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68 Camaro Install
I usually have between zero and one percent luck posting pics that are the right size and rotated properly, so apologies ahead of time if they are giant or sideways..
Anywho, my wife and I recently picked up a 1968 Camaro. It was "done" by the guy before me. Overall its an okay car. It is nothing crazy; It was badged as a Z28 by the last owner but is originally a six banger sport coupe. It has a budget 383 choked off by some smog-era iron heads. The body is relatively solid, I'm sure with plenty of glass under the paint. The paint is pretty clean, with some bubbles. It is supposed to be sunset orange metallic, looks coppertone in some lights. It looks, runs, and drives pretty decent. My personal long term goals are to lose the 15" Cragars, drop it a couple inches, put some decent heads on it, upgrade the suspension, and go for a pro touring look.
The car came with a circa 2000 Pioneer CD deck and sweet pair of Kenwood dual cone 6x9s. I like those older Pioneer decks, but this one was all messed up, with the preouts cut off and antenna wire pinched almost all the way through. I pulled the deck and found a nice gouged hole behind all the mystery glue holding the radio in. Being that this was the situation, I had thousands of dollars in old car audio gear in the garage attic, and I want to go pro touring look anyway, I figured I'd do a custom install. I plan to try to blend it in with the car's interior the best I can without hacking the car. I'll try to keep up with progress pics.
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Here is the rest of the shop. I built it about three years ago, but finally just finished it. 24x28 with attic storage.
Here are some interior shots including kick panel mockup. I will install pods over the factory kicks to not ruin them. I needed to make sure to leave room for the air vent pull, the vent itself, and the high beam switch. Oh yeah, when I can find proper replacements, the fast n furious pedals will be going too..
I have an old pair of Image Dynamics convertible components I plan to use. I will use them as separates for better tweeter angle. I plan to ditch the passive crossover and go active, providing my old Eclipse head unit with built in crossovers, time alignment, etc., works. If it is flaky I will have to go passive. The drivers are decent. The tweeter is soft dome, about 28mm. The woofer is a woven carbon fiber 6.5". The motor is massive, but simple with no copper, etc. I'm not too worried about distortion as the car is pretty loud.
Here are the subs I plan to use. They are old custom built Image Dynamics IDQ12s. I loved my IDQ15s, but the suspension was wimpy and I popped a spider. The local car audio shop guy at the time is a friend of mine and had close connections with the owner of ID, so I was able to custom spec a pair. My requests were longer throw spider and surround, woven tinsel leads, as well as spring terminals as opposed to spades. They were delivered as requested. They never played low though... and the IDQs are known to play quite low. Only more recently when I built my limp jig did I learn why. They still lave a low FS (20ish) but the Qts is super high, around 0.8. Guess I got what I deserved asking to mod a good sub. It works out here though as I plan to go infinite baffle (ok, really big leaky sealed).
I used up some old VBlok sound damping material in the trunk. I hate this stuff. It is stiff as hell unless warm and doesn't stick to anything. I used a lot of spray adhesive to assist in it sticking. My goal here was to block some exhaust drone.
Here are the dried and cleaned up kick panels. I wasted almost the whole day on these today. I got one wrapped in black vinyl, but it is not the good stretchy vinyl, so it was a PITA, and resulted in seams on the hidden side. Then I dropped in a woofer to realize I didn't clearance for the magnet when pulling the fabric, so I had to pull open the seams, cut the fiberglass, and glass in a clearance back for the magnet. I was not happy with myself. That is as far as it goes this week I guess.
Your stereo plans look great!!!
It has a cool drag race look for now anyway, even though I’d likely be happy if it broke into the 13s
I'm trying to get it down to the drag strip one time before they close for the winter. I've purposely slowed the car way down. It use to consistently run 8.80's at 165 mph in the 1/4 mile. As it sits now it will probably run 10.00-10.20 at maybe 140. Every SFI safety device on the car is out of date and would either need to be replaced or recertified to run faster than 10.00. That would require a lot of time and money. Also the last time I raced the track officials told me I had to put a parachute on it per the NHRA rule book (any car faster than 150 mph) and I never want to run a chute on a street car. So I yanked the EFI system and installed a blow-through carb, switched to E-85 pump fuel, and changed pulleys on the supercharger to run a lot less boost. I'll just run it on a 275 drag radial and leave the slicks at home
Do you have a device to measure flow when you ported your heads or did you kind of wing it? Also how many pounds of boost was the 978 whp made at?
Short term plans are to finish up the stereo, replace some worn out bushings in the control arms and rear leafs (which seem to be new but somehow have dry rotted bushings), replace what I suspect are drag shocks with bilsteins on all four corners, and upgrade the front sway bar.
Id like to do the hotchkis tvs, but it is expensive and I need to fix these bushings sooner than later. The tires on the car are almost 27” front and 28” rear, which is an inch and two bigger than stock, so I won’t be able to drop it until I corrected the tire sizes, especially with the 275s in the back, so that forces me to spend the money on the wheels and tires if I drop it. The stance it has now with the oversized tires is what im looking for once dropped a little with proper size tires. Also I don’t want to show off my sweet four wheel drum brakes with 17” wheels so I’d want to do the disc brake swap at the same time. So wheels, brakes, and slight drop are long term goals.
Other longer term goals are a retrofit hyd roller cam swap and some basic aluminum heads. Not necessary by any means but crank hp right now is around 360 and that is less than one hp per cubic inch and I’d like to fix that. That as well as the more efficient coooling of the aluminum heads and these particular iron heads are crack prone. I want to do the roller cam swap as well since I worry about wiping out my cam lobes, especially with high zddp oil becoming harder and harder to find.
I could also also see air conditioning in the future, it’s so hot in the car. You can feel the heat from the headers coming through the firewall. There is definitely no showing up anywhere without your shirt back soaked through!
I dug up some old radio install kits to hopefully come up with something to cover the hole in the dash and correct for the angle of the radio as to not see the sides of the cage. My hopes is to use an Eclipse 8053 8v preout-only hu I have but I know it had issues with a channel cutting out in the past, so I’m not sure if it’s going to work out for me. We will see..
The components will be run by a 4ch PPI PC450 amp. The subs will be run off a US Amps 1000x. Being run IB they definitely won’t need 500w each, so I plan to run the amp as 8 ohm stereo, hopefully upping the damping and still providing 150w per sub which should be plenty.
plans may change but I plan to flush the amps in the dip in the trunk pan, flushed in a false floor, covered in black carpet, which will also line the remainder of the trunk and look like it belongs. I will cut an extra piece of the carpet to place over the amps if I need to use the trunk as a trunk or if I don’t want old guys at car shows seeing the amps and griping that I modified a nice old car with a big stereo.
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