[TheSilverBuick]

Originally Posted by azmusclecar

you work your magic and I believe your helper deserves a bit of credit and a raise........rumor has it he may go union on you...........and then where will your help be??????????????????????

;
okay back to work..................for you ...................

lol

[TheSilverBuick]

So moving back to the engine in the Firebird. In good news, I put two different mechanical oil pressure gauges on it today and they read 8-10psi higher than the gauge in the car, so the engine is probably not wounded like I thought. I'm feeling a lot better about using it.

I wired up the battery disconnect switch. It's a 4-pole one so it not only kills the main power wire, but also the dedicated power feed to the ECU which inturn shuts off the fuel pump/engine. Don't have to worry about the alternator keeping it running.
https://www.facebook.com/randal.burn...5711480233674/

Then started on removing the manifolds from the engine to mock up the intake and header to make sure there weren't any surprises.

The 2.5" exhaust with glass pack has served me well, but is now replaced with a 4" pipe.


Intake manifold fits. Of course its not port matched to this head, its about 1/8" off.


I do like how this is looking!


The headers clear everything!


However, there is only about 1/8" clearance between it and the alternator. I have a 3/4" spacer on the alternator that I think I can remove as well as use a shorter belt to pull it down and away.


Then I finished wrapping the exhaust. If I have time I'll make some tin heat shields as well. Thermal management I think will be important.

[azmusclecar]

GO man GO!

No not mango....................... MAN GO! :

[TheSilverBuick]

Soooo close! I was hoping to fire it up yesterday, but I didn't have the correct adapters for the fuel line to fuel rail. I also need some fittings and hose for moving the cooling lines around the exhaust. Hopefully get that taken care of today or tomorrow. I will then start on cleaning up all the wiring, but it will be minimal because I plan on making a new engine wiring harness to go with the new engine.

The turbo and hoses are not clamped down yet as I plan on cleaning out the intake tubes before running the turbo, and I plan on removing the turbo for first fire up to blow any remaining crap in the exhaust header out first.

8 days until I head out on a 3500+ mile journey!

[gtospieg]

very cool...good luck on your trip

[Jeff Hamlin]

Outstanding use of limited space!

[GTOWAGON]

I haven't seen so much stuff crammed into such a tight space since prom nite

[azmusclecar]

Originally Posted by GTOWAGON

I haven't seen so much stuff crammed into such a tight space since prom nite

[Bill Hanlon]

Originally Posted by azmusclecar

I wonder who he was watching.

[azmusclecar]

Originally Posted by Bill Hanlon

I wonder who he was watching.

HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! good one Bill

[TheSilverBuick]

Yuk yuk yuk =P

I've been busy. Time is getting short! In short, I've driven it to work two days in a row, had one hiccup and have made 4 psi of boost at half throttle at 2500 rpm, so I do not think I'll have a spooling problem.

I was really excited to drive it to work yesterday, I stopped at a car wash on the way to work, washed the car, then about ten minutes later sitting in stop and go traffic (mostly stopped) I noticed the coolant temperature rising. Ordinarily it rises at a stop until 200ºF when I'd have the fan kick on then within 10 seconds it starts dropping. This time by 203ºF I knew something was amiss. The computer said the engine fan should be on, but it didn't seem like it, so I pulled into a Home Depot parking lot to check it out. Got out of the car and I couldn't hear the fan then right as I was reaching for the hood latch this happen!


Okay, it turned out that the heater hose popped off the radiator, and upon inspection I think the hose clamp was loose. All the steam is from the electric water pump still pumping hot water out, not necessarily from boiling over. The hose clamp was on the ground and I didn't have to loosen it at all to put it back on.


So I got 5 gallons of water from Home Depot and was on my way. I was running straight water anyways because tracks don't like glycol spills.


My poor just washed car


My Ford air filter was a casulty of the spill. It turned into mush (I took this picture about 30 minutes before steaming).


So I picked up some 4" couplers yesterday to put a proper filter on it. The tube is a scrap piece of exhaust tubing I had laying around. Tonight I'll cut one that will put the filter in the fender well for cooler air. Though so far, yesterday and today at anything over a few mph the intake air temperature sensor reads ambient temps. Which beats the +40ºF the stock manifold set always registered!



I'm still tuning on it. Every drive yesterday it was running really lean so I didn't want to push it. Driving to work this morning I finally had it giving me mid-10's AFR readings as it was getting into boost. Still have not gone over 65% throttle as part of the tuning process. But good to know it can start making boost below 3,000rpm. I currently have the stiffest single wastegate spring that came in the kit installed. I have the other springs on hand to adjust it as necessary. I want to keep the boost down to around 8psi until my good engine is together.

