Dear diary...

The oldest notes are at the bottom of the page.

03/04 The engine project is coming along slowly but steadily. I have pretty much all the parts that I'm going to need and all the block preparation work is done. Time to start assembling it!! Check out the engine build up here

05/03 Not much has happened over the winter. I've been planning my engine buildup and saving money for it. I also moved and bought a new daily driver so I had other things on my mind. My new apartment has a lot roomier garage than my old one so I'll have a nice place to build the engine. I did a little upgrade to my stereo install, I swapped the 2 channel amplifier for a 4 channel unit. I put a pic of it in the stereo section.

08/02 I spent a couple of days of my summer holiday swapping in a steeroids R&P kit. It was an easy install, with great results. Read about it here.

04/02 For four years I've been driving around without any soundsystem (except the V8 one...) but finally at a local car show with lots of car-hifi systems on display something snapped in my head and I decided I wanted one in my Vette. After some thought I came up with a plan that included a cd player in the dash, two-way separates at the kick panels and a subwoofer + amp. I didn't want to diminish the rear gargo area so I decided to install the sub in the jack compartment. Choosing the parts and shopping around took couple of weeks and building the sub enclosure and installing everything another week or two. Currently the head unit is being serviced, the damn thing wouldn't play CD's when the engine is running!! Did the same thing on my daily driver so it's not the car to blame! Check ou the pics in the stereo section.

03/02 One little project I did during this winter was a tilt column refurbishment. There was some slack in the tilt pivot and the steering lock wasn't working. After I had disassembled it I knew I needed some parts that could be hard to find. Or so I thought! The bearing housing where the tilt head is pivoting had one of the pivot holes worn pretty badly. I read from a FAQ by Jim Shea on the www.corvettefaq.com that most GM steering columns of the era share this part. I looked the local ads and sure enough, there was one seventies cadillac tilt column for sale. I picked it up and after disassembly found out that the internals were excatly the same! I needed some other little parts aswell, the lower bearing and adapter and the fragile c-clip retainer. I found all these from the local GM dealer! With good information on the web and parts that are available immediately this project was allmost too easy!

02/02 After the car had been been painted there was only one eyesore that I could think of: the rear underbelly. The exhaustpipe tips were crooked and the spare carrier just plain ugly. As a little winter project I decided to strip the carrier and detail it. The metal straps were rusty and the tub had some cracks. I removed the rivets that hold the two together and decided to remove the rust from the strap chemically. I bought some citric acid from the pharmacy and made few gallons of 4% solution. I dipped the strap in there and after a couple of hours I took it out of the bath and scrubbed it with a scotch brite pad and the rust was coming off! I repeated the dip&scrub procedure a few times and the part was like new. I then painted it with satin black. The tub is glassfiber and easy to fix. However it has a funny texture where you can see white strands in black resin which is pretty hard to duplicate. I tried but came up with plain black glassfiber. Well nobody's gonna look it that close anyway... After removing some overspray with paint stripper I riveted the strap back with pop rivets (not quite up to NCRS spec I'm affraid but it works!). The exhaust I'll do later, somebody had welded the tips on so no chance of replacing just them.

09/01 Getting my car on the road seems to happen later every year, but now my Vette is painted and gorgeous! My annual inspection was due long ago so I took the Vette to the local private inspection station the very next day I picked the car from the paintshop. It was piece of cake eventhough I didn't have front grilles and parking lights installed, the heater didn't work, neither did the windshield washer or the passenger side indicator. He didn't notice that the horn was out of order too. Sometimes things just go smoothly.

07/01 The Bodywork was a big task. Stripping 95 % of the exterior was easy but getting to bare fiberglass in the door and hood openings, grille openings side marker openings etc took a long time. Also making all the new repairs took quite a long time. Took pretty much all my summer vacation this year... I estimate around 200 hours in total. Anyway I'm reasonably happy with the results and will take the car to a paint shop soon. Check out the paintwork section.

05/01 Fixing the cracks lead to another thing, stripping the paint off. I had hoped that I could just paint over the old paint but decided to get all the old paint off before painting. I've discovered a few more cracks that have been just fixed with filler so I'll have to do some more glassfiber work... I'll try to get some more pictures in the bodywork section soon.

01/01 I've been a bit lazy with the body work but the spoiler lip and drivers side fender are done. I guess I'll continue with drivers side rear fender and bumber area. Another thing I did was installing a tray for the removable rear window. It was one of the very few things completely missing from my car (ignition shielding being the other). I really like driving with top on but rear window removed so I've kinda missed this item. I got a used tray from Michigan Corvette Recyclers. Installing it was a easy. Next summer there wont be a loose window bouncing around in the rear compartment!

12/00 It's time to start this years winter project, body & paint. So far I have done some glassfiber repairs to driver side front wheel opening and I'm moving on to front spoiler lip. There are a lot of small cracks on the body plus a badly done old repair on the drivers side door. Most of the cracks have allready been repaired from the underside by Finnvette when they were doing the chassis restoration last spring. I'll just need to do the top side. I'll post some pictures when I get a little further with the project.

09/00 After one sunday drive I heard some strange noices when I shut the door. It was like the exhaust pipes were hitting the frame slightly. I looked under the car and noticed one nut was missing from an exhaust clamp. I installed a new one and tightened it but it didn't help. Next I noticed that the drivers side exhaust bezel was hanging with only one screw and I could easily move around the whole exhaust pipe on that side. It turned out another nut was missing from the rear exhaust hanger. After fixing those I could still here some resonating noises when I slammed the door! Turned out that the headlight bezels were missing two screws. Replacing these finally helped. Few days earlier I had noticed that the power steering pump belt was squealing sometimes. Yes, you guessed it, there was a loose nut there as well causing misalignement and the occasional noise. I guess after everthing has been apart it can be expected that bolts and nuts can work themselves loose. So the next weekend project will be checking all the bolts and nuts under the car!

