Wheels 2

The centers of my wheels could not be powder coated due to them being plastic. The company that did the powder coating had paint on order that would match the color of the wheels, but I have been waiting on it for over a month. I did not like the look of the chrome plastic centers so I started looking for an alternative. I have always liked the look of carbon fiber but not the price associated with it. I found a company that made the centers for these wheels in carbon fiber for the cheap price of just over 600.00 dollars.

Plan two, DI-NOC a 3m vinyl covering that looks just like carbon fiber. I ordered a 1'x4' sheet off of Ebay last week for 24.00 and it is everything I read about it. It looks and feels just like carbon fiber, its also easy to work with and very forgiving when you make a mistake. It took me all of 20 minutes to cover the wheel centers with it.

The color matches the wheels perfectly.

I love the look it gives the wheels and the car, I plan to do some of the interior plastic trim with it as well.

Splash Guards

Yesterday I scored a set of factory splash guards. The cheapest I had seen these for was 90.00 plus shipping.

I bought these from a body man at the local GM dealership for 30.00, he was converting a C6 base to a Z06 body. The good thing about these is they fit great, are very hard to see and protect the wheel well / rocker areas very well.

Wheels

I got an offer a few weeks ago from an old friend to trade my factory "hairpin" wheels for some factory five spoke wheels. The hairpins look nice but are a pain to keep clean, especially in the center of the spokes. If I drove the car once every few weeks it probably would not be a big deal, but as a daily driver the brake dust builds up rather quickly. My plan was to just paint the wheels black when it came time to replace the tires but the deal I made for the five spoke wheels included having them powder coated black.

I was going to paint the center caps to match the semi gloss of the wheels but ordered some Di-Noc instead to give them a carbon fiber look.

The black wheels should be much easier to keep clean with the car being driven daily, I think they also give it much more of a competition look.

Z06 Exhaust

I have been looking for a different exhaust for the corvette, the factory exhaust is extremely quiet for the type of car it is. After researching numerous options and deciding that sound was not justification for paying 1,200.00 to 1,800.00 at this point in time I had basically given up, until I read about the NPP and Z06 multimode exhausts. The NPP is a factory option that has exhaust cutouts built into the mufflers, they are vacuum operated and controlled by throttle position and RPM through the ECU.

The option was 1,195.00 and added 6 horsepower to the base coupe 430, buying just the mufflers alone is over 1,200.00 new and 600.00 to 800.00 used. That eliminated NPP as an option, the Z06 multimode mufflers though came on all Z06's and sell from 250.00 to 400.00 used. They have a deeper tone and larger tips than the NPP's.

I found a set of Z06 mufflers for sale on a corvette forum and the seller was located in Phoenix. Tania and I drove up two weeks ago to pick them up. The tailpipes on the Z06 mufflers are 3" in diameter versus 2.5" for the stock pipes, so I had some adapters made which once everything was apart didn't come close to fitting.

Matty decided he wanted to help me and during the removal I got a call from work, by the time I was off the phone he had almost the entire stock exhaust off all the way to the downpipes.

Being late in the afternoon and seeing the adapters were not going to work, I cut the tailpipes off the factory mufflers and welded them to the Z06 mufflers. This actually worked fairly well since the Z06 mufflers reduce down to 2.5" at the inlet of the muffler.

Now all that is left is to hook up the vacuum lines to the exhaust cutouts. They default to open but this causes a bit of a drone at low RPM freeway speeds. I have found a remote control relay that I can use to control a vacuum solenoid, adding a small accumulator to the system will allow me to open and close the exhaust valves at will.

In the picture above you can just see the vacuum actuators and linkage that open the valves in the center exhaust tips. When they are closed the exhaust is very quiet.

The old exhaust not only was very quiet but very restrictive, note the small diameter of the pipe leading into the dual tips. The new Z06 exhaust has individual pipes going to each tip.

The sound of the Z06 exhaust is very similar to what flowmasters sound like and makes the car sound like it should have when it was new.

