Newbie intro

[IHI]

Howdy fellas, and gals if's there's any in here I'm a small general contractor here in Iowa, build about anything from the ground up to any stage customers budget will allow, but i enjoy doing garages most of all along with other neew construct projects...yrs of remodeling and fixing other peoples screw up's has taken it's toll on my patience since we have to work backwards before going forward and ya always find more than you ever imagined wrong once you gut stuff.

Anyways, here's some pics of some jobs we've done. i have quite a few we did towards the end of last yr i have'nt gotten pics of yet, so once all this snow is done i have to get back over and shoot some of them. I have'nt had time to see who's who in here, but if i can be of any assitance, I'd sure like to help. Mainly walked in to get some more ideas to offer clients that may have a better budget for a nicer set up garage some of the pics are out of sequence as far as when we got there and when we left, but you can figure it out

As for me personally, I bracket race/drag race. been doing this for the past 7 yrs, started out with my $500 firebird and have since invested over $50K to date and still only running 10.60's on pump gas through the mufflers with my sbc. Doing a regear and hoping to get into the 10.40-.50 range, and then we're gonna add the baby bottle and shoot for some 9's for fun. Bought the house i grew up in, mom never built a garage, so i have an open canvas here at home for my shop and naturally i want what i want, but dont know if i'm comfortable sinking that kinda coin in a garage in a cookie cutter neighborhood LOL!! so we'll see, currently looking for a building to move the business to and hoping to find one that can house a showroom, able to carry inventory, as well as put a hoist and have storage for my trucks/trailers/equipment and such..we'll see.

here's the toys:

retro fitting interior from a 1998 firebird into my 1986 firebird:

Josh

garage pics

 

[Homebody]

Welcome! Anyone that races a thirdgen and an S-10 is ok in my book!
Nice lookin garages, It's gotta **** building garages for others and not having one on your own house!

Let me know if your ever head over here to Byron Dragway. I've got 2 Camaros myself (72 & 92) to toy around with also.

Good luck in your garage hunt.

 

[hypnotoad]

Welcome IHI,
Nice rides. Just be careful about using the bottle, once you use it, running on the motor is boring. I've got a tube chassis 1980 Z28 that I'm slowly working on. I'd like 2 turbos, but who can afford that nowadays.

 

[IHI]

huh, i must have not checked the email notify thingey LOL!! glad to see some other gear heads in here i dunno, the price of fuel is going to kind of dictate what we do this year for racing, we've already planned a trip to race in St louis in may for the worlds fasteest street car thing since they have some bracket classes and i like to hit at least one track a year out of the norm for the experience, but i'm lucky that my home track cedar Falls Raceway is only 20 minutes from home and they've worked they're schedule to go back to the 2 day $2K to win each day set up...so it's kinda hard to pull 3+ hours for less....although Byron has some pretty kickazz events/payouts

Right now i'm working with my sign guy, the car was scheduled to go back to my paint sponsor to get touched up...rubber burnt the clear coat off my quarters and i had a alternator pulley explode and pop a nice 3x4" chunk of paint off the hood as well as a niiice big dent up from the underside but my sign guy just bought his new printer and is capable of doing body wraps, so i really want to come up with some cool wrap to spice it up...paint guy wanted $600 to fix everything up, sign guy wants me to just buy the material/ink to wrap the car for $900....and doing the body wrap will draw ALOT more attention to advertise for my business and just give a different cool factor..but trying to come up with a design from scratch is hard. For sure the company logo and such, but i want some other coold stuff too...just dont know what. I called him tonight with an idea i thought sounded cool, been blessed with a very good reaction times so everybody calls me the lumber jack or tree killer, so i told him I'd like to do one area that has what looks like a tree growing out of the ground and then fades into a nhra christmas tree, but the kicker is the tree will be hacked at with a big skeleton lumberjack weilding an ax..so the tree is falling over...just need to figure out how to make a cool back ground and make it cool looking and flow with the rest of the car stuff we're going to try to come up with.

 

[Bib Overalls]

"Anyways, here's some pics of some jobs we've done." ???????????????????

 

[CRAZYASTRO]

Welcome IHI,

nice toys. What's in that s10? what axle are u running? 9" ??

 

[IHI]

"Anyways, here's some pics of some jobs we've done." ???????????????????

Sorry about that, I screwed up and did'nt link when i said it, the link is at the very bottom of the page and i believe it says garage pics...veeery bottom of the original post..my bad

Crazyastro: at that time, i think it was a few years ago, both the car was running a AFR 210 headed 388?TH400/9" with 4.11 gears and 28" tires and the truck was running a Dart Pro 1 230 headed 383/Glide/9" with 4.30 now 4.88's. As for the rear end's, the car is stock suspended and the truck is ladder bars. The S10 was/is still running JUNK azzed Dart heads, the pro 1 230 heads..biggest overly hyped POS heads on the market, yet another company that over markets under delivers, STOCK vortec heads outflow these supposed Dart race heads out of the box....sure they give you the meat to hog out, but by the time you dump $1500-$2000 to have them hogged on, you might as well jump into 18* stuff. Same with the stupid Comp cams, i know many guys run them, but i made the switch to Bullet Cams yrs ago and have always had much less for a motor in my car, always ran pump gas, always been heavy, and i still run as quick as the guys did with lighter stuff in high compression motors with brodix/dart heads and comp cams...more and more guys finally started to take notice and have been switching over to Bullet cams...when thye spec your stick, you will laugh, i have with the last two, but the on track results speak for themselves.

This latest 427sbc i'm running now I was running 10.60's with the small bullet stick, lost the snout of the crank and it took out every piece of the motor, another $8K later and the engine builder said my bullet cam was too small and wanted to show me some real power and asked to spec a comp...i was hesitant to the point of a mini arguement breaking out, he promised more power and better ET...alright, but if it's slower, i'm not paying for it...he said deal. On the dyno we picked up 60hp and 30 ftlbs over the original version that had blown up, so i was stoked...got it in the car, ran it against the transbrake and it dropped 1000rpm against the stall....not good, that means major pwr loss soemwhere. Took it to the track and went from 10.60's with a loose convertor, to 11.30 with that pos comp stick that is much taller lift so it's a annual valve spring replacement deal, and the idle/part throttle driving around town is terrible, the car is no longer fun. I'm pulling the 4.11 gear out, putting a 4.56 in and see if it'll fool things to wrong somemore out of it...we got it tuned to 10.68-10.72 before i ran out of small jets to change so i feel there's a bit more in it, but i'm going to send the original cam back in and have it fixed, screw comp cams...