Door Bars and Cage Finish Work

To Finish up the Cage I took the car to Mitch Marchi at CMP Fabrication. He designed, bent and welded in the Drivers side door bars, added a few bars to stiffen up the cage and built-in some jacking points. Mitch's shop is in Waterford Michigan and his work is top notch, I highly recommend him to anyone in need of any fabrication work. When my car was at CMP there was all sorts of project cars in the shop, everything from a Boss 302 mustang with trans am history to an Alfa Romeo GTV6. Prep and Paint work has started on the interior of the car, but I need to finish up all the detail work before I can lay down the final color.

Seat Mount

Yes, this may be a very complicated way of doing something simple, I could have saved myself a day of work and just notched the factory rear crossmember, but what fun is that. I couldn't use the factory mounts because they were in the worng spot and they are too high once you get your cage in the car. So I cut out the factory rear crossmember and welded in a new one. The factory seat mounts use a stud sticking up into the interior, I changed this to be a welded nut inside the seat crossmembers so you can bolt the mount down to the floor. I had a set of aftermarket sidemount seat mounts but they wouldn't work because there was a bend at the bottom that made them too wide to fit inside the car. So I cut them up as well and made my own.

Roll Cage

The Cage I bought for this car is a Prefabricated Weld in cage from S&W Racecars. Working with limited tools (2 angle grinders, tape measure, level, and a Miller Mig Welder) makes the job very tedious. It took me three full weeks to finish. S&W's cage kit fit very well but the next car I build I will be changing from the front Halo and A-pillar style construction to the front down bar that extends from the front footwell all the way back to the top of the Main hoop. With the Halo setup its difficult to get the bar close to the roof to get me most headroom possible (very important in the F-car platform) This forces you to move the seat lower by cutting the factory seat mount out and fabricating your own mounts.

Getting an Engine Together

The spec engine for a Camaro in CMC1 is a 5.oL. You can set up your engine one of two ways. Carberated or EFI. I chose to go Carbed because its a simple setup, its cheap, and its easier to diagnose and fix when you are having problems at the track.

I started out with an 86 IROC TPI 305. *FREEBE* Thanks Shawn. I ran a leakdown test to check for any major problems before I pulled the cylinder heads. The engine had been sitting for a while and it was cold when I did the test so I got quite a bit of variation from cylinder to cylinder. The best being 5% and the worst being 20% leakage past the piston rings. When I pulled the heads I found all of the cylinders to be in great shape with only very minor wear. The bad news starts when I started pulling the heads apart. The valve guides are worn to the point where they are just outside of the acceptable specification, the pushrod guides are showing some wear, and the castings themselves are just awful. The intake entry is considerably smaller than the gaskets. There are casting bumps in the roof and floor of the intake port. The list goes on. These heads would respond very well to some port matching and bowl work, however, the CMC rules state that the cylinder heads MUST be left alone (NO PORTING). At this point I am going to sort through the other two sets of 305 heads I have laying around and see if they are any better.

I was able to start collecting the short list of performance parts I need to finish the build. I bought a used Edelbrock Performer intake off of Craiglist of $25 (can you believe that) and a 4776 Holley carb for $100. I still need to buy the Performer Cam and lifter kit and the spec Canton oil pan.

The Donor Car

Follow along as I build my first real race car. The car is a 1987 Chevy Camaro that I picked up as a rolling chassis for under $300. The Car will be competing in the NASA Camaro Mustang Challenge series in the near future.
The first order of business was to strip everything out of the car that is unnessasary for racing.
All of the seam sealer and the undercoating is being removed from the car. For the build process I have removed every piece of the factory interior, including mounting hardware and mounting brackets that will no longer be needed. This job is very tedious.
In the mean time I have began to order the mountain of parts needed.
Including:
Corbeau Racing Seat
SCCA spec DOM rollcage from S&W Racecars
Hankook tires (will be used for practice and the competition licencing process)

Just as a heads up there are some positives to the slow economy we're in. I was able to buy all of the above parts at a substantial discount off of normal retail.

In order to keep the cost of racing down the NASA rules require CMC cars to use most of the Factory components. The rules do allow updating and backdating of parts within your specific vehicle platform, ie 82-92 Camaro in my case, and that is exactly what I intend to do.
Because I am starting out with a base model car I will be spending most of my free time searcing for the factory high performance parts that GM offered.

To make the process easy I bought 2 parts cars.
1988 Pontiac GTA
1990 Pontiac Trans Am


I paid around $600 for each car but I am hoping to remove the parts I need and sell the remaining parts to recoup the purchase price of the cars.

The parts I removed from the parts cars to use on the camaro include:
5.0L Engine TPI
NWC T5 Transmission w/all parts need for the manual trans swap into the Camaro
9 Bolt Borg Warner Rear axel with disc brakes, 3.70 gears, and a worn out Posi
WS6 steering gear box with power steering cooler
8 GTA crosslace 16X8 wheels (only 6 of the wheels were not horribly bent)
2 sets of front spindles to modify for 4th gen F-body brakes
2 front and 2 rear sway bars for chassis tuning
2 aluminum radiators with plastic side tanks
all coil springs that were not broken
1 set of front control arms for spares
and a bunch more misc. spare parts