Future of the Monte Carlo: LSA Build Overview / What am I Going to Do With It? (Plus Some Backstory)

so what we're actually going to do in today's video is i'm going to go over the bonnie carlo show you the bones the nuts and bolts what makes it tick give you some backstory on it and you know just fill you in on the setup and what i'm going to do with the car because i realize a lot of you probably didn't even know i had this thing or if you do know i had it you don't know that much about it and that is what we're going to address today this car has been a 656 probably 620 to 650 wheel depending on i don't know just based on like what that setup does with the zl1 either way it's over a 700 horsepower freaking car that's been put together for about three years now and i've never gotten to drive it well guys i tell you what i have had one heck of a day today uh it's dealing with something i've never had to deal with before i got up this morning i went outside to go to the gym and realize somebody had broken into my truck not only did they break into my truck they tried to steal my truck and totally destroyed the ignition column in the process freaking awesome that they didn't get it because it was still connected to john's trailer and whoever did it had no idea what they were doing and i could tell just by what they did and the type of truck that it is but i've been dealing with that all day the problem is i'm not even so much irritated about that is that last night i put a bin of packed and ready to go shirt orders in the back of my truck probably like i don't know 25 30 orders some of which good bit of which had two shirts in the package they took that they took the bin they left my edge cts monitor they left my freaking like hockey skates in the back like other stuff they left my tools in the bed like they didn't go into the trailer but they took my shirts great now like i don't know how to use this website that well so i'm gonna have to figure this out to go in and figure out where the last order was that actually got shipped because if you ordered something and got a tracking number from me pretty much between yesterday and like december 23rd your order was in that bin and i'm gonna have to go back and redo all those and eat that inventory which sucks fixing my truck not a big deal that sucks but this part of learning process i'm just glad they didn't get my truck so i have that to be thankful for let's go 2021 starting off with a bang apparently so first of all we'll just before we get into what i'm gonna do with it i will fill you in on what it currently is so it's a 1972. it was originally like poop green when i got it it was black but it had like some ragtag you know someone's garage paint job on it and i've had this car since 2014 when i was in high school i had a big block then i this is kind of the car that got me to like learn how to work on cars and i put a solid roller cam in it that big block blew up i put a four speed in it well i paid a shop to put a four speed in it this is really how i got into turning wrenches is this car here i paid a shop to put a four speed in a muncie the transmission i got from under some old guys tree for like 300 bucks acquired all the other stuff paid a shop to put it in man it was a lot of money it was like i pretty much spent all my money all the money i had saved uh on that stuff and i spent more money in labor than in parts i'm like man this is just freaking terrible on top of that i wanted to get it uh tuned for the different carburetor different intake manifold because i put like a edelbrock air gap on it well i had them do it while they were doing it because back then i didn't know how to work on stuff let's get that out of the way i didn't know how to work on anything back then and they took it to jeff lutz so jeff lutz put a boom tube on this thing i had the boom tube and i wanted that place to put on they said yeah the same guy with the dyno can put the exhaust on so i did that jeff lutz dino doing this thing put the boom tube on it before i even met the guy when i met him he had already done this that's how i got introduced to him first i remember picking this up right before drag week in 2014 when he did it with junior in the evil twin and he ended up winning which was pretty cool but then again he dinged me for a lot of money too so i thought i'd spend all my money well after that i had really spent all of my money six days later i blew up the four speed roll racing and evo x like i shot the counter shaft out the bottom of the case it blew up that bad limped at home in fourth gear and it wasn't until a couple weeks later i limped it over to the garage and rolled under there and realized that the whole bottom of the transmission was gone that i'm like wow this is not good and i wanted to put my turbo 400 back in it so i could drive the car again but i couldn't afford to take it back to that shop and have them do it because i knew it was going to cost a bazillion dollars so i called my friend sean who was in tech school at the time and said hey like do you think we could figure out how to get this back in here and he said yeah we could do that so we went to do it and long story short he didn't know as much about what he was doing as i thought he did and we bolted the converter to the flex plate first like you bolt the clutch onto a flywheel and try to put a transmission on that way well that's not how you do that we mess with this thing for like four hours didn't get anywhere so we had to call my other friend bill and he stuffed that thing in like 20 minutes so that's how i got my intro to turning wrenches and i realized if i'm ever gonna have a fun car i'm gonna have to learn how to you know i got two eyes two hands and a brain that was like the exact verbatim the thought process i had two eyes two hands in the brain just like the guy who put it together for me i can figure out how to do it and that's how i was gonna have a faster car than my friends is by taking the time to learn how to do that stuff myself because that would totally eliminate labor cost into upgrades right now it has the escalades old six two in it the original 6.2 liter out of the escalade with the blower that was also in the escalade this setup from blower lid to oil pan essentially it's got a different oil paint on it now for a car swap but it's the same everything that was in the escalade when it went 1188 with the lsa setup same everything now it's in here with a 6l90 and it's blown up like partially blown up it's it's weird i put this car together in 2017 as a thrash for drag week because the escalade was not going to be done i started tearing