9/13/03
This week I have finally waited long enough - the GTX has been hitting the
streets of Indy for shakedown testing and to try to build confidence in its
reliability. So far, it's been doing great. It does still need a lot
of things to be what I would consider "robust" or
"done" (they're never REALLY finished), but it's drivable, it's
running better, and the paint hasn't fallen off, yet, so it's time to put some
miles on it before the snow flies!
And no... I don't intend to just stand by the car......
I did say.... drive it didn't I?
I moved them over here in
the tech section - thought it made more sense there 
11/19/03
Shake down testing.. oh boy.. what a lot of shaking there was! Let's see... I still have a vibration at highway speed. Yes, I have new u-joinst and the drive shaft was rebalanced. So far I have found my pinion angle is at 0 degrees (oops), the driveshaft is about an inch too short. Argh!
I also found that my water pump seeps at high RPM's, for some reason my shroud warped out away from the radiator about 1/2 an inch. Dangit! All kinds of little things keep cropping up... and to add insult to injury, my header flange warped on the way to the last cruise of the season - something I've yet to fully rectify!
I did try separating the flanges as illustrated here and took a file to the middle tubes.
I even employed autobody techniques in putting a layer of filler down for a
guide coat... but as evidenced by the improved but still slightly leaky header,
I'm not very good at autobody techniques. 
I suppose whenever I get back to working on this area, I'll try some of the high
temp copper silicon on that region - if that doesn't satisfy me, I'm going to
yank it out of there and have the flanges milled flat - a lot of times the
"beads" these headers have cause more leaks from warping than they
prevent.
Winter projects on tap? Well I have a heater box here finally - in decent shape:
They did kinda sorta forget to send me the duct work that we had agreed on, so I'm not quite "there" yet, but the box itself is real good shape; two small cracks with a lot of dirt and leaves to clean out. I really liked the fact that it had the factory tag still on the top! The heater core looks decent. One tube is partially bent but I can fix that - I figure I'll get it checked when I get the new tank lined. Did I mention the new tank?
Oh yeah! I have a "new" tank ready to go - it already had a drain plug in the bottom for easy access for gas thieves - or to allow water draining, however you choose to look at it. I also picked up some horns and again - they "forgot" to include the horn relay and wiring pigtails, but that one's a lot easier to recover from. They did at least toss in for no charge the passenger side vent cable that I needed.
I also managed to get the Air Grabber control cable and the glove box liner replaced finally. I really do feel sorry for whoever had to put gloveboxes in on the assembly line - or I at least hope their boxes fit better!
Also on the way.. SOME day... I have an A-body disc brake conversion setup on the way from a fella over on Moparts.
I also finally located some front fender well moldings that I bought off a guy on Moparstyle.
Seems like most of my time has been spent searching for and buying things
doesn't it? Well my wallet agrees with you!
6/1/04
Awwwww crap.
Cracked head. Looks like a horribly botched repair job, doesn't it? Looks like it'll be a long while yet before I can cruise again.
