01/12/08 - Pantera: I got the drivers side seatbelts installed and Jaime finished up the remaining center console pieces. The box surrounding the e-brake lever was designed by Jaime out of cardboard, then I cut it out of sheet metal and welded it up. Jaime covered it and designed a custom e-brake boot to cover the base of the lever. The ash tray is new as well. It's the same one that can be found in the Vipers. I liked it because it was a lot simpler than the original one, and didn't look as dated. The interior is coming together!

12/30/07 - Pantera: With Christmas vacation at an end, I have to say that we didn't get nearly as much finished on the Pantera as I would have liked. But that said, I have had a wonderful vacation full of other adventures so all is good in the universe. Today I did manage to get the new 3-point retractable seatbelt system figured out and installed. Passenger side is done, drivers side awaits backordered parts from Summit Racing. Going to be so much more comfortable (and safe) than the factory lap belts. I also installed new door latches (not in the picture).

12/25/07 - Pantera: After opening Christmas presents, I moved on to installing a new fuseblock in the Pantera. Nothing was wrong with the old one, but this new one is so slick and compact that I couldn't resist. Since I already had the seats and carpet out of the car, I had lots of room to work. The old fuseblock used old style fuses and was seperated into two seperate blocks. One small block just for the window motors, and one large block for everything else. The old style fuses are getting harder and harder to find and I just don't see them having as good of connectivity as the new style.

This new fuseblock was purchased from Pantera Electronics. It's the same size as the larger of the old fuseblocks, but includes the power window fuses as well. The fuse ratings are labeled on the side, and when a circuit is blown a little LED lights up to show you which fuse is the problem. So cool! Installation is easy and everything worked on the first try!

12/23/07 - Pantera: We're getting back to the Pantera now that the Miata frenzy is settling down. The interior has been out of the car for a while. I welded in two pieces of 2" x 1/4" Steel Plate down the length of each door sill area for chassis strengthening. This is where most of the chassis flex occurs in the Panteras. The holes for the old seat belt plates are covered up since I'll be converting to a 3-point seatbelt system. Jaime finished up the center firewall piece and we finally fit the new roll bar. The seatbelt tabs at the top had to be cut off, ground, rewelded and repainted to match up with the seatbelt bolt holes. I drilled and tapped the 1/4" steel plate on the floor for the roll bar to bolt to. Everything is extremely solid and tight fitting.

10/19/07 - Pantera: Took the day off work today. Picked up some paint and supplies for the Miata, and I installed a brand new Momo steering wheel in the Pantera. Looks more modern and it's really comfortable, I love it!

9/23/07 - Pantera: The Pantera work keeps coming. This weekend we installed the Cat Eye Quad Headlight Kit from Amerisport Industries. The kit converts the huge factory froggy looking headlights to more modern, low profile headlights. Expensive, but amazingly high quality. Installation would have been straight foreward if our Pantera didn't have a couple frozen headlight adjustment screws, and a oddly sized headlight bucket hole that didn't have enough clearance. At any rate, after working the majority of Saturday on the conversion, Jaime and I were eventually victorious. The car looks awesome with the headlights on now (yay!) and night vision should be greatly improved. Check out the before and after:

9/09/07 - Pantera: Jaime and I worked like crazy to get as much done on the Pantera before this weekend's car show as possible. We finished both door panels and armrests, kick panels and the rear firewall cover. I also replaced the orange switch LED's with blue ones, and added som angle trim rings on the Autometer gauges to point them towards the driver. Slowly but surely the Pantera interior is coming together. Still have a lot of work ahead of us though.

8/26/07 - Pantera: We finally got some traction on the Pantera door panels. To catch you up, we had a couple things going on that necessitated a redesign of the factory door panels. First, we shaved the door handles on the outside of the car and installed remote door poppers. We no longer need the door lock on the inside of the Pantera door. Second, the factory door panels were made of some kind of plastic/fiberglass material that hasn't stood the test of time very well. They were warped, cracked and brittle. So Jaime and I decided to go the hotrod route, and make our own, flat door panels. They don't wrap around like the factory ones did. This means that the door lock hole and surrounding metal will be exposed so they needed to be cleaned up and finished nicely.