that apart in the beginning 2017 and quickly realized that i was in way over my head was not going to be done in time so threw this together with my friend kyle because the big block had previously dropped the valve the year before and i sold everything so i had this six liter 6l90 pull out from a junkyard that i got for like a steal i actually bought that before the big block blew up because it was such a good deal i was just gonna flip it well then the next day the big block blows up and i'm like well i know what i'm doing with this now turns out the 6090 i got was garbage yeah we got it thrown together right before drag week day before i gotta leave put on the dyno it does not shift so i'm screwed then i put a 6l80 in it the one from the escalade that i like foodborne the tail shaft on to be two wheel drive probably not a good idea and lo and behold that one does not work either whatever i did do it may have messed it up i'm not really sure it runs and drives but it slips i've never gotten to use this thing this thing has not been driven like a regular vehicle since 2014 before i paid that place to put the four speed in it and then freaking goober it all up and now that's gonna change right now it's got the 6l80 in it and the shifter is just from like a 4l80 or something and i kind of made that knob and i feel focus on there i put like the punishers called the monte carlo thing and put it in a little insert there which i thought was pretty cool it's got a cts-v gas pedal which i was able to make work by switching a couple pins around from the truck one i don't know if that's a common thing but uh it worked for me this tack doesn't do anything there's nothing in here anymore not yet i have a new dash face for this it's got new carpet i had to build a new tunnel for the bigger transmission um it's got a 12 bolt with c-clip eliminators like moser axles um it's pretty basic there's like some boxed the factory control arms at the bottom are like boxed and the uppers are like 90s hotchkiss ones this thing actually handles pretty dang good for what it is but it's funny i put poly body mounts on it with my friend bill or pretty much bill put poly mounts on it while i handed him tools and we didn't know that you were supposed to do one side at a time so he just unbolted all of them and then threw them all in well the body's no longer centered on the frame so that's something i have to fix too like look how look how close this is in here i can't fit my fingers between here but over here i got like you know good good bit of room so yeah body's crooked on the frame actually there's like a little three quarters hole in the frame and the body under here that is used for alignment for that so fixing this won't really be a big deal i just never got around to it because the engine was always acting up and the last thing on my mind was to like make the body straight on the frame again i mean you can kind of see that it's it's off crooked there i'm not sure exactly where this alignment hole is at it's somewhere in here it's got the 12-volt that's a pypes street pro exhaust system like regular summit catalog ones three inch stainless and x-pipe it actually sounds really good i'll fire it up here in a bit if it's not dead it's got a tanks inc um efi swap tank in it um that install went pretty well it was very easy to do but word to the wise do not put tons and tons of rtv on the gasket for the sending unit because i had a problem with this it squished out got into the tank and plugged the pump sock so this thing just did not make fuel pressure i thought the pump was too small or something because after i change the transmission this one will actually like let you goose it it doesn't slip until like fourth gear but uh it just would not it would just like crack out like it would not make fuel pressure i'm like what the heck so i pull that off find the pump sock clogged with rtv change it boom it's fine so if you're having symptoms like that check your pump sock learn from my mistakes um that is an olsen custom works six rib drive setup it's from the escalade and there's actually a little spacer at the very bottom that i had substituted with washers because i couldn't find it well i found it at my shop in pennsylvania and i put it in the freaking center console of my truck so i wouldn't lose it and the mofo that broke into my truck stole my center console insert with that piece in there because it had coins in it so i've been i have an eyeball on this little spacer for three years and i finally get it i'm finally gonna put it on this car and it gets freaking stolen because of some freaking coins stupidest thing stupidest thing ever but whatever anyway the motor mounts are a umi ls swap mounts i had to do some drilling to make those work remember they didn't like fit right not exactly sure why uh speed engineering ls swap headers it's got a 245 upper pulley stock truck lower this is all stock truck stuff it's got a mighty mouse catch can because i had it laying around biggest waste of money ever ever ever ever i don't know why i bought that freaking thing somebody told me to and it was the biggest waste of 400 of my entire life i could have made the thing out of a freaking pop can and some freaking steel wool whole catch can pcv thing it's total hocus pocus i think it's a scam so don't buy it do it uh regular old magna fuel regulator that was also from the escalade i've made this intake myself it's just kind of puts the filter like way up in the fender because i thought it'd be real easy to block that off and you know like maybe i could pull the headlight and have some clean air that way easy to use is kind of like zip tied right here because with this harness it the stuff kind of has to go where it was in the truck because it's not heavily modified the place that did this was a pain in the ass to deal with i would never use them again they uh they had some stuff pinned wrong it was just weird and then they like build me twice and wouldn't refund me i couldn't get a hold of anybody just dumbest thing ever wouldn't total freaking nightmare that was that's like a griffin radiator same one that was in there from the big block and got one of these dental fans from like the parts store behind the counter which surprising enough actually keeps it cool unless it's super hot outside uh true cool 40k trans cooler this came from my buddy george's silverado i'm sure there's been several transmissions blowing up through that and it's in the car is that why my transmission now doesn't work maybe i don't know i've also chunked several transmissions through the true cool 40k and the escalade and i flush it out