Need advise

Hey. New to this Forum. I was lookin at buying a new Pony Car. I had a Mustang GT (It was OK) Now I want a Camaro SS. What is a good year as far as reliability, performance and quality of workmanship. Also I was looking at an engine compartment is it even possible to do any work on these cars yourself???? How possible is it to make it a true dual exhaust (assuming it's not)???? Is there a 1-4 skipshift like on the Vipers 6sp??? Is there a lot of cowl shake on a convertable/T-Top Camaro???? Any help would be appreciated.... BTW I don't want to have one of the years with the knocking problem.... did they ever figure that one out???


THX

No knock in my SS. As for the skipshift, yes they are in the the M6 cars. All of the V8's have them, unless you install a skip-shift eliminator. I have no cowl shake with my T-top car either. As for doing the work yourself, if you've got some ramps and the tools to do it, it's possible to work on them, just might get some chewed up knuckles. I've got a buddy with a 98 TA that just put a powerdyne supercharger on his car by himself, did all of the work including all of the guage wiring too, I was impressed with his work.

for true dual exhaust you're gonna have to do one of two things.... i've looked at doing it to my '97 Z28 so if it's at all similar to mine.... the thing about running one pipe down each side like a mustang exhaust is like on mine when you go to hump over the rear axel on the driver side you run into all of your fuel lines and such and that wouldn't exactly be a good idea to run a hot pipe through there so you may have to relocate all that if you can. the other option is to do a completely custom job from the headers back running two pipes down the passenger side but that might get interesting in seting it all up in the end and tuning it but like i said before if you can work around the fuel lines some how (if that ends up being your problem) true dual exhaust will work because you can mount the pipes right up theres no real modification that i can see that you'd have to do.

P.S. if you do figure out true dual exhaust before i do please lemme know

A friend of mine has true duals, let me talk to him and see if I can get some pictures of it. His car is a 98 TA...

cool, thanks.... im interested to see how he did it and what he used.

I think the knock that you are talking about is the piston slap issues that alot of GM cars have. They usually do it when it is cold. LS1s are real prone to it because there pistons are real short and the block expands before the piston does. It does not hurt anything though just make shure that your engine is warm enough to get the pistons to seal up all the way. GM engines have been like that since my grandpa can rembember. It's no big deal.

Here's what he wrote to me, verbatim...

"Well this is what I did with my exhaust.

I put on hooker long tube headers and then I removed the cats. I put on a x pipe from the headers to the pipes that go to the back. I used two dynomax race bullet mufflers for the mufflers and dumped it before the axle.

I do not have pictures but if this guy really wants to do this setup then I will get pics for him."

awww man!!! how could i have missed that. god am i stupid. thanks a lot for the help.

I did true duals on my camaro.

http://www.geocities.com/fuddylord/Duals.html