LS6 Tommy said:
Doober, Madge is still a "Driveway Eliminator". Things have been slim for us. I lost my job a year ago last June, then lost the new job last July. Normally I do a Holiday Club with my bank and it's my total car budget for the year, but this year it might just go to pay bills.
Tommy
Ditto on the driveway thing... I haven't done much with it, but I start it every once in a great while to circulate the fluids... the tires are pretty old (some old Yokohamas that were on the Irocs I'd traded for some Camaro/Corvette wheels), so I don't want to risk driving it too far/fast and a tire coming apart.
It still needs basically all the interior besides the dash (mint '81 Lemans dash, Slimbo said a long time ago he'd shoot me for cutting it up, lol). I have a floor-shift auto column, but want to get the bucket and mechanical parts to make an authentic stick-shift column with the key release lever. The body still has some love needed, not as bad as many, but still some stuff needs to be fixed... firewall above the HVAC box has rusted through (I've never seen anyone else talk about this, anywhere), so that will have to be patched, and there's some pinhole rust in the passenger floorboard (likely windshield/HVAC box/heater core related) and the trunk.
I have a used T5 I was planning to rebuild with a G-Force set (~$1500 I think for the hard parts, plus rebuild parts + misc.), but I think I've changed plans to do a T56. It seems the used units are worth their weight in gold now, don't see many under the $2000 range that aren't cores or needing added parts/work... a brand new Magnum unit is something like $3200 +tax/shipping/etc., I think by the time I bought a used unit and had it rebuilt I would be past that for a transmission rated at 2/3 the power/torque of a Magnum, so I've started saving.
I have a B-Body 8.5 to swap in, but haven't touched it besides finding the gear ratio. I'm going an alternate route there and keeping the original width, which - if I measured correctly - happens to line up with the offset/backspacing needed for the high offset wheels of the 4th gen F-Body/C4+ wheels. This I can rebuild at home, and probably get the shock mounts close enough to work properly (they're on the front of the housing vs. the rear for G-Body). SSM makes a set of swap bars for a B-Body into a G-Body. The front suspension has a couple companies that make extended length a-arms, so I can move the front spindles out the same 3" as the difference for the rear, but I haven't been able to find much explanation online about changing arm length vs. suspension geometry/handling... I would think it can help in the camber department, but I'm like 95% noob when it comes to geometry. With the wider rear/front I'm hoping to be able to run some late model GM wheels (and big brakes to match), was thinking of some C5+ wheels, but we'll see where that goes when we get there.
While the engine is still the mild 350 I built about 13 years ago, I eventually want to build a 6.0 with L92/LS3 heads... I like the idea of 500+hp with mostly factory parts, and being able to spin it harder than most production small blocks of the old days. This would be the cherry on top, it's still fun to drive with what it has.