Hello, I'm Mike. In case you havent noticed I drive an '87 Cavalier with major work done to it. I am a Chevy fanatic (see pic of tattoo down below). I love all that is GM, even if it is a rebadged import. I bought my car May 5, 1995, one week before my 18th birthday. Ths is the only car I have ever owned, and I'm sure I'll have it for a long time still. I figure it like this, the car will never die, I'll just eventually give up on improving it and move on to another Chevy, probably a J body.
When I got my car I was just looking for something to drive, that wasn't my dad's car. I saw a gold 87 Cavalier in the Auto Trader for $3000. If the color wasn't bad enough, it was a 4 cylinder 4 door CS model; the 'luxury' model. I figured what the hell it's cheap and I need a car. They gave me a 1 month/1000 mile warranty on it. I figured I didnt want someone else's problems so I drove around in 1st gear for a week straight, even on the open highway, and blew both the motor and transmission. They replaced them for free with fresh reman'd units. And yes I marked the motor and trans to make sure I didnt get the same stuff back.
I didn't really know all that much about cars, except that I liked Chevy's, when I got my car. Put it to ya this way, when I did my first tune up I went to KMart, pulled a plug out of the motor(still hot-oops), went inside, and bought spark plugs that looked the same as the one I pulled out. Don't laugh too hard. Suprisingly enough I must have picked close enough plugs because I never had any problems with the plugs. Anyway, that February, I started working at Salvo Auto Parts, and I still knew nothing about cars when I started working there. I had to ask how many spark plugs were in a V8. OK, you can laugh at that, I still do. Working there I learned a lot from talking to customers and co-workers. After being there one year I replaced my entire brake system. After another 6 months I re-did the suspension. By 2 years I had rebuilt the head and did all the work myself. Now, I work for Pep Boys as a Parts Manager. I've been in the parts business for 5 years and I know as much and sometimes more than the techs we have out in the shop. I've rebuilt complete motors, heads, dabbled with transmissions, done body work, suspension, exhaust, everything. And I don't limit my knowledge to just Chevy's. I am fairly well knowledged in most cars domestic and imported, I just specialize in Chevy's, J bodies especially.
I never figured on doing anything to this car, performance wise. I don't even remember what got me started on messing with it. The first thing I did to it was remove the A/C from it. I never used it and I didn't want the extra weight and strain on the car. Then I took the stock air intake tube off and replaced it with a regular round air filter and housing. Then the back seat and other interior stuff got pulled out. After some other little dinky things, I did some research on ignition systems. I figured out how to hook up 2 MSD-6A boxes in between the module, and the stock coils. That lasted about 2 weeks before one of the coils burned up. I replaced the 2 stock coils with 4 Accel Super Coils. No problems after that. I put Accel 8.8 wires and Rapidfire plugs on to finish the ignition up. I then put Z24 exhaust on it to free up some power. Eventually I put a Camaro sideways muffler with 2 outlets on it for the dual exhaust look. I ran like that for awhile tinkering here and there, learning what I could to up some hp's.
Then, about a year ago, after giving up on finding bolt-on/plug in power adders for my car, I started research on replacing the motor with something else. The first thing I looked into was either a 2.8 or 3.1 Z24 motor. The thing that kept me away from commiting to a V6 was that I got tired of hearing riceboys complain that when they got beat it was because this person or that had more cylinders than they did. So I resolved myself to building a 4 banger that kicked ass. I originally was going to rebuild my 2.0L and go with that. I didnt want the downtime of rebuilding a motor with no extra car to drive in the meanwhile. Hmmm. what to do. I started looking at 2.2L's whenever they came into the shop. Lets see...more motor, same mounts, some had the same TBI fuel system. I looked up parts and decided to do a 2.2L in the car. Might as well squeeze out what I can, huh, so I decided to have it bored .040 (1mm) over. I decided to put a turbo on the car with the new motor. I did tons of research on turbos and fuel systems and found out it's a lot harder to fabricate than I thought. Thats why the turbo is going to happen in the spring, I need more time to research. I wanted something to add power that was easier.
Nitrous wasn't something I liked because of hearing stories of people blowing their motors with it. I looked around and asked questions and it turned out that when motors got killed from nitrous it was almost always because the person using it did it wrong somehow. They installed it bad, held it for too long, over used it, put too big a shot on..., etc. When you do the nitrous right you don't have any problems. So I started looking at different NOS kits. I wanted to use NOS company because they have an excellent reputation. The factory TBI system was a weak point for the nitrous...I needed more fuel and needed it adjustable. I looked around and found 91CavGT's homepage and how he installed '93 MPFI onto his '91. I asked him about it and did my own research on it. Good fuel, adjustibility, good stuff. It also helped solve the problem of what NOS kit to purchase. 4 intake runners, 4 nitrous fogger nozzles. Cha-Ching!! Part # 05030-FI. Just use the smaller jets and we got it made.
MSD had just come out with their Digital DIS-2 box, so I got that so that I could adjust timing and have a rev limiter. I found a trans and a cam to put in the motor. Etc etc. I'm starting to get carried away on this section. Just look at the rest of this site for the other details of this build. And I'm sure I'll repeat some shit from here on the other pages, so deal with it.
Anyway, more about me, if your still awake that is. I'm always trying to think up new things to do to my car. Ya see, when you have 0% backing from the aftermarket, you have to get creative with things. Right now I'm looking into installing a different computer, or having my computer sent out to someone to 'fix it up' for me. I stay up at night staring at the ceiling or the computer thinking up new things to try to get her moving faster. Everyday is some new idea that is either considered or shot down. I read tons of books on cars and how other people have done their's and what's new coming out that might work. That's one piece of advice I can give to you, never give up on making your car the way you want. It's not always easy, but it's almost always possible with time and thought.
Okay, enough bullshit, go look at the site and make yourself smarter and maybe faster. Just remember : Be safe when ya race and never fuck around, people die that way.
LaterZ, Mike