One of only 4031 hardtop or fixed roof Corvettes made in 1999, I purchased my car on 30 December 2001. The day of my 21st birthday. I can honestly say that owning my first Corvette has been an experience. I quickly went from not knowing how to do my own oil changes to doing just about all the maitenance and modifications to my car myself. It was quite a transition and was not without a lot of help, a lot of patience, and a lot of mistakes.
After having the car for nearly a year, the mod bug bit me. Above is a picture of it stock. Notice the ride height and "wagon" wheels? Yuck. The first mod I did to the car was change the wheels and tires. The stock tires are Goodyear run flat tires and transmit a great deal of road noise into the cabin. Of course, they also offer a sense of security for those occasions when you run over a sharp object. The run flat tires can be driven at 55MPH for 200 miles. I must say, that is impressive but for what I want to use the car for it's not necessary. So off the run flat tires went and on went some Goodyear GS-D3 tires. I have been very pleased with the GS-D3 tire. The tread pattern is amazing and the tires hold the road excellently. The rims also got replaced when I replaced the tires. I put a set of reproduction chrome Z06 (10 spoke stile) rims on. The reproduction wheel doesn't offer near the weight savings of the factory Speedline wheel but I decided it was a take and give game here as I didnt' want to spend quite what the Speedline wheels were selling for (even used).
This is a picture of my car as it currently sits. This picture shows the amazing shine Zaino car polish can product on a 6 year old car with 60,000 miles on it. Although Zaino is incredibly hard to put on the car, it produced results like I have never seen before.
With appearance mods moving right along, I decided it would be a good idea to so some under hood appearance modifications. So, I headed down to the local pait shop and had them mix me up some torch red spray paint for plastic. I also purchased a nice silver spray paint from them. This paint was for the fuel rail covers (FRC's). The first time I pained the covers, I had some problems taping off the recessed "Corvette" lettering. My results are in the picutre to the right. I have since repainted the covers (with correct sanding) and am going to install some lettering inserts in the striped area as well as in the "Corvette" letter recessions.
Now that you have seen the car clean, here are a few of the dirty shots. The first image below is after running my new CAM (MTI C2 224/224 .581/.581 112LSA) for around 15,000 miles. I took the valve covers off to check the torque on the rocker bolts. The only problem I ran into when doing the CAM was that I somehow missed a vacuume line and my heater would only output hot air from the floor and not from the dash vents. This was an easy fix. It took a me and a friend around 15 hours of non stop work to change the CAM in the car. This was the first time I had ever seen the pistons in a real life (and working, mind you) vehicle. It was a very educational experience. Oh, we did run into one other problem. There is a small head bolt in the top right corner of the drivers side head... that bolt broke when we were putting the heads back on the car. Not a fun experience getting that one out, and not cheap either. The head bolts are available from GMPartsDirect as a kit; if you have to buy them from a local stealership like mine though you must by the bolts one at a time. Both sets of bolts from GMPartsDirect cost the exact same as one set of bolts from the local guys. Moral of the story? Order and extra set of bolts and gaskets and keep them handy.
To date, I have done many more mods than I show here. My latest project has included setting up a LM-1 wideband O2 sensor to emulate the stock narrow band. This is so that I can monitor my air to fuel ratio with HPTuners and not have to weld in an additional bung. I plan to put up a page detailing the install proceedure and wiring for that project once I complete it. I recently added fog lights and I had to build my own harness for those. The stock harness on my Corvette didn't have the connectors or the wiring ran to the fuse box. It did have the interior wiring, just no switch. I also put in a heads-up display. I think the HUD was my best & favorite mod.