The transmission is pretty good too! I'm still adjusting the shift points for when to be in and out of overdrive, but it'll bark the tires going into second gear with just a little extra throttle. I'll probably dial that down a little, but it's been fun yesterday and today. It runs smooth well into the 80mph's.

I think the intake and headers have upped the naturally aspirated power, but its hard to tell since I also upped the gear ratio from 3.42 to 3.89 as well. I think I have enough fuel pump to get me to around 350 horsepower, maybe even 400 horsepower, which would be double what it was making before.

Now to get the trailer sorted. I head out Tuesday!

[azmusclecar]

Well I'm glad it was a STEAMbird and NOT a FIREBIRD....................

They name cars that literally could be catastrophic should they live up to their name.

Here I thought everything always went well for everyone else and I was the only one who suffered at the hands of Murphys LAW.................

It looks like the casualty wasn't too bad. And you got the little tyke at home to check your work next time.............so let the quality inspector do his job.

There's nothing wrong in doing something wrong, unless you do it the same way again and expect different results. That is called insanity.........or so I've been told........
many times.......................
and by some that may read this post..............
you know who you are.........

[Bill Hanlon]

Just curious:

"heater hose connected to the radiator" - Is that stock or something you have done? If yours, why?

[TheSilverBuick]

Nothing outside the engine is really stock.

I am running an electric water pump because the EFI fuel rails interfere with the stock thermostat housing and because of that I decided to go with a reverse flow cooling system to cool the head first. Then I bought a discount alumium radiator that is for 2nd Gen F-body radiator and had a heater hose return port there, so I utilized it.

[TheSilverBuick]

The Final Count Down! Tied up a lot of little loose ends and now going on to packing.


A gratuitous engine shot.


I need to pick up two more clamps, but have moved the air filter into the fender.


I thought about just reading the speed off the display, which will always work in a pinch, but decided to step up to an actual speedometer/trip/odometer gauge. It's a Summit brand electric speedometer. I don't have the time to pull the dash to tuck the wires, but this will get me by for now. I'll get a black wrapping on the wires tomorrow. Supposedly will report 0-60 and quarter mile times. Uses 8,000 pulses per mile output from the Mega/Microsquirt.


I'm going to change the oil tomorrow and figured I'd check the level based on how much oil is added. Here is the level with 4 quarts. Figure about 1/2 quart is in the oil filter and another quart is running through the engine, with a stock 5 quart fill it it should be right under the baffle. Its like the engineers knew what they were doing...

[azmusclecar]

Don't forget to pack your mechanics helper.......afterall, he did much of the work and deserves a vacation...........

[Formulabruce]

Did you switch to a 10si alternator on this? ( internal reg) ?

[TheSilverBuick]

I went directly to a CS144 alternator. More amps, and avalible at lower rpms. Runs 12.8v at 550rpm and all electrical equipments running (fan, water pump, two fuel pumps, headlights, etc), goes up to 14.4 v going down the road.

[TheSilverBuick]

Its been a long while since I did a real update. The short version is, the car/engine survived the drive out east, made it through Drag Week 2018, and the car is still under it's own power. All in right at 4500 miles since I left the house right after Labor Day to the second week of October when I got it home. I couldn't get it to 60ft worth a dang and would only spool up 5psi in 3rd gear giving me a dismal 15.1x at 93mph. With the 4.56 gears it had 1.8x 60ft's, with the 3.89 gears the best I could muster was 2.2x, even leaving at 2200rpm and 3psi of boost. I should have been able to crack into the 14's if I could get it to launch decently.

The long update.

The machine shop finally finished their work and I've brought it all home a couple weeks ago, but have not yet done anything with it.

I've been driving it every now and again. Took it to a Cars and Coffee last week when the weather was nice. It was still pretty cold out in the morning but not to bad by noon.


Just a bit cold in the morning.


So the oil consumption and tail pipe smoking has gone up quite a bit so I did a compression test and it wasn't pretty. Last time I did a compression test a few years ago it was about 130psi across the board, and now it looks like 4 cylinders are low with one of them being very low. I ran out of time to re-test all the cylinders or try oil in the cylinders to see if it goes up.


With the Megasquirt I did a vacuum versus crank degree plot to see if anything obvious would pop up, like a few cylinders pulling less vacuum, but nothing definitive really showed up. The plot reads backwards, so right to left with the red line being crank degrees from 0 to 720, so each vacuum peak is a cylinder, from right side is 1-5-3-6-2-4, with the right side of the peaks being as the valve opens.


