Okay, so this next post is going to be a bit of a catch all that covers my last few months at Mazworx, a vacation, working at Real Street and some other bits in between. Wish me luck on stringing all of this into a coherent story!
So around the end of my time at Mazworx I started doing more freelance media work because before the opportunity arrived at Real Street I was considering doing media full time. That resulted in me doing a variety of projects including YouTube blogs and more photography, including my girlfriend which all of you guys seem to love lol.
Around this same time I also started getting more into fabrication, again just trying "jobs" out to see what I liked. I did quite a few custom valve covers for people on Zilvia and still do if you're interested!
I also did some of the external gate OEM SR manifolds and would like to make more of these!
All of this fab work paid off and gave me some side money which I quickly blew on an LS. To be honest I love SR's I just don't have a ton of faith in them, not because they're bad engines but because I know that I don't have the budget available to make them reliable at the power I want to make. So long story short the LS is the backup plan for the SR sorry guys!
This engine is stupid clean and has low miles, it's actually a GM warranty engine! It's a standard 5.3 LM7 that I plan to do a heads and cam swap on and push about 400HP N/A. So far I've just bought some swap bits and did some aesthetic upgrades such as painting the valve covers, re-looming the coil pack harnesses and some ICT billet pieces including their valley cover and alternator bracket.
Now with the rest of the money earned from my odd jobs I went on a vacation with Andie to New Orleans before starting at Real Street. This wasn't the best financial decision at the time but anyone who knows me personally knows that I have horrible anxiety and I was very nervous to quit my jobs and start a new "harder" one.
Long story short we went to the French Quarter where I used to live and I had a great time being able to get out of my own head and enjoy life for a bit. I wish I had some pictures to post of this but I never finished editing them so maybe I'll edit this post later.
Now we'll pick up with me coming back to Florida and starting at Real Street. Not a lot happened for my first 3 or so months working here since I didn't receive commision during my transition (for non sales folk "commision" is the percentage we make off of the parts we sell you and is what is a big chunk of our income).
During these few months I decided I was done with the headache of running Megasquirt on my SR and the lack of support for it and ended up selling the computer and my Racepak dash. With that money I bought an Enthalpy setup and tidied up some things on the car and got it running again.
I've since started to drive it more and even went to the last OSW event of the year and got a few runs in, sadly the day was cut short when my CAS backed out. Without a timing light I had to eyeball the placement and limp is home. Anyways here's some pictures of the car in its current state as well as a custom shift knob I made on our lathe when I was bored.
All in all the car is pretty fun and I'm moving on to making it prettier until the SR spits its guts out. I'd like to do a roll and pull all around to get the car to sit better, repair my pignose bumper or get a new one so the car can have a face, do a new oil pump since I don't trust the 25 year old time bomb in this engine, and probably wrap the car and maybe add carpet. We'll call this chapter "The Little Things".