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♦ As mentioned above, the next trip will be Easter at Gordon’s Well from Thursday March 28th through Monday April 8th.

♦ We will again have an adult Easter egg hunt on Sunday, March 31st. Bring some eggs and prizes to hide in them or put in coupons for. This has become a fun annual tradition, so plan on joining in.

♦ P.J.’s V8 installation is moving right along. Read more about the progress over the last few weeks on page 4.

♦ Steve Tharp is recovering from shoulder surgery that has kept him out of the dunes since Thanksgiving. As of one month after the surgery things are progressing and begin-ning to heal, but not enough that he could make the trip to

Gordon’s Well like he had hoped. He is planning on a better river season, although likely without the backwards knee-boarding. Maybe a summer Coral Pink trip is just what he needs?

♦ Speaking of Coral Pink, individual site reservations may be made starting near the end of March for our trip, which will be July 11-20th 2013. Call (800) 322-3770 8AM-5PM Utah time for reservations.

The annual trip to Gordon’s Well is just around the corner.  Will you be there?  See more info inside on page 3.  We’ll hope to see you there for some late season Southern dunes food and fun. 

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March 28th-April 8th: Easter Week at Gordon’s

Well. Plan on an Easter Egg

hunt on Sunday, March 31st.

April 7th: Sand Sports Super Swap

meet at the Orange County fair-

grounds. Buy, sell, or just hang

out...

April 26-28th: Weekend trip to Dumont.

So far this seems to be the pre-

ferred weekend, but let us know

if you really prefer the one be-

fore or after.

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28 29 30

S M T W Th F Sa

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26 27 28 29 30 31

It is that time of the year where the season starts to wind down, and we say goodbye to Glamis for the summer. While this is a sad thing for most of us, it does mean there is the opportunity for a trip to Dumont before the weather heats up too much. We have done this trip about this time of year for many years now, and it is a real highlight of the season. If you can, make your plans now to join us the weekend of April 26-28th, which so far seems to be the most popular weekend with the group to go, but most of us are flexible so if you really can’t go then and would prefer another weekend, let us know and we’ll figure out when the most people can make it. I the mean time, here are some old Dumont pictures to convince you:

The sand sports super swap will be held again this year, the weekend after Easter on April 7 from 8AM-3PM at the OC Fairgrounds. A few of us went last year, and despite there being few vendors we did find some deals. Some of us may get a space this year, so maybe we’ll see you there.

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Bridge

Camp

Gordon’s Well Off Ramp

I-8

Below is an aerial photo of the flats at Gordon’s Well. We usually camp near where the arrow indicates. Look for Jim’s blue over amber strobe, the yellow shop trailer, and the Bakers’, Fords’ and Trantham’s rigs.

This year we will once again be having an Easter egg hunt in camp, and with how the calendar worked out we will have opportunity to have it on Easter Sunday. In this now-traditional Inland Empire event, the adults in camp search for eggs that the kids (with help from some others) have hidden on the buggies in the middle of camp. The eggs contain items (or certificates for items if they won’t fit in the eggs) that the adults would be happy to get. If you would like to partici-

pate, just bring 6-12 plastic eggs filled with inter-esting items. Part of the fun is seeing all the unique items people come up with to donate. Past favorites include carb cleaner, ice cream, candy (since you never outgrow sweets!), and of course money! It is great fun to search for the eggs and to see what prizes everybody gets. Peo-ple will compete pretty hard to see who can find the most hidden eggs, and inevitably we will find a few still hidden in the cars when we’re out on a ride later that day.

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When we left off last month, I had sold the V6 from my car and found the V8 wouldn’t exactly fit width wise between the frame rails, so I proceeded to cut them out and fabricate new ones. This month I’ll continue the story, reporting how with a lot of help from a lot of people we were able to accomplish a motor swap mid season. With the V8 sitting in its new home, I began work to make my new stronger motor mounts and frame reinforcement to handle the extra weight and torque of the V8. Besides working on Tuesday night, I also started to spend Saturdays at the shop, and made some great progress. On March 2nd, John and my Dad spent the day at the shop with me and we were able to get the headers tacked together. I had considered running the stock exhaust manifolds to save time, but John insisted that headers were the way to go, and working from a picture of his head-ers we quickly tacked the mandrel bends together into a neat set of headers. One cool thing we did was once we got the length and shape we wanted for each piece, we marked it on another piece for the other side, so the second side went very quickly. In addition to the headers, I added additional bars to strengthen the frame and support the motor mounts. I also added some cross bracing to the frame since I now knew exactly where the motor would be, so I did-n’t have to leave extra room for the V8 like I had when we stretched the car. All in all, I put 40 feet of new .120 wall 1.5 inch tubing into the frame of the car. I did remove a fair amount of tube that used to be next to the motor and the old motor mounts, but just like with John’s car it is surprising how much tube it takes. I am looking forward to weighing the cars at the dunes sometime to see what the total effect of the motor swap (and frame stretching) winds up being. I’m sure the performance will more than make up for the weight gain though, and keeping it from breaking is always a good thing.

