It’s been a busy week and I couldn’t be bothered to update every night, but I will post several updates now with what I did this week.

First thing on the agenda was to get the rear diffuser off. With that out of the way I could jack up the car and get the Vette wheels off and the GTM wheels on. Much better! After the wheels were on I wired up the power windows. No pics as it’s just 2 wires on each side, well documented in the manual.

UPS dropped off the tires for the GTM today so I got them mounted and ready to go. I opted for BFGoodrich g-Force R1 rubber. 245/40/18 fronts, 335/30/18 rears. The wheels are iForged Senekas paint matched to body color, black lips.

Just thought I would let everyone know what is going on with the car.

The GTM is still at Ken’s waiting to be started. I guess he was busier than I expected. Start date was supposed to be a few weeks ago, but Ken assures me it will be ‘very soon’.

Wheels from Iforged came today. I would post pics but they did the wheels wrong (polished lips instead of black like I paid for), so I have to have them pick them up and wait another 2 months probably for them to send back the right wheels. This pretty much goes hand-in-hand with what this project has entailed. I have counted no less than 20 instances of shippers sending the wrong parts, missing bolts, messing up the order complete, etc, during the duration of this project.

Wednesday afternoon the GTM left me a present in the form of a puddle of fuel under the passenger tank. I traced the leak to the fuel sender unit mount and when I tried tightening down the fuel sender bolts more the leak got worse. I had to pull the fuel tank (after draining all the fuel) and remove the fuel sender unit. A quick inspection showed tears around several of the bolt holes in the tank gasket. I made a quick call to the GM dealer and they had a new pair for me Thursday morning (decided to change the other tank’s gasket as well since I had the passenger tank out already). Unfortunately the gaskets they received were not the correct ones. I promptly ordered another set of gaskets for 97-99 tanks in hopes that they would work. Luckily, I was able to get them overnighted again and got them Friday morning. They were the correct ones and I was able to swap the gaskets as Gorilla Gasket notes and get the tanks reinstalled in a half hour or so. Quick cycle of the fuel pump shows everything to be OK.

With the fuel situation under control we trailored up the GTM and hauled it to the alignment shop. No surprises (good), and the wheels are aligned properly now.

The GTM ships Sunday morning.

Today was pretty exciting. Before doing anything I checked the coolant from the other night’s fill; it had settled a quite a bit (ie: air pockets released). I decided to idle it for a bit and see how it cooled (or not). Before idling I threw on some wheels and finally got the GTM off its stands.

Since it was idling, and on the ground now, I decided to see if reverse worked. It didn’t. I realized it was because I didn’t set the gate cable properly to allow the cable to pull reverse, so I fixed that. With reverse fixed I backed out of the garage into the driveway, let it idle outside for a bit, then pulled it back into the garage.  It felt pretty good to be able to drive it a few feet! However, there is still air in the cooling system, as the temps got too high again after idling for about 15-20minutes.

With that out of the way I let the coolant settle for the afternoon and came back tonight to add more coolant. I added more the same way I did previously: disconnect the upper water pump hose, open the steam vents, open purge tank cap, and dump coolant into the water pump/radiator hose. Tonight I was able to add in quite a bit and am now at over 4.5 gallons (shouldn’t take more than 5 gallons). There are probably a few air pockets left to get out, so I will let it sit overnight again.

Also did some troubleshooting on the throttle body. With some adjustment I was able to get the car started with it (before it would throw codes and would only start with the scanner disabling them), however it would not idle. This seems to be a manufacturer defect, and not something I can fix, so a new throttle body hunt begins.

I also installed the exhaust.