In the pictures below, you can see the original door lock hole and surrounding, unfinished metal. I welded up the hole with new sheetmetal, filled the seams, sanded and repainted semi-gloss black. Jaime cut the new door panels out of wood, sewed up a new cover (half UltraSuede, half UltraLeather), put in the new panel clips and installed the new door panel.

This week we hope to get the armrest refinished and installed, and the drivers door will be complete!

8/12/07 - Pantera: The Pantera has always had a flat steel gas pedal and normal looking rubber pedal covers so I thought it was time to dress it up a bit. Ultimate Pedals makes great looking pedals so I thought I'd give them a shot. I'm very impressed! Super high quality, great looks and they're grippy, thanks to the rubber inserts. Very cool!

4/21/07 - Panteras at Irwindale: The Foothill Pantera club arranged for a Pantera day up at Irwindale Raceway. If you arrived in a Pantera, you got free admission, special parking and a few parade laps around the track before race night begin. Was a good bit of fun. We caravanned up and back with a couple other local Panteras. Only downside was that it was a bit cold and threatening rain so the spectator turnout wasn't as huge as it was the last time I went with the Cobra club.

It's tradition to do a burnout in front of the grandstands on your parade lap. This is something I haven't really tried to do with the Pantera as I have monstrously wide Kumho V700 tires in the rear. They're actually DOT legal race tires so they're very sticky... oh, and a new transmission for the Pantera will run you just under $16,000. But screw it, I tried it anyway! My first lap around I slowed to a near stop, brought up the revs and released the clutch. Clutch couldn't hang on and just slipped. Doh! Happened on the second lap too. On the third lap as we were exiting the track, the gods must have decided that I paid my dues and had mercy on me. The clutch finally held, the tires lit up and we sailed past a bit of the grandstand sideways. Yay! Watch the short clip here.

4/07/07 - Pantera: Worked on the Pantera. I took out the door locks and installed remote door poppers in preparation of shaving the door handles. I also installed a new window regulator system from Vader Racing. Both are really nice updates to the Pantera. I can now use a remote to open the doors (no more door key, yay!) and the windows roll up and down in seconds!

C&C Car Show: Got up in time for the car show this morning. Drove down with Pinto Rick and hung out for a while. Saw the usual handful of nice cars, including a Porsche Carrera GT, an awesome old Road Runner, a Lotus Europa and more.

10/15/06 - Pantera: I am honestly not sure where the Pantera is going these days. I seem to be moving it away from "classy" and more towards "raw and functional". After last month's intake install, the Pantera started having a real pinging problem. I double checked the timing, vacuum lines and everything else. Just couldn't see anything wrong with it. I pulled the plugs and found that the #1 spark plug was coated in oil. I also noticed that the intake gaskets were leaking a little bit of water out of the water passages in the heads. I decided that the intake gasket was probably leaking oil into the #1 cylinder. My understanding is that it doesn't take much oil in the combustion chamber to cause detonation. I also discovered that 351 Cleveland heads do not have water passages on the intake side, so the heads on my Pantera aren't Cleveland heads. The numbers on the heads reveal that they are actually 1970 302 Boss heads. Cool!

Last weekend I bit the bullet and pulled the intake and valve covers, and reinstalled everything. I also added oil baffles to the valve covers because the rubber baffles built into the grommets were junk. I took the advice of my on-line Pantera buddies when installing the intake this time, using a couple new tricks. Seems to have worked perfectly. No water leaks and the install went smooth with the use of things like alignment studs and quick drying cement. The pinging was reduced, but still noticeable. Friday I picked up a couple cans of Mopar Combustion Chamber cleaner. This stuff has a great reputation of being able to clean out detonation causing carbon deposits. I used two cans and now all of the pinging is gone unless I ease onto the gas in too tall of a gear. This week I'm going to pick up another two cans and see if I can get rid of the pinging entirely.

