Last Indian

Mark, first of all welcome to FP! Next I think you need to re-read the post this was about the 4 cylinder Trophy engine, not a 6 cylinder. So you would be wrong, due to the confusion of mistaking 6 cyl for 4 cyl! And that’s ok! I too just wanted to clarify so the folks who read this don’t get confused.

Well I would like to say I got a lot for the Indian, or my other cars, but there’s not much I need and the wife already says if I die I win! You know the guy with the most tools, yadda yadda! So we usually just get each other a couple things and then do multiple charities! We are blessed, so I’m grateful! That said I did buy myself a trans cooler for the Indian to install while the front end is off! Glade to see you all got good things for Christmas! 😊

Ah ya, dah!!

So; as I think about this a little more, why does Notallthere want our opinion?

Nope, no sofa! I would get it dirty or worse yet drool on it. I have a shop with a bench and heat that would be good enough! 🥴

Ok! Yes dear that makes sense now! I thought it was, it’s the beer, that made me say it! 😁

Its’ setting is Christmas, so maybe yes, but you’re still wrong! What JustA said! When you say “I do” you are really saying is - - - - I do admit I’m wrong! Otherwise it’s just going to get worse and worse 😁! Sorry! Read the lyrics to Mike & the Mechanics, All I need is a miracle? Than it all comes into focus. After 47 years, I know!

Unfortunately you can’t teach taste or make someone understand mechanics that is smarter than all the rest of the past generations! So while this never convinces them either, they never have an answer! I ask them; show me the 20 year old Honda Civic or the Toyota, the Mazda, the Nissan! And if you can show me one show me 10 ! Never going to happen throw away junk is just that, junk. The most unfortunate thing about all of this is we can’t wake up the fools because they have no understanding of history, be it cars, religion origins, past reasons of wars, past discovery’s or the very fact that for all the things that come from modern electronic advances, none can create a mechanically tangible product!

Ted, 100% gas is good stuff, but just remember in a pinch if you use Sta-bil 360 marine, it removes ethanol from gas and protects against the effects of water and alcohols mixed interactions on components. FYI.

Look at it this, when you retire in the not tooooo distant future, you’ll have more time for everybody that you now tell, sorry I don’t have time to do that!🥴

Ok! You are forgiven! ‘‘Tis the season you know! So how was the first days back? Really great right! Not funny!

Hey! We don’t use the M word around here! Heck most of them don’t know what a Pontiac is! Not even the actual Indian Chief himself! (Ringo excluded of course)

Finished welding up the front splitter today, also pulled the ECM & air box. I have to do some work on the air box first before I do the mod for adding the NACA duct leg to the box. So thought I might use this as a teaching moment, for those who are interested, with respect to all the add-on air filter setups. The single biggest issue with so many of the new type air inlet systems is a restriction at of the front air box! While this is not new, basically the same principle as the old air horn snorkel on a carb air cleaner. Why the OEMs did this is beyond me, but when you do the math if the area of the inlet is the same size or smaller then the throat of the throttle body, it’s a restriction. Likewise if you make it to big, turbulence is created. The fact is this restriction can easily be removed! Once that’s done and with some very aggressive mods on the box, this system will out perform the aftermarket units! Partly because nearly all of these OEM systems sit in an optimal location for air flow. While the aftermarket units take their air from a dead zone inside the lower fender/front cover area. They may increase the diameter of the filter area, but that doesn’t help with volumetric efficiency. Forced induction changes everything. Whether turbo, supercharged or ram air, these change turbulent air into laminar flow! Take this six generation GP! The air box sits right behind the left headlight and that’s where the air inlet is as well, but it’s too small. Still this air is rammed. You may think not because the headlight sit in front of it, but when you remove the restriction and open the area of the opening of the box up, then look at the aerodynamics of the cover and headlight, as well as the area of the gap around the perimeter of the headlight, which is almost as large as the entire filter area and 5 times greater than the area of the throttle body bore diameter! The physics completely change! Now introducing an upstream inlet of low pressure air, which will be coming from the NACA duct of the new front cover this really changes things! A high flow higher pressure (comparably speaking) flowing past a hole/tube so to speak creates a siphon effect. Now when the other end of the tube, in this case a hose, is connected to a low pressure NACA duct, we get very high flow at low pressure. For those who don’t know the polycarbonate plate divides the ECM area from the air area & protects the ECM from direct water contact.

Duh! You’re Frosty! You and Santa are; well; you know balls to the wall from here to December 25th! Sorry that’s just how it goes! 😁

Cruzin, turkey, pumpkin pie, football & good company! What could be better! Best to you & the family!

👍 yup! That is the only way to eat pumpkin pie! My wife says it’s bad for me & I say - - - what’s your point?

Stay away from the oven Frosty, no matter how good it smells! You know you’ll melt! You know you may have no choice but to watch the Lyons, right! Happy Thanksgiving buddy!

I found some time to get a little work done on the front cover and add-on air damm as well as the splitter. The splitter is a complete redo, as it has to be stripped of all paint, right down to bare aluminum for the welding that needs done. The add-on pieces are completed and clamped in place. Next is to weld them up, but first I need to get some aluminum welding rod, as I used up the last of it this summer. Likewise the front cover has been fitted with the lower add-on air damm and bonded in to place. With respect to that, I now need to pull the cover off so I can do some backside work to complete the new functionality of this cover for a new trans cooler and a second inlet for ram air. Here I’m increasing the size of the NACA duct inlet to change the effect of the low pressure dynamics and to put it more inline with the function of the NACA duct physics. Here I’m laying out the front cover to add the add-on air damm laying out the new design of the splitter starting to attach the add-on air damm, notice the screw heads on the far left & one is visible at the center below the license plate area.