With the headers and frame bars tacked together, it was time to pull the motor back out of the car for finish welding. That same Saturday John and my Dad helped pull the motor at the end of the night. Unfortunately it turned into a major ordeal, because as we pulled it, the motor mount on one side broke free. This meant we had to re-install the motor to get everything in posi-tion, then weld up the mount better to hold it in place. After re-peating this process twice, we finally got to the point where the motor would not com free from the car. It turns out that the mo-tor mount plates were a little bigger than they needed to be, and they were keeping the block from lifting up and out of the car. Once they were securely held in place, so was the motor! I ended up cutting one plate back off, with the plan being to get everything else finished and then weld that piece in once the mo-

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Don’t look now, but there is a hole going right through the middle of the oil pan...where the

front axle went.

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tor was in the car for good, and of course after the plates had been clearance to allow the motor to be remov-able. The next Tuesday Barry and Dean spent a lot of time welding the frame. We used the forklift to lift up the car and get access to weld the bottom of the tubes, which revealed some cavernous gaps that needed to be filled. While they welded, I prepared the motor for installation by adding the pilot bear-ing, flywheel, and pressure plate. It turned out I was missing the bolts for the pressure plate, so that would have to wait till later in the week. Before the night was over though I was able to get a coat of paint on the newly added bars, and the frame was ready for the motor to go back in. I arranged to meet Scott and John at the shop after work on Thursday, and we stuck the motor in. It went very well, probably in part due to our practice putting it in and out the Saturday before. Scott then reattached the motor mount plate, and did some more motor mount welding. Now that the motor was in, I was basically ready to do everything else to finish it up. That turned out to be a lot of stuff, but it started with installing the battery holder and computer mount. I had splurged on a pretty Optima battery holder at KarTek, in part since John insisted on a sealed battery since

there is the possibility that it might be upside down at some point. With the bigger motor and all the electronics on the car, it was nice to upgrade from a lawn and garden battery. I also bent up some tubing to serve as radiator lines, since the V8 has the outlets on the opposite side from the Shortstar, so water needs to go from the left rear of the wing to the right front of the motor. I basically copied

John’s, and used cheap fence tabs from IMS that I picked up for 10 cents a piece to mount the tubes. Speaking of “nickel and dime” stuff, with the rare exception of those cheap tabs (which actually were a dime) it seemed the default price for stuff on the car now is $60. Need intake fittings and hose, $60 shipped. Need some stuff from Home Depot, that’ll be about $60. Make a trip to Auto Zone, that’ll take about three $20 bills as well. Twenty feet of tub-ing, that’ll be $60 too. It is funny how quickly that stuff adds up, but we all know how that goes. Back at the shop on Tuesday, Dean continued work on welding up the headers. The process was complicated by a fussy TIG machine at the shop, so Dean agreed to take them home and weld them elsewhere. Barry fabricated a neat mount for the electronic throttle pedal. It will be a change to have drive by wire throttle, but that’s what Barry, John, and Scott all have and I want to be cool like them. I do think it is a neat tech-nological update to end sticky throttle cable issues, and that is what the motor was already set up for so why not. John and Dean also welded in tabs for my radiator lines, and I began to figure out how I’d hook them up to the motor. I decided that I wanted to avoid flex lines, and would look

