An engine bay with all the parts...amazing sight.
Once the headers were on, the rest of the accessories and details could be installed. Accessory brakcet and acessories, coil packs, spark plugs, spark plug wires, throttle body, MAF, air filter housing, radiator fan, and probably some other stuff I forgot. Installing these parts was pretty straight forward, as I've done entirely too much work to this car in the past. I primed the oil system before installing the intake manifold with a drill, but since LTx's don't have a hole for the distributor, you can't prime them with the intake on. Instead, I turned the engine over with the spark plugs out. This was fast enough to generate about 20 psi of oil pressure.
An engine bay with all the parts...amazing sight.
Exotic Muscle long tube, perfect fit.
New, beefy radiator and lighter single electric fan setup.
Driver's side header. You can just see the -12 oil lines behind the header.
Then came the moment of truth...would it fire? I put the plugs in, put the fuel pump relay back in, and turned the key...and it roared to life the very first try! First start up went well, with plenty of oil pressure and no weird noises. Then again, weird noises were hard to hear with open headers. Before driving the car, I needed to get it dyno tuned. Before dynoing it, I needed to finish the rest of the exhaust. Rather than risk driving it, I bummed a trailer from a friend and towed it to work. We fabricated a custom dual 3" exhuat with a Magnaflow X pipe and dual 3" Spintech mufflers. I had never herad Spintechs in person before, but I had heard several good reviews. In person, the car sounds very good. The current setup may prove to be a bit too loud, but I'll give it a try...
After the exhaust was finished, I made an appointment to get the car dyno tuned. After a lot of research, I decided to go with Henderson Performance. They were close, have a good reputation, and have experience tuning OBDI LTx's. I bummed another trailer from another friend and made the 2.5 hour drive. They lived up to their reputation on my car: improved the power as well as the idle and drivability. The dyno chart speaks for itself:
The final corrected numbers ended up at 450 RWHP and 425 RWTQ, which is higher than I had hoped for. I noticed the correction factor ended up at 1.06, which is a bit high in my opinion. It was raining that day, with humidity araound 90 percent, with temps in the upper '80's, but I think a 1.03 correction factor is a bit more reasonable. Either way, my goal was only 420 RWHP, and I beat that even with the uncorrected numbers. At this point, the engine only has about 30 miles on it, so it should gain a bit more power as it frees up. I do plan to get back to the drag strip at some point and see what kind of trap speed I can knock down. I have to give a big thanks to Lloyd Elliot of Elliot's Pork Works for excellent machine work and lots of advice through the engine building process.
What's next? Coming up quick is the start of school and the Fall 08 Texas A&M Sports Car Club auto-x season. There is a practice event coming up this weekend where I hope to make some shake down runs and really open it up for the first time. Hopefully I'll have some event pics to post up soon.
The engine ran perfectly. It started up every time I asked it to, and ran strong all day. It never got hot, and the oil cooler kept the oil temps right where they needed to be. The engine even had oil pressure at the end of the day! The power was WAY more than the tires could handle, even when the car was pointed straight, but it definitely feels faster than it was before. My single cooling fan may prove to not be quite big enough for hard, continous auto-x abuse in the summer heat. At the end of the day, the temps would creep up a bit higher when sitting still, but would instantly drop when the car got moving again. More testing is needed before I really know for sure. The clutch worked well, and I didn't stall the car too many times. As the miles start to add up, the clutch is getting easier and easier to use, but the combination of a big cam, light flywheel, and unsprung clutch will never be easy to modulate.
Pimp-tastic f-body wheels! Picture by Chris Hinz
Just a bit loose... Picture by Chris Hinz
I want to get back to the track ASAP, but I feel I need a bit more time to shake out and break in the motor. I don't want to rush out to TWS only to blow my car up again. The first few auto-x's of the semester should give me a great idea if the motor is going to live or not. So far, so good...