Back in the day, my friend Kathy was dating a guy named Marc. Marc was into cars and had a very cool and fast green Camaro from the early 70s (i think it was the first year of the new body style) .
Marc was a good mechanic, he did all the work on his car. I became friendly with Marc thru Kathy and we hung out a bit. As much as I loved the Firebird I was always envious of other "cool" cars because I only had a little 305ci engine while most people had small block 350s (again, why couldn't mom have gotten the trans-am???) .
I wanted to go faster. . . . I NEEDED to go faster!
I don't recall how it got started but i ended up buying and installing (marc did most of the work) an after-market Edelbrock hi-rise aluminum manifold and a big 4 barrel carb. I know I bought it used, might have been from Marc. I think i paid $50 for the whole thing.
After we got the parts installed we found two problems:
1. The throttle cable didn't reach far enough to the new carb and we ended up fashioning an extension out of the blade from a hacksaw.
2. Due to the hi-rise feature of the manifold the tip of the screw for the airfitler was about 1/16 of an inch too tall. no fix to be had, ended up with the tiniest of pimple on the hood when the wing nut dented it from underneath.
Never really knew if the performance was improved but it sure sounded great. I drove the car for years and don't think my parents ever knew that we made those changes.
Of course there was the time when they DID notice what i'd done. One night Marc lent me a spare set of fat tires on some nice looking chrome rims which i put on the back of the car. They looked really cool especially since i'd installed air-shocks and could jack the back of the car up. The next morning i got yelled at by mom about not respecting the car, looking like a hoodlum and blah blah blah.... she made me take them off :-(
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