Banana Peel
May 11, 2019
Ryan stumbled upon this 350 powered 1976 Camaro on Craigslist and rejoiced, for he had found his dream car. The car was located in northwest Rhode Island, about an hour and a half from where he lived. Ryan and his dad immediately took a trip out to see the Camaro, and discovered that it would need quite a bit of work to be safe to drive. Despite that, he convinced his parents to let him buy the car, and so their journey began.
Summer of 2019
The Camaro had plenty of issues when Ryan bought it. He was barely able to drive the car when he got it home because it had a really bad vacuum leak. One source was the Secondary Vacuum Diaphragm on the carburetor, but that didn’t fully fix it so he suspected there were more little leaks around the engine. On top of that, there was no weather stripping on the windows, doors, or trunk lid. This caused a lot of problems on the interior of the car (see next post). Other issues included: the trunk latch and lock, the door hinges, and there were some massive dents and dings in the driver side door that needed to be pulled. This was the first body work Ryan ever did, and it’s pretty obvious.
Summer of 2019 Cont.
The biggest issue with the Camaro was the floors and the trunk. The floor and trunk pans had been completely rotted through in multiple places, and even the riveted patches someone had previously put in was now rotted through as well. This began the long, arduous task of replacing the floor and trunk pans. Jay and Ryan worked much of the summer cutting out and prying up the old floor pans, just to spend more of the summer fighting the replacement pans on their way into the car. The guys learned a lot about body work and welding during this time.
November 9, 2019
On this historic day, Jay and Ryan set out semi-legally on the roads in the Camaro to find a place to thrash around for the conclusion to Episode 5. The plan for the day was to get out early, get the Camaro inspected, meet up at Jay’s house and then drive around to find a filming location. That plan was derailed very quickly when Ryan didn’t make it a mile away from his house before running out of gas in the Camaro. With the help of Camera Guy Cole, Jay brought Ryan some gas and then they were on their way to the inspection place, which ended up opening much later than it was supposed to, so they skipped the inspection and hit the highways. After quite a few hours of driving the guys were about to give up when they saw the Showcase Cinema parking lot. It was big, beautiful, and empty. So they whipped into the parking lot and thrashed the car around doing burnouts, donuts, and just all around mayhem. Lastly in post production of Episode 5, Ryan dubbed the Camaro “The Banana Peel”.
Early March 2020
Sometime after Episode 5, Ryan noticed some strange symptoms and behaviors out of The Banana Peel. Overall, the car wasn’t running very good, and there was white smoke coming out of the exhaust that had a somewhat sweet smell. After a bit of research he realized that there must have been an internal coolant leak. So he began taking off the intake manifold, exhaust manifold, and cylinder heads. When he got the cylinder heads off, there were some large pools of coolant in multiple cylinders on both sides of the engine. There was a good bit of corrosion on the head gasket, so Ryan determined that the head gasket must have been the problem.
Late March 2020
Ryan had a big dilemma on his hands. Should he pull the 350 out of the car and rebuild it or just clean out the fluids and change the head gasket? Or should he buy a new or used built 350 and slap that in the car. After boat loads of research and consideration, Ryan decided that he would pull the engine out of The Banana Peel and begin rebuilding it. This 350 was the first engine that he rebuilt, and the first time he pulled an engine out of a car.
Burnout Extra
July 2020 - March 2021
During this time, Ryan had to put The Banana Peel slightly on the back burner. He continued to work on the engine and many other smaller things on the car throughout the year, but wasn’t able to put the car as his primary focus.
March 21, 2021
The Banana Peel came with a factory vinyl top. Anyone who has worked on cars for a while knows that means bad news. Vinyl rooftops will trap rain water under the vinyl and completely destroy the roof with rust and corrosion. That was the case with The Banana Peel. Ryan knew that he would have a lot of work to do on the roof once he took the vinyl off, and he was right. The roof was a disaster. But Ryan found a product that was damn near a miracle worker. Rust Mort - Rust Conversion helped Ryan save most of the roof.