Runflat

Last week I decided to get a slow leak in my right rear tire fixed. It had been leaking since I bought the car and every three to four days I had to put air in it. Corvettes do not come with a spare, they use runflat tires which allow you to drive at legal speeds for up to 50 miles with a completely flat tire. I read a few things on Goodyears site about needing specialized training and equipment to work on these tires, there was also vague reference to the repairs being done by Goodyear for free.

The first Goodyear I went to, they told me that runflat tires were not repairable

Plate

Saturday Matty and I went to a local car show, it was the first time out with the Corvette and my new plates.

Normally I am not a big person on personalized plates but when my plates came as ANN593 they had a personalized look to them. The problem being the name ANN. I spoke with someone at the DMV and they explained they would not change them for me, so I decided to get a personalized plate.

The DMV required that I explain the meaning in 70 characters or less......

New Years Resolution

My new years resolution this year was to get a brand new corvette. The one I bought is a year old, oh well I never was good at following through with new years resolutions....

Truck Seats Pt 9

I hit the local u-pull this weekend, they had 3 88-98's and over 20 f-150's in the same year range. Needless to say the OBS's were pretty picked over. I found some lighting in one of them that I had been wanting to get. The interior and under hood accessory lighting.

Because of how it is integrated into the cab harness I cut off the sockets and made my own harness that lights the foot wells, ashtray, and glove box.

I also drove 175 miles to look at this 91 Stepside 82k mile "creampuff" that was for sale at a dealership for 4599.00.

The add had numerous pics and I was excited at the prospect of finding a bone stock, fully loaded, low mile OBS I could use as a daily driver so I could tear mine apart.

Once I got close to it red flags went up with a really bad Earl Scheib type paint job that was flaking off everywhere. That was just the start of a wonderful test drive which included the worn out front end taking the truck where ever it wanted along with the hood deciding to release on its own and the glove box door falling off into my Tania's lap. This was going to be a bit more work than I wanted for Matty's first car.

When we got back I tried to close the hood and the passenger side headlight fell out. The sales dude then promptly says "that's why we have it marked down to 3999.00". I left my number with an offer of 3k including tax and by the time I got home the add was removed from CL.

Truck Lights

Today I put in some TYC lights and DDM HID's. I had quite a bit of trouble getting the passenger side light to fit correctly. Many of the pictures I see after people have replaced their lights show them sitting at angles in relationship to the opening in the grille, now I know why. After I modified the headlight bucket and made a spacer for the upper inboard mount it placed the headlight parallel to the grille opening. For some reason the factory buckets have a spacer molded into the plastic that does not exist on the buckets that came with the TYC lights.

The DDM HID's are very impressive for the cost, they took less than 10 minutes to hook up and 30 minutes for me to figure out I needed to plug the headlight connector into them backwards to make them work.

The amount of light they put out is pretty amazing. With all the lighting laws they have in this area of Arizona these will be great on all the streets that have no street lights.

Truck Seats Pt 8

This weekend I had a bit more luck at the 3 acre pick and pull, in the form of a 2000 Suburban. When I got there the professional junkyarders were in the process of destroying the interior to get the door locks and window motors. I did manage to get the overhead console and Temp/Compass mirror.

Unfortunately the yard itself cut off the front clip to pull the motor and the temp probe and harness were gone.

The console is in very good shape but once I got it home I notice that someone had disassembled the map light switches internally.

I decided today to mess with the passenger side mirror, it came off with a large screw driver and prying against the pivot point in the center of the mirror. Once it was off I found one of the pivot balls on the adjustment screw was broken off. Being a Sunday afternoon buying the part was out of the question and since it was already broken me trying anything to fix it would be no loss if I failed.

First I drilled out the center of the tiny pivot ball and the center of the screw itself with a #40 drill.

After it was drilled I filled the holes with epoxy and screwed in a wall hook to hold them together.

I cut off the end of the hook and put the everything back together, the mirror works fine and is probably stronger than it was new.

I test wired up the rear-view mirror and the compass appears to work correctly. Tonight I am ordering the temp probe and connector, tomorrow I will run the wiring and put the mirror in.