Yeah man!
Nice looking vette!
Been taking the car out whenever I can to do a break-in of the new clutch. Still haven't put it into boost yet to make sure that turbo system is all air tight and not leaking pressure anywhere.
Somewhere along the line through the years my catalytic converters "fell off", so I am going to put new ones in sometime soon. Getting tired of the unburned gasoline smell that fills up the garage whenever I start it up. So right before I do that, I'm going to be checking all exhaust couplings for leaks before and after. If those front most clamps aren't leaking, I won't have to remove the X-pipe because I put that in front of the straight pipes replacing the cats. This gave me two spare O2 sensor bungs that I was able to easily use with the wideband O2 sensor when I was doing the tuning via EFIlive.
I may have to do a little bit more tuning sometime down the road, because when the car is in open loop mode, the idle is a little bit unstable while warming up and stumbles sometimes at low speeds. So even though it would be better to put the cats forward of the X-pipe, I really don't want to do that quite yet. The cats might be just a bit less efficient behind the X-pipe, but hopefully no big deal with them dealing with the exhaust fumes.
And as for the manual shifting, yeah, that is getting to be less and less fun with each passing year for me. Several days ago I cracked my left elbow on a sharp corner of a desk in my den. Brought tears to my eyes. It's just now getting better. I did something like that a few years ago to my right elbow, and then later on when I moved my arm over my head, something popped and that arm was really bad off. No way I could work a manual shifter then. And it took a while for that to clear up. I was working a lot on the car then anyway, so I couldn't drive it. Funny thing is, the arm sort of fixed itself in an odd way. I was in the bathroom and spotted a mosquito flying around. So I grabbed a damp hand towel and attempted to snap the skeeter with it. Well, I did a sharp downward motion with my right arm to snap the towel, forgetting about the elbow problem, and yelped out in pain. But after that, it started feeling better, and eventually healed completely. So I must have knocked something out of joint, and then snapped it back into place just by pure dumb luck. But I can see where something permanent like that could happen, and then my manual transmission days will be over with. Heck, a problem with my left knee or ankle could put me out of commission too with working that clutch.
I would sell the car, but there is something very intriguing about driving a car that feels like it has almost unlimited power to the wheels. So I am reluctant to give that up until I really have to. I know it is something I will never have again in my lifetime.