May 23, 2021
After pulling an all nighter to finish rebuilding the 350, which Ryan pulled out of the car a year prior, Jay and Ryan finally installed the engine back in the car. It took them pretty much all day to finish getting the engine ready and finally getting it in the exact right place in the car. However, they did not get to experience the glory of starting that engine just yet. The guys had a very important event to get to.
May 24, 2021
To add to the huge amount of work Ryan had to do on the roof, somebody had previously added an aftermarket sunroof to the car. Ryan didn’t love the sunroof. It barely opened, it was dirty, and wasn’t installed very well, so he decided to take the sunroof out and patch the large hole left in the roof. Luckily, the previous owner had and gave Ryan a spare roof to the car because he knew there was a lot to repair on the roof. So Jay and Ryan cut out a patch and welded it in place. They have since covered it over with Bondo in an attempt to level the roof out.
May 27, 2021 - May 30, 2021
The guys trailered The Banana Peel down to Lime Rock Park for their Memorial Day Weekend Trans Am event. Jay and Ryan got a vendor booth on the midway at Lime Rock and promoted Burnout and more specifically, the upcoming race that would take place at Lime Rock the following week between The Banana Peel and a 2018 Camaro that our friend lent us. The Banana Peel was a show stopper, drawing in tons of attention from all the events’ attendants.
May 31, 2021 - June 6, 2021
Once back from Lime Rock Park, Jay and Ryan went back at it to get the car race ready for June 7th. Don’t forget, at this point the car has no radiator, front clip, distributor, hood, interior (including seats), and the engine hasn’t even been turned over nevermind started, so the guys had another long week ahead of them. Slowly, or rather very quickly, they knocked each thing off the list. Finally, late in the evening two days before the race, Jay and Ryan got the engine running and then were able to get a short test drive in.
June 6, 2021
Jay and Ryan trailered The Banana Peel down to Lime Rock Park the night before the race. While they were preparing for the race, they did an oil change on the car at around 10:30 in pitch black. As Ryan pulled the oil pan out from under the car, he noticed something bad. There was once again coolant in the oil, which meant the exact reason why he decided to rebuild the engine in the first place was still a problem. Feeling defeated, the guys thought about what they could do. They decided to get some head gasket in a can and see if that would minimize the damage and continue with their plan.
June 7, 2021
Jay and Ryan got The Banana Peel to the track, and once they got there, they discovered that both engine oil and trans oil were leaking. Ryan did his best to clean up the oil and tighten everything down to minimize the leaks, but it wasn’t enough. The Camaro continued to leak. Luckily Lime Rock Park was cool enough and understood how much this meant to the guys that they gave them a chance to race around the autocross despite the smoke pluming out from under The Banana Peel. Check out Episode 6 to find out the rest!
Click here for Burnout Episode 6.
April 5, 2022
This photo looks familiar… After almost a year, Ryan finally started looking into the internal coolant leak again. When he opened up the engine, he discovered coolant in the cylinders and a milky oil/coolant mixture in the radiator and coolant channels. He was not happy with this discovery. This began a long process of replacing gaskets and retesting the engine for leaks.
April 14, 2022
Needing a break from the despair of trying to fix the 350, Ryan and Jay continued working on repairing the metal roof of The Banana Peel. Overall the metal in this area isn’t great, but there were a few select spots that were significantly worse and needed real metal patches to be welded in. This is one of those spots.
June 14, 2022
After welding in all the metal patches, Ryan began finishing the process. Using an angle grinder, he ground down all of the metal beads from the welding on each patch to create a smooth surface. Then he began applying Bondo over this whole area to try and create a smooth, level, and straight surface. Ryan had to apply multiple coats of Bondo to achieve the affect he was looking for, sanding smooth each layer before applying the next. This photo depicts the last layer of Bondo he applied to fill in the small gaps and imperfections left behind.