Ram Air! I mixed PIMotorsports' Pantera side air ducts and Vararam's Street Ram Air Intake system to build my very own Pantera Ram Air intake. Works like a charm. I am shocked at what a difference it makes, even under low speeds. Feels like there is a ton more torque. Got sideways in first gear while test driving tonight, something that hasn't happened before. At low speeds there can't be much, if any. ram air effect. I can only guess that the more important difference is fresh/cool air? It's probably ten degrees cooler tonight than it has been for a while. Fall is in the air. No matter the reason, the Pantera was a blast to drive this evening. I couldn't be happier with the end result.

09/16/06 - Pantera: Got the new engine cover put on. Wow does that really clean things up! Looks so much better back there. Had a loose throttle linkage. Fixed it and can finally tell how much of a difference the new intake makes. Much better! Throttle response is much improved along with low end grunt. Feels more fun to drive.

09/10/06 - Pantera: Had a lifter ticking so I decided to adjust all the rockers. Bought a new intake that is lower so that the Panteras original engine cover will fit. The new Edelbrock Performer intake is also more "streetable", offering more torque at lower rpm's than the old Torker intake it replaces. The old Detomaso valve covers were cracked and leaking, so I replaced them with some Ford Racing tall valve covers. In the process of swapping intakes, I also found that the brake booster vacuum line was resting against one of the header tubes. When I bent the hose to move it out of the way, it cracked and broke in two! The heat made it brittle. I replaced the hose and routed it away from the headers this time. That could have been bad! Also replaced the fuel filter while I was in there.

12/03/05 - Jaime and I spent the last week working on the Pantera every evening. We've been working on the interior, and this time we were focusing on the center console, trying to finish it by the December 3rd Pantera holiday party at Pantera International. We wanted to design a center console that would have the stereo mounted horizontally and have cooler switches. I handled reworking the fiberglass and the specifics of how everything would fit together and still allow easy access to the backs of the switches and gauges. Jaime took care of the upholstery. I think it came out pretty good. We are still waiting on our switch labels to come in and there are a few things that we will change soon, but it's on the right track. We went to the PI show this morning and won a trophy for "Best Work in Progress", wohoo!

11/20/05 - Haven't had time to finish the new website design yet, as I have been very busy this weekend. We are still rounding up parts for the Miata V8 conversion, and I had to start re-building the Pantera Wiki since the database crashed last week. Jaime and I finished the commercial version of the AugerResources Pantera Shift Boot. It went up for sale this evening. I also installed a third brake light on the Pantera. I feel better having an additional brake light up a little higher. Saturday Jaime and I met some other TPOC members at Donut Derelicts. After the show we got breakfast, and then headed up to Dromo for some go cart racing. It was a hoot! And I'm still sore.

10/16/05 - Replaced all of the gauges in the Pantera with new Autometer Phantom Gauges. Merged a universal fuel level sender with the stock Pantera fuel sender, and now have a functional gas gauge, yay! Also installed new water temp and oil pressure senders that were included with the gauges. Sorry for the crappy photo, but it's raining outside today so I left the Pantera in the garage, and had to use a flash. Jaime has also redone the door panels, and shift boot. I'll get good pictures of those soon.

09/30/05 - I started tinkering around with some recording software and a mic. Took a few recordings of the Pantera this morning. I didn't have time to drive it, so I only recorded it starting up, idling and turning off from both the inside and outside of the car. This weekend I hope to record some sound clips of it on the road. Till then, here are the idling clips:

• exterior - start idle stop wave file
• exterior - start rev idle stop wave file
• interior - start idle stop wave file