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for the right shape formed rubber lines to make the short connections to the engine and radiator. This be-came an internet research project. I found that the up-per radiator hose from a 2006 Avalanche is the right diameter, is over three feet long, and has some nice bends. The best part is it is less than $20 at Auto Zone, so I could get two hoses, silicone, and a thermostat for my $60. The next Saturday, my Dad and I planned to work on the car and get the bearing carriers replaced. This was pretty much unrelated to the motor swap, but clearly needed to be done. After years of abuse and plenty of rewelding, I had decided to fabricate replacement parts with a new stronger heavier design. I had started after Thanksgiving with some tubes that Dean had already started, and John machined the main plates by cutting the hole for the bearing itself and the bolts that hold it on. This allowed the plates to be bigger than ones you can buy, which meant we could tie more directly to the five link mounts. Scott spent quite a bit of time stick welding them together so they would be as strong as pos-sible. My Dad took them home and spent a couple of days finishing the fabrication and adding a few more gussets and painting them. He brought them to the shop and we started mounting them on the car. I think it is interesting that Scott and my Dad spent the most time on the bearing carriers, since they are also the ones who

have spent the most time repairing them in the dunes. Hopefully that won’t have to happen again for some time. Part of the installation process involved drilling and tapping the holes for the brake caliper mounts, which have to be pretty precise. It turned out that one of the holes must have been off a little bit, and the caliper hit the hub when it was bolted on. This meant we had to re-weld the hole, re-drill it, and tap it again. This meant my Dad stayed Saturday night in his trailer at Johns and came back down to work on Sunday. We ended up getting the carriers mounted with new rod ends and bolts, eliminating lots of slop from the rear end and making it MUCH stronger, which should come in handy with the new motor. We also finished the radiator and fuel line plumbing, and fit the firewall back in place. It was a long

weekend, but the car was definitely coming together, and the prospect of firing it up on Tuesday seemed quite possible, and exciting. On Tuesday, I got off from work early and made it to the shop just after 5:00. My Mom and Dad came out for the night, so Allie got to play with grandma while we played with the car. John, Scott, and Dean had al-ready started working on the mufflers, so I finished up the power steering and installed the battery. Barry, Walt, Dave and Brandy were all there helping out as well. I added a neat little inline power steering filter from AutoZone that looks like a fuel filter, but it rated for use on the power steering return line. It should help keep any dirt in the system out of the pump. With John working on the Mufflers, I started working on the pipe to connect them to the headers. I ended up with a neat setup where the header outlet is extended back and inward by half of a 2.5 inch U bend ending in a flange. Then the other half of the U bend attaches to the flange and extends to the muffler. This way there is only one seam in the system, and it is right where we had to cut the U bend anyway. Besides the exhaust, we made good progress with the intake as well. I knew it was going to be close with the intake up against the firewall, but using a “Cobra Head” elbow raised on a slight angle to clear the upper radia-

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We got these neat fittings to adapt the stock fuel rail to AN fittings.

The old and the new, comparing the well worn original bearing carriers to the new stronger version.

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This month we’d like to thank everyone who made it this far for reading a newsletter with so little content. We agreed to put something out each month, and sometimes there just isn’t a whole lot to write about. Hope-fully next month will be better, and that depends on you and your articles. If you have plans for upcoming trips that we don’t have listed let us know so we can put them on the calendar and on the website. -PJ, Melissa and of course Allison

tor hose we were able to run the intake line pretty simply. The Mass Airflow Sensor in inline between the el-bow and the air cleaner, and was able to be attached using appropriately sized reducer bushings. I had to notch the firewall somewhat for the air cleaner, but since they are both alumi-num it looks pretty good. The air cleaner setup I am using is similar to John’s, where we cut an old aluminum fuel tank in half and Dean welded a tube onto it to accept a UMP style paper element filter. I bought a filter cap at KarTek, and for less than $50 I ended up with a more advanced air cleaner setup. Over the course of the night we did find that the header flanges needed to be clearanced for the plug wires, so my Dad took care of that when we had them off for Dean to do the finish welding. Once every-thing was done and welded, it was about 9:45 PM and the time we usu-ally call it a night. I had gotten a lot done and the car was in good shape, but we hadn’t made any attempt at starting it. I asked if any-body was in a hurry, and they all encouraged me to bolt the headers on and give it a shot. I quickly threw the headers on and we topped off the cooling system, filled the power steering, and poured in some gas. It was time to give it a try, just after 10 PM. I hit the switch and absolutely nothing happened. Then I hooked up the feed wire to the console and gave it another shot. The fuel pump came on and cycled just like it was supposed

to. We did that a couple of times to get fuel through the system, and then hit the starter. It fired right up, just like it had been parked yesterday. The throttle worked, and so did the power steering. That meant that I was one happy guy, thanks to a lot of help from a lot of friends and family. Now all that is left is some cleanup and finish-ing touches and I should be able to load the car for Easter. Hopefully we’ll see you there! -P.J.

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The tailpipe setup we fabricated extends the header outlet back to a flange which places the mufflers inside the center of the car underneath the radiator.

I recorded video of it running and posted it on the club website.