1970 Duster, Trans-Am-inspired "Pro Touring" build
Been another year. Any updates?
Expected a picture with the new wheel/tire combo. :D
I'm glad you posted, I need occasional reminders lol time flies. I will get some good pics of the car in its current state soon. Since last year I haven't done a ton of work to it, just been driving it and taking it to the track when I'm able. One mod was upgrading the rear leaf springs to Hotchkis units which I'm honestly a bit disappointed with; the rear of the car sits at a good height but they are still too soft for my liking. Even with my rear sway bar adjusted to the stiffest setting the car definitely prefers to understeer unless of course I do some left-foot braking mid-turn and give it some gas to swing the tail out but that's not the way to get fast lap times lol. I'm considering hitting up a leaf spring shop in Denver to see if I can have a leaf added and stiffen it up some more.
I also swapped out my 1.0" Just Suspension torsion bars (remember them? lol) for some 1.14" bars from Sway-A-Way, boy that really stiffened up the front end nicely but exacerbated the understeer issue. I really need to adjust my alignment for better grip, it has basically zero camber and way too much caster (over 8 degrees), probably my next adjustment then I'm gonna hit one of the early-season practice track sessions in February or March 2022 to see how much it improved and what next steps I need to take. I also need to buy some nice adjustable shocks, current cheapo replacement shocks are a joke they can't keep up with the higher spring rates.
Going into winter I wanted to upgrade the front brakes to 11.75" rotors with the later big-piston F-body calipers and also upgrade the upper A-arms but it's hard to say when I'll actually get around to it. I started a project to build a 440 for my D200 pickup and that's kinda the top priority right now in terms of spending money; I'm also trying to be careful with how much I spend as I want to save up to buy my own home. I've been living in my parents' house for about 6 years now and needless to say I'm really over it lol.
I did finally bite the bullet and ordered a set of Doug's D453 ceramic-coated headers after lusting over them for years, but again not sure when I'll get around to installing them. Autozone is having a 15% off online sale right now so I took advantage of it. I want to cut out the 2.5" X-pipe currently under the car and run 3" pipes straight off the header collectors and then reduce down to 2.5" right before the mufflers with no crossover. That way I'll have decent tuned secondary length which should boost low- and mid-range torque in addition to the improvement going from the current shorty headers with dinky 2 1/4" downpipes to long tubes. I really don't like the X-pipe sound anymore and everyone runs crossovers these days, I want to hear that REAL muscle-car V8 sound. Plus it's been proven that real power gains from X- or H-pipes is minimal if any in most cases.