The only machine shop in town I could find to take on the job of making my brackets at anywhere close to a reasonable rate is also apparently a busy shop.
With the small pieces orders I’ve had lately it has run me out of stock and I now have to wait three to five weeks to get more kits made. I’m sorry this is taking so long as there are two people now waiting.
Hopefully it will be closer to three weeks than five.
It is official, Bob at Brute Speed has graciously agreed to carry my F-Body Procharger bracket system for sale to his customers. He brings with him sponsorship to a few communities that will hopefully extend the visibility of my system further. This gives me three outlets for sales, including myself
Here is the direct link to his sales page.
Thank you Bob, and I look forward to working with you.
Spent some time on a dyno with new higher power numbers, and maybe getting a new vendor for my bracket.
I know I have been very bad lately with keping up on posting things to the blog. Between working on the car on the weekends these past few months and familly time I just haven’t been keeping up. I have also not been good about remembering to bring my camera with me when I made it out to the shop where the car had been living for the last few months.
I was finally able to start the motor for the first time two Saturdays ago, 8/28, and let it do the first heat cycle while I checked the fuel lines for any leaks. Everything looked good at the time and we just had to let the computer figure itself out for idling, nothing a flat head screw driver under the throttle arm didn’t fix. Once it warmed up the screw driver wasn’t needed. Unfortunately it was getting late so no more time to finish up that night.
I was able to get a fair amount of work done this past Saturday on the motor. It is starting to look like an engine again, which is nice, but we did run into a minor snag along the way.
I got a couple of hours to work on the motor yesterday, but didn’t get nearly as much done as I would have liked. I got the block cleaned back up, checked the crank clearance with the new coated bearings, installed the crank, cleaned the rods, and put the spiral locks in one side of each piston.
Checking the main bearings was time consuming, but worth it to make sure. I was aiming for a little loser than stock setup, which I accomplished on mains one, two, four , and five which all came out looking like .002 for cold clearance between the crank and bearings. Number three, however, is a little tighter the plastigage looking like .0015. The thrust clearance on the crank came out to .0025 which should be ok. When the motor warms up the aluminum should expand to open up a little more clearance for the mains.
This next week I hope to gap the rings so they can be ready to go in the motor. Here are some pictures of the block and the crank install.
After months of waiting I was finally able to pick up the new clutch from the shop. They were paying Spec for the repair since they had installed it wrong, I’d say good customer service.
The death of an engine is never fun to deal with. Especially one that was supposed to be built to take abuse, at least that’s what I thought I ordered, and had professionally installed. Read the rest of this page »
Almost two years ago when I started piecing together the parts I would need for the supercharger system I was less than impressed by the standard mounting bracket Procharger had designed for their F-Body kits. It had no automatic belt tension system, and instead relied on a fixed position manually adjustable pulley to keep the belt taught for driving the blower. This at best caused belt slip for a lot of people and at worst added a lot of stress to the crank shaft as people had to over do the tension to try to keep it from slipping at high RPM.
I felt that I could solve both these problems and get some satisfaction in doing it myself instead. Thus Aster’s Auto Spring Tensioner bracket was born.
I decided I needed a place to toss my notes around so I figured why not put it online… cause everyone wants to know about my breakfast or boring day at work scattered intermittently with updates on various personally exciting but potentially useless or fruitless projects I’m working on.
Okay I lied, I will try to contain myself and not post about the trivial little things in my day. I do hope this will turn out to be a good place to keep track of what I am working on, and if I am lucky keep me focused on actually finishing a couple projects.
Until I get this sorted I’ll leave it at that and try to collect my thoughts.
Aster's Project Logs 