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