Redoes: by Bill Howell VOLUME 1, ISSUE 5

            Now that I’ve turned my focus from the ‘80 Malibu and towards a new project, I have been doing some math on how much I’ve spent on it. Like most, I am always just blown away at how quickly I blow the budget. I always try to have a game plan and know pretty much where I am headed with a project, but wow, did this one get out of hand.

            It was my first Pro Touring build, but it got put on the back burner when I bought the GTO. What has really blown the budget is the redos. The first one was deciding that I just had to have a T56 after spending big bucks getting a 700R4 built and installed.

            Everyone knows the drill. Buy a tranny, have someone rebuild it, work out how to make the lock-up torque converter work properly, cut the driveshaft, stuff like that. Once all this was done, I was very unhappy with the shifting of the 700R4, spoiled no doubt by the 4L80E in the GTO. About this time, a ‘97 Camaro made it to my garage. Even though I never had the time to get it right, I did fall in love with its six-speed transmission and knew that I had to put one in the ‘Bu. Well, since a T56 requires a hydraulic clutch and no one makes a bolt-in for it, it was trial and error, but we made it work.

            Once we’d gotten all of the hard stuff figured out, I realized that the Malibu’s speedometer is just not going to work with the new tranny. Hey, it wasn’t anything that

another $500 piece from Street & Performance wouldn’t fix, right? Now I have a 700R4, and a couple of torque converters sitting in the corner of the shop, reminding me constantly of how expensive that redo was. Oh, once I’d swapped the trannys, the precision-ground cam I had bought to replace the factory one was no longer right for the combo. Yep, another $400 to fix that, too.

            Then I am reading all the good things everyone is saying about the ATS spindles, and realize that I just have to have those on the Malibu. Since it still had the original spindles, hey, this wasn’t really a redo, was it?  Never mind the expensive control arm bushings that I had replaced, they were free right?

            Once I got the spindles on, I realized that the brakes would have to be replaced…with C5 calipers. That was cool. But it’s just not right to do the front brakes up like this and then leave the rear ones alone. Now I was in a full-blown upgrade. I can’t do anything simple; I had to incorporate C5 brakes on the rear, including factory parking setup. You ever tried this with a 9-inch rearend? Several bracket designs later it’s a working setup, but I have a useless pile of expensive, machined one-off brackets and a complete rear disc brake that came with the rearend. Will they ever see duty again? Doubtful. Ooops. The new master cylinder will no longer work with the new setup. You guessed it, another redo.

            It’s very easy to tally about $2,500 that I just threw away because of a lack of my planning. Please learn from my stupidity. A well planned build is mandatory. I’m sure we all have thrown good money after bad chasing dreams, but man, I would have much rather had that $2,500 in my pocket. It would just about pay for the interior work I need to do to the car next.

            The one thing I hope I have learned from this is not to make the same mistakes. I would rather work thru all this on paper before I start writing checks. And yes, Melinda reminds me about all this every time she sees another check being written……lol

Bill

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August 2006: Ouside The Box

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