So what will surely be a long and ongoing project with my 1968 C3 corvette, is cleaning up the engine bay. Much of the parts are rusty, and have just been sitting without any attenion for a long time. The coolant overflow tank was on such neglected item. Everything about it was covered and rust and engine bay grime. I took the part out and... sure enough all of the beast wast rusted apart and failing. It was cheap stamped steel, and I'm amazed it had held up like it did.

If you're at all familiar with the 1968-1972 corvettes, you've undoubtedly born witness to the insanity that is the headlight cowl. In an effort to hide the headlights, Chevy added a cowl that covers them up during normal operation. To be able to use them they devised a system that lifts the cowl up to expose the wipers... which required vacuum to lift. To prevent the wipers from going too early or too soon, the vacuum doors trigger a switch allowing power to the whiper motor.

With the Corvette now on the West side of the country at my house, I was taking it out for a spin and noticed a real drag of a problem: at sustained 1/4 to 1/3 throttle acceleration, the car started sputtering and just didn't put power down until I got all the way on the throttle. Sure, if I jummed the pedal to the floor it would power through,but the more I had driven the Corvette, the more I came to realize I wanted it as a comfortable street cruiser. Sure, it's a powerful brute of an engine, but good for the street none-the-less due to it's wide torque curve.

Recently, I've been playing a lot of disc golf. I play a decent amount, but it's been forefront on my mind the past few weeks, and I've been digging it. I went out to the field nearby my house to practice throwing discs, while simultaneously letting my dog roam free. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that without a target, gauging any gains from changing up my form was pretty tough. I could see consistency, and judge on how it felt physically... but that was about it. This got me thinking about a DIY disc golf basket again.

The Fluid Spice was waiting for me when I returned back to my house after 10 months away. Shipping has always been prompt for me from Fluid, and this was no exception, as I expected to beat the boat home but was pleasantly surprised that my renters had put it in the garage.

The Corvette gods just didn't seem to want to let me have a working Corvette. After all the headache to get the corvette back, the better part of sorted, inspected, and registered... I drive home and smoke is billowing out of the right rear wheel. Awesome, I now can't risk the Corvette for fear of it catching on fire, or a wheel seizing or something else exciting.

When I picked up the corvette from the shop, I was informed that there was an issue getting the belt tension correct. Apparantly the bracket wasn't correct and no amount of changing belts would fix it, there was simply no room for adjustability. I was a bit confused since the Corvette still probably possesed many cobbled together systems from my father. I also wasn't about to wait to pay the shop to endlessly bang their head against a wall any longer either.

The Corvette, now at least driveable and with definitive proof it was being fueld properly and surviving, was driven by me for a few months, but persisted to nag at me. The need for race fuel was a giant headache, and made it impossible to go beyond a half tanks distance from my house safely. Running it on too low an octane fuel would cause detonation, possibly to probably resulting in internal engine damage. Add that to the fact that at 8mpg and roughly $12 for a mixture of race and pump gas the car cost $1.25/mile, the whole thing seemed ludicrous.

The Corvette came to me in very rough shape. Despite having had a myriad of extended family friends swear the Corvette was worth 40,000 dollars, the Corvette didn't even want to run. With some work and tinkering, we were able to get it to barely scoot along. Replacing the spark plugs introduced major concern, as one of the ceramic centers had been blown out. Those are very hard and thick pieces, and don't just dissappear. Something was woefully wrong. Ontop of that, 10 years of squirrels and mice had moved in and out of the Corvette. It was in rough shape, and needed a lot of attention.