every time and it's fine so i don't know it's just kind of one of those things personal preference all right i'm going to make those bumpers black i had this uh like not plastic but like a competitive plasti dip and when they redid the body it uh they took it off because it kind of got messed up but i'm gonna wrap that wrap the back one and the reason i do not want to change them to fiberglass ones is if i hit something or got hit those big steel ones would save the car and i'm not that concerned about weight this is not a drag car that's not what it's going to be which leads me to my next point now if you go to kenai yes that's pretty much the dailer and heart paint scheme i found out after a while of staring at this thing that i could just paint the factory trim and it would look just like dale's car so that's what i did i originally just wrapped this part red and then uh i went through and painted everything and this is orange it's not red it's orange dale's cars were freaking orange just how they are if you've ever seen one in person you know what i'm talking about because the colors come up differently on camera so everybody thinks dale's cars were black and red they're not it's orange usually this is on the grill but um they took it off because they painted my grill but it would go like right here like that maybe one lower no i went right here yeah this is actually a bow tie from a fifth gen camaro and it is upside down because if it's right side up how it goes on the camaro it like points down funny because it's angled like forward but if you flip it over then it's got the perfect forward rake to fit the forward raking grille of this car neat little factoid there too for you that's why that thing looks the way it does people ask me about that grill a lot and have been for years that's what it is and the exhaust is not going to stay this way the transmission is not going to stay this way i've always wanted this car to be a full out like nascar tribute car like the dale earnhardt car tribute with this that's why i wanted a monte carlo because they used them in nascar i thought that was really cool so this thing is going to get boom tubes on it it's going to get the x-pipe system like the escalade has like the legit one this thing this thing is going to sound like a freaking super speedway car circa 1995 to 2007. if you ever listen to a nascar like go on youtube and watch freaking qualifying from like the you know talladega in 2000 or daytona in 2001 2002 something like that [Applause] a lot of those cars is a really distinct high-pitched whale that they don't have today that's because of the x-pipe with the boom tubes and that's a whole other video that i'll get talking about later people think it's the carburetors the fuel injection the headers are different on the newer cars they don't sound like that none of that's true it's all in the way they do the exhaust and we're going to do this one the right way with the original company that built those exhausts for those cop cars they have the diagrams of all that stuff still i'd like to do a t-56 if funds are not permitting i'll put a four-speed back in it i would hate to lose overdrive but i want this thing to sound cool and it's going to sound cooler with a stick and it's going to be more nascar with a stick in it and this car has gone back and forth from auto to stick like four different times over the times i've had it just because i bust one or i'd get annoyed with the stick and i wanted to go drag racing and i felt like drag racing was important to me for a little bit and i kind of lost track of this and it veered away from that and then i blew it up but it's just big wholeness getting back to what i wanted this to be from day one and that's a freaking stock car sounded nascar looking freaking super awesome obnoxiously cool looking thing always wanted to build a duck bill like spoiler for this thing just in the worst way possible so that's definitely gonna happen too i got this years and years ago it's a front splitter from a 69 camaro but i'm gonna figure out a way to put it under here somehow like look at pictures of bobby allison's old like coke machine 1971 monte carlo it had something like this under it so we're gonna go with that i'm pretty sure in this box i have led tail lights because i had led tail lights in this thing and they shorted out or something and everything was always getting messed up so once again never got to put them in i want to know do you guys think i should leave the engine bare like that or put the lsa cover back on it and maybe just paint it so it matches better so here here's your visual that's what it looks like with it off to do to do wrap around here check it out okay now let's see it with it on there we go that's what it looks like with it on there it's kind of cool i mean objectively speaking i think it looks better with it off but when it's on there and you stand back here you're looking at a zl1 camaro when the hood's open so i think that's kind of cool but i don't i know i don't know what do you guys think should i leave it off paint it leave it on just powder coat the blower lid and not do the cover do both you got any creative ideas let me know i'm all ears even consider doing some graphics on here of you know like a number or something maybe like four i think i think a number four would look good on the side of this thing or maybe like a six with a nine next to it i don't know we'll see so let's see if it'll actually start we'll let it run for a while and see if it'll hold a charge too because it did not the other day i want to put my money on that it does start i'm going to put the camera out here for you guys so you can hear what it sounds like from a cold [Applause] start okay so whatever i did it's not happy so i'll rev it a little bit for you guys and then i'll throw in some montage of clips of me doing random things dumb things with this car over the last six years which might be pretty cool it takes me my memory lane to think about that stuff and maybe he'll fill in some of the blanks for you guys as to how long i've been messing with this car i've had this car longer than the escalade actually this industrial park is great because i could do that at 3am and nobody cares let's do it again from the front so you can hear the blower how about that well that does it for today um tomorrow we're actually going to go drive this thing which is going to be fun i'm going to smoke some tires slide it around do some stupid stuff i shouldn't do because you know what the transmission only slips in like third and fourth gear so you know i just won't go fast you don't do that doing…