Chipping away at this mountain on the weekends and weeknights as time permits, and if it's not ridiculously cold in the garage. 20deg, propane heat, and cold weather gear isn't the most fun to work on. We get 2-3 weeks of perfect weather in MI so... pick your poison.
Tossed on the 417 water manifold and then played with some positioning for the water pump. I'm going to hard mount it right off the water manifold and let it eat. I have some ideas for the swirlpot, expansion, and over flow but I needed to get the radiator mounted.
Prior to mounting the radiator I need the sway bar on. "Need" is a strong word. More like it makes life easier when rolling around on cold life sucking cement. While working on the car I like to look over and double check everything. I noticed that my driver's side wheel doesn't spin freely. The rotor minds right where the top hat has witness marks from breaking the 2-piece rotor off previously. Either the rotor is warped or the top hat is bent. My money is on top hat bent. A call was made to Z1 on replacing just the top hat but they essentially told me to eat a D because they don't sell them separately. FINE... I'm honestly sick of Z1 how they farm absolutely everything out to China. With that same thought in mind, I messaged SPL to change out my end links so that I can exclusively run their parts. I told them about my wreck and told them I ran SPL end links previously. They ended up giving me a good guy deal as long as they could get the tea about the wreck and hang the pictures on their customer's hall of wrecks. Deal. Side by side you can tell the engineering and materials are significantly better than Z1's end links. This isn't a gaff at Z1 for either the rotors or the end links. The price point is higher for SPL so in this case you get what you pay for.
I don't know if I ever said this out right, but it's important that I support small business that produces American made parts when ever possible. A great example is the 417 Motorsports water manifold. Summit has a knock off Chinese manifold that would do the same thing. Bonus points if products are made in Michigan (local to me).
Here we are:
