Great Thread! Thanks for Sharing!