One more Australian made part for this car

3800 to T56 adapter. Goodbye 4t65 issues...

 

Wow man that's great, nice to see you're still working on the Monte. I finally drive mine at least once a week!

 

Good to hear she's still on the road and treating you well!

I feel bad for mine, I've not driven her in over a year at this point. We sold our house about a year ago mid summer. Going to start it up to drive it to the new rental house, it lost almost all fuel pressure and died right away. Ive had it happen once before since upgrading the pumps on the twin pump setup and its probably that it blew a line off the top hat inside the tank. Since the lines are run separate to the rails, the other pump just loops around and dumps straight back to tank.

The new Teflon inside tank lines I switched to dont seem to grab as well on the barbs on the top hat as the old soft rubber hoses did. Because I went with a speed controller, it starts with both pumps on full blast to prime before backing them down via PWM. Being these are a lot bigger than the old 255 walbros I had, I think its making more pressure than the connector can hold as the engine isn't taking any real fuel at idle.

Ive already bought a Hobbs switch to replace that old setup so that it only runs 1 pump until it gets into boost. Also picked up a check valve so the running pump doesn't just dump back to tank as it would do now.

In the meantime to get it on a trailer, I took an old 5 gal gas can and cut the nozzle off and mounted a walbro inside hardwired to a switch. I strapped it to the strut tower and ran hoses straight to the rails. Worked well enough to get it on the trailer and is unfortunately how it sits today.

Unfortunately we lived in that rental house almost a year which had a strict 'no car repairs rule', even in the garage. I did oil changes and super minor stuff, but didn't want to get caught with the monte torn apart.

We bought another house earlier this year, but have spent most of our free time renovating it. Its got a garage, but its a really tight 2 car. So this winter I'm building a real garage out back. Once I've got some space, I'll get the monte back up again while I finish collecting parts for the RWD swap.

I sold the donor Camaro I had bought back when I totalled my GP as the HOA wouldn't let me park the GP outside while we fought with insurance (and I didn't want to risk theft parking my monte or vette outside), so I'm searching for another local donor car now that I've got the space to park it again.

 

For some laughs, below was what I came up with for a temporary fuel pump setup to get the monte on a trailer. Had very few tools as we'd already moved most to the new rental house, so this was about the best I could come up with for a temp setup. Just have it strapped on top of the drivers front strut tower. Looks really classy...

 

I think we are the only ones keeping the Gen 5 alive.
I am hearing about the issues my son is having with his Insurance company. 2 weeks ago on a Saturday he was hit in the rear quarter by a drunk driver and that guy had let his insurance lapse. After the wreck he tried to run away on foot but some passers by and witnesses captured him the guy was better than twice over the limit for alcohol. My son had his family with him 2 little girls under 5.
His insurance company is wanting to go on the cheap for a settlement, they even asked for the deductible upfront.

 

Very sorry to hear that! I'm very glad I moved from a state towards the bottom 1/4 of most lax DUI laws to the #1 strictest. No doubt it doesnt stop everyone, and IMO its still not severe enough, but I really do think there's a positive impact to reducing DUI because of it.

DUI wrecks make me sick. Personally knew several people lose their lives because of it back at home. People gamble with other people / kids lives just for a night of fun, its pretty sickening.

Similar feelings towards those who drive uninsured. Costs me extra because they dont feel like paying. I also think the penalties for that should be much more severe as well as it can be devastating to someone else if they cause a wreck and the other people aren't properly covered for uninsured / underinsured.

I've also had my fill of insurance. Its like its their job to get the settlement down to the absolute bare minimum that they can get away with legally - house, car, health, whatever.

What makes it worse is that they bury you in a pile of paperwork to review and agree to within your policy written by their pro legal team. Then they get you for all kinds of weasel word clauses to reduce their costs. I really don't feel like the average person has a good grasp on what they're really signing up to as it seems like focus #1 of most is always price, which in turn rewards the behavior above of cutting cost wherever possible.

At least auto insurance isn't quite as bad as medical. Ive never dealt with such absurd amounts of time of the phone arguing about coverage all because 'someone mustve coded it wrong'.

 

That's a clean gas tank setup right there. Puts the one in the car to shame, eh?

I couldn't imagine a HOA that wouldn't allow car work... That's just insane. But hey, I'm sure any HOA wouldn't be happy with me, much less a strict one.

Glad to hear everyone is OK from the drunk driver incident.

 

HOAs are terrible. The house we sold last year (that we lived in almost 10 years) was in a HOA too. Depending on the property manager at the time it ranged from livable to tyrannical. They did have a rule about garage vehicle maintenance not taking more than 48 hours, but they had to request entry 5 days in advance and they had a fairly long period between warning notice and first fine (2 weeks?) so I did whatever I wanted in the garage as I knew I could wrap up just about anything in a month.

The problem with the rental house we lived in over the last year was that we had both the HOA rules and the landlord rental agreement. Their HOA had a 24 hour garage maintenance cap and shorter entry request time frame, but as the landlord was financially responsible for the fines, they made the rental rules 0 maintenance allowed. Of course they couldn't just show up and request immediate entry either, but the penalty from them for noncompliance included starting the eviction process, so it wasn't worth the risk in doing anything besides oil changes and ultra simple maintenance jobs.


Luckily the house we just bought this year has no HOA. That was one of the few criteria we had when searching for a house this time around. Certainly made the house hunting process more difficult as Id bet at least 75% of the property out here is in HOAs.

 

Yikes, yeah I made sure not to have any HOA or weird restrictions on working on my cars too. I don't think I can have disabled vehicles on my property (like a yard full of cars) but they aren't strict on me doing my own maintenance and what-not on my own property.

Glad to see the update, looking forward to seeing the RWD build take off

 

Yeah, HOA's are the worst. How are they gonna tell you what type of fence you are allowed to install, or if you have broken down vehicles on YOUR property? Ugh.

Only the real expensive neighborhoods around here have HOAs, until you get closer to the beach, then there are HOAs everywhere.