While I was there I checked my injector timing versus manifold vacuum. I had set injector timing based on a spreadsheet calculation I did, and it looks like it was pretty spot on at peak vacuum. This only really helps at idle and low rpm. My goal was to inject fuel at highest vacuum after the exhaust valve closes. This was based on PipeMax plots and cam timing.


So after doing this I started thinking about the oil consumption, and it seemed I was adding significant amounts of oil prior to even leaning on it with the turbo, aka it shouldn't have been the turbo that hurt it. Maybe the rings got stuck while it sat for a chunk of summer? So I put a bunch of Marvel Mystery oil in the cylinders the other day and need to crank the engine over with the plugs out and run it a bit to see if the rings free up. This assumes it's stuck rings AND that if they've been stuck for 4,000 miles it hasn't hurt the cylinder walls even worse. Either way, it's still getting a new engine.


So a bit of a Drag Week re-cap. I've already mentioned it's soft launching, only making 5 psi in top gear for 93 mph, or approximately 240HP at race weight. Though that 240HP is 65HP more than the 175HP it was making the last time I was at the track, or a 37% increase (it's definitely noticable!). I will likely need to get a different turbo, which is not unexpected, but will wait until the new engine and cam are in to see how it acts.

Now this will be kind of a photo dump of the drive out and week.

Ready for the highway.


Crossed a huge part of the country at 80-85mph.


First stop of the trip, Elko, NV.


It had been running hot, which it shouldn't have been because the new radiator, but the big intercooler apparently was killing air flow through the radiator. So I made a stop at a parts store and raided their cardboard pile to make some baffles to force the air back through the radiator. It helped out quite a bit. So at some point I'll make tin versions.


Lots of open road. I didn't take any pictures of it, but leaving Elko my turbo oil feed line blew apart due to me accidently kinking it at some point. I used a nylon fuel like patch kit to fix it until I got to a friend's house in Nebraska to swap a new line on (that he happen to have). But this work put my schedule about a half day behind.



Then it blew the gasket on exhaust port #2 to create a nice torch mark and singe some wire harness wrap. I actually at the end of the day just took some muffler repair putty and jammed it in the hole to sit over night and it held a few days.


In Wyoming met up with another Drag Week'er to caravan out (yes the Honda).


Cruising along at 2,800rpm at 80-85, pulling the trailer. Driving out I kept the engine on the rich side as a pre-caution. By the end of the week I had it leaned out quite a bit.

[TheSilverBuick]

Then it scenery started turning greener and wetter.



Eventually stopped for dinner and wait for the rain to ease up.


The rain wasn't good for the card board box of my awning, but otherwise no real issues. Stocking up on another gallon of oil.


Then Friday driving out it blew the exhaust gasket on #1. So I did the responsible thing, pushed that piece back in place and put more muffler weld on it and waited about 30 minutes and hit the road trying to stay out of boost for a bit. The night before it had popped the previous patch, which I then re-patched.


Then Saturday around noon arrived in Commerce, GA! Registration was the next day so I figured now is a good time to changed out the intake/exhaust gasket. I had brought two spares.


I needed to trim the Clifford sourced gasket to the port match, as well as add the holes for the intake dowel pins. I brought a punch and chisel for this exact work. So lesson learned is this gasket material likely wants to be re-torqued a few times, something I had not done at all. So I spent the next three days re-torquing all the bolts each morning, after getting to the track in the morning, and again at night. The bolts I used were locking so they won't back out. So far it still appears to be holding.


Registration Day, waiting for registration to open.



Passed tech!


Day 1, in line!



And then I made a most comical mistake. Used to driving my Skylark with a 5-speed, I foot braked the car up on the line, let off the brake but muscle memory kept my foot hovering over the brake and when it was time to shift to 2nd gear I jammed on the brake like a clutch pedal as I grabbed 2nd gear! Eventually realizing my error finished the run dismally, though now I had the data I was looking for on shift rpm.


Afternoon rains came before I could make a second run. This was the only day that got rained out at the end.


So off on the road I went when the rain lightened up. First check point. For most the week I followed along Doc McIntire and the SeeRed Camaro. The weather slowed everyone down and he was running a half second off the pace he was hoping, but still won the pro-street NA class.


A lot more trees back east.


Now the days all start to blurr together.


My parents live in North Carolina so my wife and son flew out to stay with them and came to visit at Zmax, as well as a open house party at a local shop for the drag week group.






This may have been my best run of the week. Still could not get the 60ft down. I tried using a 2-step making 3psi, just foot braking, leaving from idle, leaving from a high idle, nothing was getting me there.


Pat Musi's shop was a check point.


By now I was trying some rebuild's in a can along with VR1 oil.






Lots of people complained about the hills of Tennesse, they clearly haven't been out west, lol. Beautiful scenery.