2003 Nova Updates

By John Heard Nova Comments Off

Some pictures from 2003..

Another pic of the motor click the picture for a bigger version. Yeah, I know that air cleaner is ugly, but it fits under the hood.

Finishing up the plumbing work for the Nitrous

Aeromotive Fuel Pump has more than ample volume for the nitrous kit

Nitrous fuel tank – 1 gal Jaz cell

Getting setup for Nitrous, here’s the 15lb bottle mount I made. I’ve already changed my mind on the mount, this one was for mounting the bottle in the trunk. I realized that with in in the trunk, we lose all most 1/2lb of Nitrous filling that long 6AN line. I’m going to relocate the bottle to inside the car to shorten the main line and to avoid heat soak in it.

I took the 2″ drop spindles off, went back to the original drum brake spindles and used Aerospace front disk brakes. Saved about 35-40lbs off the front as compared to the OEM style brake setup.

New Harwood 4″ Cowl. Wasn’t quite big enough, wish I would have went with a 5″ or 6″ to get some more carb clearance. This one just barely clears an air cleaner.

Here’s the first wheels up launch (Thanks for the pic Mike) at Mo Kan’s Car Club Shootout August 16th, 2003. Best E.T. of the night for the Nova was 10.62@133. Not too shabby considering the air was well over 4000′ Density Altitude. Still having problems with the 60′ times, it’s only getting 1.75/1.74

Future plans in August involve removing the 2″ drop spindles on the front end and replacing them with stock height Nova spindles and a Strange Engineering Brake Kit. That should help some with weight transfer, header clearance and save a little weight off the front end.

Saved 45lbs by switching to lightweight seats

7/27/03

Here’s the new big block in the car taken by Roger Whitaker while we were at MoKan on July 25th. Car ran pretty good I think for the first time out, just wish we would have had more time to do some tuning on it. Best time was a 11.19 @ 126.86 with some tire spin. 60ft’s were on the two runs I made were 1.85/1.84, have some work to do there. Had some valve train problems when getting in line for the third pass on it, the #2 intake pulled the threads out of the polylock. Going to fix that this week with a new longer set of studs and some better polylocks.
Also realized at this time I had the fuel regulator plumbed backwards, no wonder I couldn’t get the fuel pressure down.

Thanks to Steve Cole I’ve got some video of the car on it’s maiden voyage to the dragstrip, I put them in two different formats for those that don’t have high speed Internet – note the file sizes.