08/00 I got the car back from the shop after some nine months. What a joy it is to drive after all the waiting! I did some work on the car straight away. I replaced the old tires with new 245/60/15 BFG radial T/As. I also replaced the stock front springs with shorter 460 lb/in "Grand Touring" coils that I had. They lowered the front about an inch. Probably caused by the long inactivity during the chassis restoration there were some oil leaks from the engine. I changed valve cover gaskets + all bottom end gaskets except the rear crank seal. I put in a new timing chain as the old one was pretty sloppy. Everything seems to be fine now, no leaks. In three weeks I have driven more than I did during the whole last year!

08/99 I noticed a couple of rust spots on the frame in front of the rear tires. This pretty much dictated the next winter project. I had planned on doing a suspension rebuild but with the frame I was going to need outside help. In the end I left the car to the hands of a shop called Finnvette and they did the whole thing. There's more about it in the chassis section.

07/99 I installed pertronix ignitor to my distributor. The instructions were pretty simple as was the whole installation. I had some up/down movement on my distributor shaft so I needed to install a couple of shims between the gear and the body. The shims came with the kit so it wasn't a problem. I can't say that I noticed any difference in performance but the main thing for me was adjustment free operation which this little thing provides.

06/99 During the interior resto I had checked all vacuum cables. They all checked fine so I was puzzled as to what could cause the slow operation of my headlamps and viper door. turned out I hadn't checked the vacuum relays which were all leaking quite bad. I bought two new ones and decided to try my luck fixing one of the originals. These parts were not meant to be serviced but one can be fixed. Using a flat blade screwdriver I forced open the collar that holds the two piece body together. The piston like rubber thingy inside was a bit loose causing vacuum to leak by. I took the thinnest o-ring I could find, filed some grooves for it in the piston and re-installed everything using some silicone sealant under the collar before clamping it back together. It works just as well as the new ones and now the vacuum system is air tight so that there is also vacuum after shutting down the engine.

04/99 I tried cleaning the tank. While I got most of the dirt out I also found out that there were several holes beneath! They were so numerous that trying to fix them seemed stupid. Also as there still was some dirt in the tank a new one seemed like the only sensible solution. I ordered it from a local Vette only shop and it came complete with neck gasget and bolts and fuel pick-up retaining ring and gasket. When I dropped the old tank I was anxious to see if the build sheet was still there. I tried to feel it beforehand but there was too much dirt on top of the tank to feel anything. When I dropped the tank I was dissapointed to see nothing on it. Only next day I realised that the tank hold down straps actually go over the tank where the build sheet is. As my tank straps were still hanging under the car I crawled under the car and saw the document on top of the passenger side tank strap! I was lucky that I didn't destroy it while I literally dropped the tank out. I removed the tank sticker by gently lifting it off the strap. The dried glue let go very easily. There was lots of dirt on it which I cleaned of with a soft brush. The typed in text was very hard to read but still visible. Later I made a "new" build sheet with my computer using a scanned and re-touched image as a basis and filling in the info with a type writer.With the new gas tank I haven't had any engine problems since.

winter 98/99 I did a lot of interior work, read about it in it's own section.

08/98 When I drained the gas tank earlier I noticed that there was some light brown sand like stuff in the tank. It was hardened a bit like mud so it was difficult to remove. I left it in tank hoping it wouldn't dissolve when new gas was poured in. At first it didn't seem to do so but one friday night I was on my way to local cruise and the engine stalled. I started it and it ran ok. Luckily the engine worked fine when I was driving around in town but on the way home the engine died 11 times! I was a bit frustrated but next day I started looking into it and fortunately it didn't take too long to find the problem. Yes the gas looked like muddy water again. New filter and fresh gas an it was ok. Obviously something needed to be done to the filth inside the tank but I decided to do it later.

07/98 I finally got the car registered. There were some problems left. The vacuum system for headlights worked poorly and the wiper door had been cut out of the system alltogether. The lights wouldn't come up without help but they went down ok. I had changed the vacuum actuator seals and the check valve but the system was still only marginally better. I decided to forget about them for the moment and drive the car a little. The suspension felt tired so I drove pretty cautiously. The engine and transmission worked fine.

06/98 At the state inspection station a couple of more problems were found. The steering lock didn't work and the parking brake wasn't powerfull enough. The parking brake took a couple of more adjusting operations before I got it tight enough. Also the steering lock required two more visits to the inspection station. I didn't know how the steering lock on these cars work (there's very little about it in repair manuals) so I took the car to a shop that cleaned the system so that it started working. The problem that remained was that there was no interlock cable on my car so it was possible to remove the key and lock the steering while car was on drive. I ordered the cable from a local GM dealer which got the part from their warehouse in Sweden. Expensive but took only two days, I was busy to get the car on the road!

05/98 I bought My Vette. The brakes were pretty much gone, all calipers were leaking and parking brake was stuck. As the piston bores in calibers were pitted I decided to replace all calipers and brake pads and shoes. I managed to break loose the handbrake cable which was stuck inside the cable covers at trailing arms. The other side needed just brute force and some wd40 but the other also required some heating.

The engine was also running badly, it blew smoke out of tailpipes and almost died at idle. The more experienced car people can tell by the color of smoke what's the problem. To me it was difficult to decide what the color was as all smoke look kinda gray to me... Well I guessed it was black (unburnt fuel) and started checking for fuel related problems. The first peek inside to gas tank revealed that the gasoline looked more like salad dressing than gas! I drained the tank, cleaned the carb and replaced fuel filter. The problem was (temporarily) solved and the engine run ok.