I buy #8 SS Phillips modified truss head lathe screws! These screws work well in plastic and have a large flat head to give good support for clamping. Lay on your back, if you don’t have a lift, and look at the bottom side of the front cover where it interfaces with the lower air dam. This is where you will drill 6 holes 1/8” in diameter through the cover and lower air dam to attach them to each other with the #8 SS Phillips modified truss head lathe screws. Once this is done and the cover is attached to the inner fender the front cover will be quite ridged. Additionally in the front an other part that is prone too vibration are the headlights! This issue I handled by adding stabilizing spacer/shelf below the headlight and attached it to the impact bumper. This, like the front cover, makes the headlights ridged like cars of the past. One additional thing you can do to stiffen things just a little further is a single #6 SS sheet metal screw mid way up and mid way inboard at the front of the front inside fender. Drill a appropriate hole through the plastic inside fender and through the steel inside fender and install the SS screw. This single attachment stiffens the inside fender substantially. All of this will really change the entire quality of the car! How it feels, how it reacts, how it sounds over the road! The picture below Depicts the attachment of the cover to the lower air damm below is showing the stabilizing block arrangement for the headlight assembly. This consists of a shock absorbing lower block, ( like you use to isolate equipment vibration )with an upper soft dense foam pad, ( like you kneel on ). The lower block is bonded to the impact bar and the pad is bonded to the block.

At the bottom area of the front cover there is a lot of work to be done. Other than the 6 push pin fasteners on the top side of the lower air inlets, there are no other retaining fasteners except at the inner fenders. Since there is really no convenient way to use any other type of hardware in place of those 6 push pins, due to the hole size in both the cover and the lower air dam, I decided to go an other way. I also feel that this choice works better in helping to tie the entire front nose area together better, this includes, reinforcing the lower air dam, a bit of a modification to the Inner fenders and front cover! So what I did was this; first I cut an 1/8” piece of aluminum to fit the back part of the lower air dam to take the warpage out of it that occurs over time due to a poor design, heat and the thickness of the plastic. I contour the ends of the aluminum plate to match the air dam and attach it using 3/16 aluminum pop rivets. This is a picture from a new front cover I’m working on for an other project, but you can see how large the push pin holes are and the holes in the lower air dam that mates to it are just as large. Below is a picture of the lower air dam that has been reinforced with the aluminum plate. This stiffens and straightens the defector portion of the lower air dam making it more effective at its function. I will update with more info soon.

So, is it fair to say you have a couple of hummers in your house and one person who whistles while he works? 😁 while you all have to traverse here and there to get to the right car? Cougrats buddy or I guess I should say to your wife, you’re just the guy who gets to take care of it.

Really glad to see you win Stratman! Well deserved, beautiful car! Congratulations to all who won!

Thanks buddy! One step closer to that 70 1/2 mark so Uncle Sam can start getting his tax money back 😬!

Exterior panel stabilization, securing & attachment improvements that will help quiet them. If you own a Pontiac from the early 1990s through 2009, then you may have noticed that because of how a lot of the panels were made and attached, there can be that creak or crack when you push on a panel like a front bumper cover or rear cover, etc., but these improvements will also help to improve driving characteristics; yes really! The old cars were not and are not like that! Why? Because they bolted together solid, panel to panel, not with plastic push pins that go in a hole almost half again as big as the pin O.D… Well you can have that same solid non noisy panel setup as the old Skool classics have and had. Why would this improve driving characteristics? Well when panels aren’t stable they negatively impact air movement aka air foil characteristics. This may seem irrelevant at 35mph, but not at 50mph! There is a reason NASCAR as well as well as some of the car industry spends millions of dollars on aerodynamic research, wind tunnels and the like! Still for me, when you build a car, you build a car! You build as a a complete assembly, too be as perfect as you can make it, for every instance and every situation! I may be anal, ok I am, but if I was paying to have a car built, this is what I would want, so why should I not do it for myself?! Really! A very simple example is the vertical edge in the engine compartment where the outer and inner fender are spot welded together (see pic)! While there is no value other than aesthetics in this case this is just a case of a little effort to make an improvement and remove an edge that can get beat up easily and inflict some damage to knuckles or the like. So to the details, again I will use my 2000 Grand Prix for example purposes. First the front end. I’ll start with the bumper support, this piece attaches to the lower hood latch and supports the upper area of the bumper cover with two push pins and one small screw/washer, but also attaches to the steel brace/bracket that the headlights attach. This where I make an adjustment to effect the height of the bumper cover height gap to the hood. I do this by retapping the hole from 6mm x 1.25mm to ¼ x 20 thd… and then placing stainless steel washers between the bumper support and the steel headlight bracket with a SS ¼-20 buttonhead screw through the middle of the washers. This piece also has the ability to be adjusted to some degree at the bumper cover attachment area itself. This includes the fact that it interfaces with the two air ducts for radiator cooling that locate it vertically on molded post of those ducts. These could be shortened or raised by the addition of a spacer if need be. This will in turn changes the gap between the upper lip of the cover and the hood. Likewise the two headlight brackets need to be fixed, as they are not attach properly as a support structure. They allow for to much movement and vibration as they come from the OEM. There are two places I will show to attach these brackets to the core support to make them solid like they should be. This structure with its long span between the factory attachment points at each end of the bracket needs to be made ridged. The two outer holes of the bumper support that interface with the bumper cover will not use the push pin fasteners. Instead it will change to SS ¼-20 buttonhead screws with a SS washer and nut on the underside. This now holds the upper bumper cover tight to the support so there is no movement or flex. the two pictures above show the vertical edge fix. this top portion area fix is the easy part! The bottom side gets much more involved, that will be the next segment.

Looking really sharpe Mike! Really starting to take shape.