Autoart Corvette Stingray Experimental - engine done

[StratosWRC]

This forgotten Autoart is a gem. Just a gorgeous thing, let down mostly by its age.



I got one shipped for $60 and immediately set to work on improving it. Problem is, there are only a few mostly old black and white pics of the engine.



The first two things that jump out at you in the old engine are the plastic exhaust shields.



They're just awful, so I cut some sheet metal roughly to shape, bent it, and smoothed off the edges with the dremel.

Before and after:



Then I made parts for that pipe coming off the radiator into the intake with some aluminium wire, shrink tube, hose clamps, and a metal "lid" for the mystery structure. Don't like the lid much, but it's better than plastic.





Then I put in some bolts into the valve cover. These are tiny and copper, and I'll be switching them out to slightly bigger steel items.





The back of the engine bay on the real thing has heat shielding, so I used HVAC tape to recreate that. This was easier than I thought.





The chassis looked sad in flat black, so I made it glossy.



The stock distributor looked crappy so I made a new one using bits of shrink tube and some wire.





This part will need some work. I already painted it a bit, put in some bolts, and drilled 6 more holes



So now it looks a bit more serious. But the chrome wires need to go.



So here's a mock up of the progress so far. Nothing is glued. Still lots more work to do.

[[KRAFTIG]]

Not bad Wes, where do you ever find the time?

[damnyouebay]

Cool! I love the whatsit with the bolts in it. I think I spot nuln oil. Damn, engine modding is so much fun.

[StratosWRC]

Not bad Wes, where do you ever find the time?

I don't lol. This is as far as I got after like 2 months with it.

Cool! I love the whatsit with the bolts in it. I think I spot nuln oil. Damn, engine modding is so much fun.

Ya I'm almost out of those bolts now lol. That's like $10 in bolts. And yes you do spot nuln oil indeedy

[StratosWRC]

So I went crazy tonight and pretty much finished the engine in one go. Re-made some parts, installed 30 rivets (!), 3 wires, and 5 or 6 shrink tubes, as well as some other stuff.

So starting from the top, I noticed that the real car had rivets just below the windshield, whereas on the autoart they're just black dots.



So I drilled out the holes and installed some domed head rivets. Unlike the hex rivets, these are virtually impossible to pick up with forceps so I had to use a thin strip of sticky tape to slot them into the hole. Took a while, but worth the effort..





Also, that silver foiled contraption on the right side used to be black, until I realized from pictures that it also has the heat reflecting foil wrapped around it.

I drilled an additional hole in the valve cover and replaced the bronze rivets with steel ones.

Before:



After:



After that I revisited this part with a whole bunch of auxiliary contraptions and replaced the type of wire I was using and added other detail.





Then I put it in place and attached the silver wire that was gonna loop underneath all the pipes and connect to the air intake tube on the right side of the engine.



Like this:





Then I added this pipe, tied to the chassis with copper wire:



Then a couple more wires.



Then two more rivets that secure the air intake hose to the valve cover:



Then another shrink tube on the right side of the engine bay, also tied with copper wire. Note, at this point I also put the scratch made exhaust shields into place.



And that's the whole engine pretty much.

Before:









After:











Total number of parts added to the engine is about 60. I think all I have to do now is change the seatbelts and the sad looking plastic wire around the spare tire. Hopefully I can finish tomorrow. Thanks for looking!

[damnyouebay]

Much better! I find with these engines it often looks a bit meh until it all comes together. When you dont know where to look, thats when its a good looking engine. Party in the bay.

[StratosWRC]

Aye. And it doesn't even take that long. Honestly if I had all the parts from the start, I'd finish this in a day.

[[KRAFTIG]]

Great job!

[FrenchToast]

Amazing! Heat shields are my favorite.

Where did you get the tiny bolts? Scalehardware.com ? (edit: looks like they recently went bust)

Is the "mystery structure" not the coolant overflow tank?

[StratosWRC]

Maybe! I'm terrible with engine name parts.

The bolts I got from an ebay seller called evolution online

[StratosWRC]

Okay did some more work today on the rear end.

First I painted the chassis gloss black.



Then I added 6 rivets to the back end.



Then I decided to tie some gold wire around the spare tire cause the original is just a nasty moulded double black wire.



Then I put both the clamshells back on. Now I'm just waiting until I can get seatbelts.