> Greetings,
> I'm considering a move to the left coast (Santa Cruz area) and am
> concerned about bringing my LBC into the state.
Well, with a '73 you miss the $500 out-of-state registration fee that
California enforces on post-75 cars not initially registered in CA.
So the outlook isn't entirely black.
> Am I automaticly in trouble because of the cam and/or headers, or is it solely
> up to the sniffer?
Yes, then no to your two questions. That is, the CA smog test consists
of two parts: a visual inspection to make sure that nothing is missing,
followed by a functional inspection to determine emissions at a range
of RPM that is still being argued about. (There's a big political
football being kicked around right now about whether to close down
the 9000 privately run smog test facilities and replace them with seven
state run centers, which would replace a 15-minute $15 test with a
30-minute, $90 test for which you'd probably have to wait four years
for a test you have to take every two. If this happens, I will probably
just relocate; it's about a toss-up which is more annoying, the laws or
the traffic.)
You just might be able to squeak by with the cam, since that's not
something anyone can see. It depends on how much of a change it
makes in your measured emissions. There is also (for the time
being, anyway) a sliding scale for the cap to repair costs required
to bring cars back into compliance. Older cars have lower caps. But
if you have modified the car to some degree, the cap is waived and
you have to pay whatever it costs to return it to stock.
If the motor looked externally stock and idled reasonably well, you
might be able to convince someone that it's just an old, worn motor
that you've been meaning to rebuild One Of These Days and that it
would cost more than the cap for '73 (which is something like $150?
I can't recall) to fix it. But you'd have to have all the smog gear
on and functioning to get to that point, and it's certainly illegal
to do this knowingly.
> Could some kind soul direct me to who the appropriate
> Calif. agency is for these questions and specs? (DMV???) I'd like to test
> it and get it right here before I haul it cross-continent.
Crowds, draconian laws, and now earthquakes. Where is UTK, anyway,
and how much does a 4-bedroom home cost there? Maybe we can trade...
> PS Do calif. vanity plates allow 8 letters? I'm thinking of MONEYPIT :-)
Heh. When I ran the Healey Club newsletter, the report of upcoming
tours, meets, parties and other gatherings was called the Event Horizon.
Nobody ever called me on it, but my carefully prepared answer was that
everyone always called their cars a black hole for spare cash... :-)
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