Credit to Cleetus for making lemonade out of lemons here. We told you last week about how, in a moment of full impulse, he bought a C6 Corvette that had taken a mild tap up front from an auction for ten grand, only to find out that the engine underneath the hood wasn’t a Corvette engine by a long shot. Instead, an iron-block LS mill had been swapped in…not so good for the power department and it’ll really screw with the Corvette’s handling, but there are benefits to running an iron block when it comes to force-feeding the car air later on down the line. The …4.8, 5.3, whatever the hell this mill is…runs and will move the car around just fine, but what about it’s power level? At their lowest, that generation Corvette came out with 400 horsepower early on and the figures started to make a sharp swing upwards throughout the run. The iron block won’t run those numbers…or will it?

As with any auction find, work needs to happen first. The Corvette is running so pig-rich that it’s actually enough unburnt fuel out of the pipes that an open spark would turn the car into a flamethrower and one look at the air-fuel ratio explains just how bad…17:1? Yikes. When a Chevy V8 refuses to go past 3,000 RPM for any reason, bad things are afoot. Luckily, some fuel map work got the engine to play along. But notice the nitrous bottle in that photo…no need to explain what that’s about. But what’s in the water bottle? Just wait…this is one of the most questionable “good ideas” we’ve seen to date!