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I was flipping through the channels last night just after 9:00 PM looking for the Republican Presidential Debate when I came across this little piece on Piers Morgan’s show on CNN. There is a small clip below.

What? Why do they put these “Movie Stars” (I am being more than generous describing Shawn Penn as a movie star) on these talk shows and ask their opinions on politics? Sure, everyone has a opinion, but at least get someone on there that can string words together into a sentence that actually makes some sense. Oh, maybe he needs a script to be able to talk. Penn is a babbling idiot! “We’re not getting nutrition of thought into our children’s brains,”? What does that mean? At one point he said that we shouldn’t be spending money on wars when our schools are broken, we need to spend much more money on schools. What’s the matter Shawn, are we not spending enough money on our public schools to indoctrinate our young to the politically correct leftists mantra?

I just don’t get it. Someone please explain it to me. Why do we care what Shawn Penn thinks? I surely don’t. I guess that’s why I don’t watch CNN!

A friend sent me this video. I found it very interesting and a good condensation of facts about Jihad that I have read in other sources.

I first learned about jihad from a book by Robert Spencer titled “Islam: What the west needs to know” I read that book about 4 or 5 years ago and I found it fascinating. This video explains Jihad in about a 25 minute span.

After the video check out the website mentioned in the video.

A coworker and Harley rider sent me this picture. I’m always amazed at how creative folks can be in customizing the cars and motorcycles! But this one, is something else. This person obviously has a lot of time and money on his hands! Check out that tandem front fork setup. I’ll like to see how he pulled that off!

You just don't see this everyday!

Finished, well maybe….I can think of a couple of additional things I want to do to the Corvette, but it is in pretty acceptable shape right now!

From the previous post you know that I finished the interior and carpet.  I replaced the carpet and the under padding, the aftermarket P.O.S. radio/CD/MP3 player that wouldn’t play a MP3 disk, and several of the dash panels that were broken and scratched beyond repair.  To put the final touches on the interior I want to make a trim piece for where the carpet attaches up under the rear window.  It won’t be original, but the stock installation doesn’t look very finished.  More on that later.  I will probably replace the leather seating surfaces.  They are not in too bad a shape for a 17 year old car, but the driver side is showing some wear.  Gonna have to wait on that, we’re talking big money.

Mechanical things, the headlight motors don’t turn the headlight down tight against the stops and they rattle.  I am hoping that rebuilding the slipper clutches in the headlight motors will fix that. UPDATE 12/17/2011 – I purchased the rebuild kits for the headlight motors from Eckler’s Corvettes and rebuilt both of the motors in one evening. Since I was replacing the headlamps with the euro-style beams I found that the easiest way to do it was to remove the whole headlight mechanism and put it on the bench. The small Delrin rollers in the clutches had turned to complete dust over the years. It took about 1 hour per side to remove the assembly, change gear and rollers in the headlight motor, replace the headlamps, and reinstall the assembly. Not hard to do or particularly time consuming.

Finally, need to change the oil in the engine and the differential oil.  The limited slip does not work very well and I think a oil change will help that.  The service manual suggests changing the differential oil at 75K miles and it is over that now. I think I will flush the brake fluid too.

Other than that….it’s done!  Truth is, it will never really be done.  There is always something to do on old cars….old boats….old houses, you get it?

Click on the pictures to see a larger version.

Front Quarter View

Rear Quarter View

Side View

Rear View. I like the big stainless exhaust tips.

Hopefully this is the final update on the Corvette interior project.  This morning, I put the final pieces of carpet and trim back on the car!   Got a good early start and finished up about noon.

As projects often do, this turned out to be more than I anticipated.  I thought I could replace the radio, some of the trim pieces and the carpeting in a couple of weekends.  But it just didn’t work out that way.  I did take my time with it in an effort to get everything done right which added some time.  There were some unanticipated problems like the crack in the drivers side floor and deciding to use upgraded thermal and sound insulation under the carpet, but in the end I simply did not realize that there was so much labor in replacing the carpet in a Corvette.

Interior from the rear hatch

Anyway, she’s complete now and it looks really good.  Got color samples from the carpet house and selected something that was closer to the color of the seats and trim than the stock.  The stock beige carpet was much darker than what I selected.  That could be from years of wear and dirt, who knows.  What I selected looks much better than the stock to me, it is lighter, matches the other beige on the trim parts, and makes the inside of the car brighter.

Passenger side

Check out the C4 Logo floor mats!

So it took a lot longer than I expected, but it came out really nice.

I’m happy with it.   Now, a good detailing and we should have some that will be fun to drive and look good doing it!

What’s next?  Well, I need to rebuild the headlight motors.  If you are going over about 55 miles per hour and turn on the headlights, they don’t rotate up like they should.  That should be a pretty easy fix.  Several of the Corvette parts house have rebuild kits for the slipper clutch in the headlight motors.   I may put a set of the eurospec headlamps in it, the headlights on this car are very poor.  I wouldn’t expect that on a sports car that has the performance this car does.