Our 69 Yenko Chevelle restoration

[450hp]

Hi Rick, my intake on my LS6 is unrestored and also has a little orange paint on the edges, as the valve covers too, matches yours to the T. Your Yenko is a work of art. You and Annie are the best caretakers a Chevelle could have.

[Slob44]

Rick, while studying your pictures today I noticed the white square grill mounting nuts. Are these what came on your car originally? My 69 Baltimore convertible had round grill mounting nuts( I have parted numerous 69 Baltimore cars and have found round ones on all of them as well. the originals I have are very brittle and I have been trying to find "correct" round ones. See the pictures attached. As you can see these are all a yellowish color, do you know if they where white and just turned yellow with age? thanks so much for posting all of these amazing pictures and assisting me with my restoration,
Rob

[Slob44]

Rick it also appears your Headlight retaining buckets are a natural metal color - I was only able to see a small portion on your grill mounting bracket pictures. my originals are black(see pictures attached) I have not touched these and they are in the exact state that I took them off the car. I was just about to begin restoring them.

[SS427]

Kurt, thanks for your input. I have literally studies this for hundreds of hours over the last 30 plus years and disagree. I have heard the same thing though oddly enough I have never seen a photo of the mask. I have been told they were separate masks, 1 for the intake and two others for the valve covers because some corvette big blocks used aluminum intakes but painted valve covers so they could not use one continuous mask. I have also studied many NCRS manuals and forums on the subject. Arguably this has been an ongoing debate since restorations started.

In addition, in my now 100,000 plus photo database I have many photos of not only original photos from back when the cars were near new but also from survivor engines.

Lastly, I found the original intake for the car in the garage when we pulled the car out. From there you can clearly see the factory overspray. I may have "dusted" mine with a little more paint (indirect spray so it will wear off rather easily) than what the original photos show but the original overspray could have deteriorated after 19,000 miles to that point as well and I assume some of mine will also deteriorate once the engine is run for some time. Bottom line is, it is hard to argue with the photos of my original intake which is why I did what I did.

[SS427]

A couple more updates from last night. Annie picked up the carpet last night so we came back to the shop and finished installing it. They were able to seam the center piece that runs over the tunnel using the same material the factory did.

I added the manufactures placard back to the carpet. Unfortunately and like a dumba$$ I forgot to photograph which tag went on which piece of carpet so knowing my luck I installed the rear tag on the front carpet.

[SS427]

Thanks to Bruce H for selling me all the NOS front trim for the car and Phil W for supplying me with a template to drill the mounting holes for the small center trim between the headlight buckets.

Even brand new parts can fit like crap so many modifications were made to fit the headlight buckets to the nose completely flat as out of the wrapper they would not lay perfect. After much time and grinding they fit like a glove. Next will be the addition of the grille.

[SS427]

Restored original to the car battery junction block.

[Charley Lillard]

On my 1100 mile 70 Z28 it was apparent the factory had a detail guy brush paint red and silver around that area by hand where needed. The remains on your intake look more like brushed on paint than overspray. Just a thought.

[Kurt S]

I figured you had good reasons to do it that way.
It also could be a difference between Tonawanda and Flint.

[SS427]

Charley, you are correct on your engine and I used the same techniques when restoring Marks Z28. However, that is a small block from Flint so I cannot say they used the same process. I have honestly never seen brush marks on a Tonawanda engine that I can remember. When I get time I will go through all my photos to see if I can post other examples.