Build Thread Enola- Finishing touches

No worries, I would rather take the 45mins to get this done the right way than have it in the back of my mind.

Thoughts on Wheelie skis or Oil pan savers.... where to buy to save the most monies, are they needed? I dont plan on doing any wheelies but i would like to not beat my pan and headers to death on speed bumps and pot holes

Ok so I swapped the spacers out with square tubing. Much more substantial.

I have been working on some of the non essential parts of the project this week, I did not like the fact that the batteries and amplifiers ect. Just sat under a piece of carpet... so I decided to do something about that, behold! My bull cover up-er-er....


I am still wiring ect.. all this junk, it looks so dirty in the photos.... stuff is old I have had it since I was a teenager.
The entire car needs a good cleaning.

Yesterday I started working on the exhaust, the hacked up very poorly done exhaust.... never ever let someone talk you into a 'deal' with an exhaust shop the tech will not give a damn how it looks when they are done.

Soo this time I am hacking it up myself. Well at least part of it, I took the old downpipes and began making my intermediate pipes for the longtubes. I want them to sit a certain way so doing this part myself is not a problem. The driver side is done, with the catalytic converter installed. I now just need to work on the passenger side and get it finished up, I will post pictures of my heavily hacked assembly when I am done.

I realized I do not want to remove the ceramic coating from the headers.. but I need to add the O2 sensors... maybe I will put them in the assembly I am making now. I truly want them in the header collector though.
*should have done this before they were fully installed in the car.

I thought pretty heavily about doing cutouts myself. However in the future I want to do rear mount turbos...

I was going outside to finish up the exhaust, then I didnt.. instead I am on the back porch with a stiff drink and a cigar.

FedEx lost my in shifter.... or they delivered it to someone who is not me...

I have been waiting for this to show up before moving forward with adding fluid and such as it requires replacement of the shift arm. I cannot start the car without fluid in the transmission

Ok so i decided to move forward with the project by ordering a new shifter. I ordered the lokar electronic sport shifter for the 4r70w, this one has the lock out for the shifter in the knob. This means i will be able to use a shift boot for a manual transmission to finalize the installation and make it all look very clean. I will post lots of pictures of the installation of this shifter when i get it in hand.

I am tired of waiting.. ordered and next day air so i have it for this weekend... If all goes well and i can work fast enough I may even have a video of it running.

I managed to get the shifter installed yesterday, I am not 100% happy with the boot but it can be modified I would think. To get the shifter installed just like I wanted took a bit of time, i had to stop and tune a car while this was happening so it interrupted my flow a bit.

I started by cutting the factory shifter plate, I used a frozen up stock shifter to do this with. After the modifications were complete I went to mounting the new Lokar shifter in place.


In the picture above you can see the test fit, I had to do some more adjustments including moving the shifter down about 3/8" it would have hit the trim ring. I only have about 1/4 gap between the shifter and the transmission, that's enough for me.

The final product is not final just yet, I still have to wire in many things. But it is progress. I have to finish a tune today, so likelyhood of this getting done is low.

I managed to get the shift arm installed in the transmission, this required dropping the pan. Then I realized after I removed this tiny little roll pin that the arm would not come out without lowering the transmission... so lower it becomes, I just dropped one side of the crossmember... install the new arm and put the crossmember back up.

I realize I put the damn thing in backwards, drop the crossmember again and flip the arm. This time I decide to install the selector arm ect before putting the trans crossmember back in place, I get the pan on. As I am cleaning up I find the roll pin...
Drop the pan again and install the roll pin, I am starting to feel like Mike at this point.

I managed to get the shifter linkage in place and adjusted with the wifes help. Went to fill it with fluid and...... my jugs are empty, what I thought were full transmission fluid jugs are in fact empty ones waiting for used oil.