Engine Assembly

As the MAKO racing season gets very close, we’re almost done with the engine freshen up project. The Nova’s engine got honed by Mark Carney at Automotive Machine Inc. in Emporia, KS to make sure the bores were nice and straight. The old pistons collapsed the  skirts, so those were replaced by brand new Diamonds with an improved ring stack, We also treated the old girl to a new cam from Vincent Performance with hopefully more nitrous friendly timing events and slightly more lift.

Chad Speier from Speier Racing Heads checked over the heads and did a valve job after we found an exhaust leaking a little bit but we didn’t change anything else in the induction system. Kevin Neal from Neal Performance Innovations supplied us with a new NLR Progressive Controller to help solve a delay problem we were having.  Sam England made me some distributor plugs to fix the issues I was having with my valley scavenge line. The new plugs will save a lot of lost hair trying to put the intake on!

Marty Chance from Neal Chance Racing Converters wanted to make some changes to the converter, and we’ve got that wrapped up as well. Last but not least Mark Whitener from Racing Fuel Systems totally redid the carb to work better with this setups. Kinda funny as I was planning on making hardly any changes over the winter so we could pickup where we left off, I just wanted to fix the problems we were having, but ended up changing a bunch of different things in the process.

Hopefully the learning curve won’t take too long and we can get back up to speed quickly!