1967 Chevrolet Corvette - Reconsidering Your Line In The Sand, Wrapup

Success. It's clean, strong, looks like it came that way, and will give us the clearance that we need over this tall fuel injection system.

We experimented with different exhaust tips before ending up with these Hookers. Exhaust tips that is. Two large outlets vs. four smaller ones-it's purely a matter of taste.

The advantage of four smaller tips is "fitability" beneath the license plate. We cut out the exhaust panel to fit the pipes, and then built a curved fiberglass wall in the cutout for a molded look, and for structural strength.

The chambered exhaust sticks were installed with maximum road clearance in mind. The forward sticks negate the downward direction of the headers and allow the exhaust system to pass through the frame crossmember as it should. The rear sticks continue to hug the floor from there and join in to the tailpipes that exit at the center of the exhaust panel.

Accel markets this clean little billet aluminum dual-sync distributor for their fuel injection systems. With the cam and crank triggers built into the distributor, there is no need to have them installed anywhere on the engine.

Because of this, however, it's very important to properlyphase the distributor prior to startup. With the GenVII computer connected to your laptop, phasing may begin. Red and blue LEDs built into the distributor signal the falling edge of the cam and crank trigger positions as you rotate the distributor body.

This is the Accel Thruster DFI startup screen on the laptop. Follow the instructions to get things properly set-up so the engine's computer knows whether to fire a plug or an injector.

With the distributor phased and the base timing set, we have run the engine. From here, it's time to load the car up and get it over to the dyno for some fine-tuning.

It's one thing to statically set-up an engine management system, but it's something else again to tweak it while running under a load with an exhaust gas analyzer connected to read the air-fuel mixture.

Jeff Wightman at Precision Autosports is an old hand at tuning, and runs the 383 through its paces to get everything right. Want more performance or more economy-he'll tune it your way.

After collecting data, Jeff reviews and makes the proper adjustments to dial-in this package to deliver what we're looking for. He hasn't "hammered" the throttle or redlined the tach, he has simply initiated a load while running the transmission through the gears for real-world testing. After some break-in miles, we'll be back to trim it in a bit more.

Which leaves us here-with the hood back on, the stickers and labels all removed, and the road calling out to a beautiful midyear to be driven. It will be a pleasure to accumulate those break-in miles before another trip to the dyno.