Hi everyone. My name is Kent and I'm new to this site. I just bought my first vette 3 days ago, and I'm very excited about it. The problem is, I can't find anywhere that has performance upgrades for it. I'm not going to start putting on performance parts just yet, but I am trying to get an idea of what it's going to end up costing after I'm done rebuilding the rest of the car. Does anyone know of anywhere I can go for performance parts, or am I going to be looking at an entire engine swap for a real performance boost? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Kent

engine performance will depend on year and engine, but you can milk more performance out of any factory engine. I would start by looking at summitracing.com or jegs.com. They have some reasonable aftermarket engine parts. I would start with an intake manifold, carburator, headers, and exhaust. If you do all of this and tune it right, you will be very surprised in the difference of performance. Horsepower gains for engine changes like that would probably be 50 to 100 depending a lot on which engine you have. Total cost would be in the 1000 dollar range. Good luck

Thanks for the info. I have a '77, and I just found a website that tells me how to read all the codes and tell exactly which 350 I have, so I'll be doing that one of these days when it finally stops raining. Thanks again for the help

Kent

Engine upgrades will probably come as necessary. It will also depend on whether or not you want to keep it more or less stock looking. My '79 was a basket case when I bought it so I didn't even consider trying to restore it to Bloomington standards. I would suggest a few things to think about tho'. If your carburetor is shot, I would consider an Edlebrock #1406 with an Edelbrock intake. I fought what I considered too high of an engine temperature until I installed a Stewart's Hi-Flo water pump. I've done a lot to mine, a little at a time as I felt the urge (which comes pretty often now that I think about it). I feel you are starting out right by asking around first. Go to car shows and see what the others have done. They'll be happy to talk cars with you.
PS...one of the better things I did was to add Hooker Headers and Sidepipes. Buy them from Jet-Hot and they'll be coated and less expensive than the chrome ones.

|UPDATED|2/29/2004 4:17:38 PM (AZT)|/UPDATED|

Something to keep in mind as you start to plan your buildup, Kent: Design the engine for the type of driving you'll be doing. Example: My 75 is a street driver; I want her to act like a Vette at stoplights; she will likely never see a timing trap, nor does "top end" mean a whole lot (over about 90, that is.) So I designed and built her "optimized" for the idle-5500 RPM range ... and there are no disappointments or embarrassments for the car or for me.

Specs: NOM 4 bolt 350; Edelbrock: 64cc Performer heads, Performer manifold, Performer Plus cam, Q-Jet Clone, Gear Drive, Water Pump. MSD: Distributor, Coil, 6A Box. CompCams roller rockers. Taylor wires. Hedman hedders into true duals (Corvette Central) into Magnaflow TurboXL's. FlexALite flexfan. Rebuilt TH400 w/kit. 3.70RA



|UPDATED|3/1/2004 2:57:23 PM (AZT)|/UPDATED|

I completely agree with jedlevine. Build your engine to where you'll be driving it and don't look back. You can get absolutely marvelous performance out of a C3...far beyond what the factory did if you approach it intelligently.

C4 and C5 Corvettes are wonderful cars...superior to our C3's technically and performance wise, but to me, they have no soul...they're computer driven machines that happen to take a driver along for the ride. As far as I'm concerned, the C3's are the last Vettes that the average guy can work on, modify and repair himself without having to own a computer to talk to the car's computer. You can personalize these cars and say you did it yourself. I don't look at the later ones like that.

Enjoy and welcome to the group!