The perfect daily driver mod list, I wouldn’t change anything, big thanks to LS1Tech!
04-01-2011, 10:30 AM
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The perfect daily driver mod list, I wouldn’t change anything, big thanks to LS1Tech! Last summer I was contemplating building up my red LT1 Z28 vert. I ended up finding a great deal locally on my WS6, also a red vert, so I jumped on it instead & sold my LT car.
My WS6 was BONE stock, clear down to the airlid & exhaust. It was owned by a local Dr. who took excellent care of it. He used it to commute to & from the hospital, kept it garaged at home & parked in the covered parking garage at work.
So, first thing I did is register here at LS1tech & start reading.
I’m a hands on kind of guy, but as of last summer, I had done little more mechanic work than swapping out an alternator, changing belts, etc. The easy stuff.
That said, I was ready to get my hands dirty on this car & see what I could do.
So, I set out with a goal & a budget in mind. I wanted the most powerful N/A car I could have while maintaining excellent street manners. I wanted it to sound amazing, but not like a pro-stock, & certainly not too loud in the cabin of the car. I didn’t want the exhaust to ever become annoying, & I also have four children that I caravan around when my wife is gone somewhere in the Expedition. I wanted to keep excellent dependability & I didn’t want to have to spin it to the moon to make power. The more power under the curve, the better. I might make a trip or two to the track at some point just to see what she does, but make no mistake, this is a 100% daily driven street car, & it will never see any kind of power adders.
So after lots of original research, research along the way, & an end-plan in mind, I feel like I have finally accomplished everything I set out to. I don’t have one single regret & I feel that I made the best choice for my goals with every single mod I’ve done. Thanks be to LS1tech!
There are probably a LOT of members here that have very similar goals for their car. I think I’m representative of a pretty large percentage of us, so maybe this can help some others in decisions on their car.
I’m not going to go through every single mod. I’m just going to assume everybody knows that you really need to have most of the bolt-ons taken care of before you start with the big stuff. That said, here are some of the more major decisions I made along the way.
Stall converter. Yank SS-3200. This & the exhaust are the only mods on the car that I paid someone to install. I did all other labor myself. I had so many old time hot-rodders ask me why in the hell I would want a 3200 stall for the street. They all thought I would hate it. Not only were they wrong, but this may be the single best mod to do on an A4! I don’t have experience with cheaper stall’s, but this Yank drives excellent! I honestly don’t even know it’s there until I hammer the gas, THEN you know it’s there. If this car was gonna see track time, I would have really considered the SS3600, but as it is, I feel this is the PERFECT stall for a TRUE DD.
Cam. Comp 228/232, .588 .574 113+3 LSA. I did a ton of research on cams. Looked at a BUNCH of graphs, & this is what I ended up with. I was very close to a TSP 228r, but decided to go just a little bigger (thanks to Damian for quite a bit of PM info here). This cam sounds amazing, drives amazing (once tuned correctly), & pulls like a ****. Excellent power everywhere with a very flat torque curve. Perfect cam for my goals!
Heads. PRC Stage 2.5 5.3's. This is the last engine mod I made, as I just finished the swap about a month ago. I have about 500 miles on them now, & they really rounded out everything about my setup. Power is better everywhere, especially 4k-6300k where my shift points are set, & the car sounds meaner than ever! Again, I think these were the perfect heads for my goals & within a limited budget.
Intake. Fast 85 & 85mm TB. I really think an LS6 intake is the best bet for most in my shoes, but I ran into a great deal locally on a Fast 78 & Summit 85mm TB. I did some research & ended up boring out the throat of the Fast intake to 85mm to match the TB. At that point, I took the intake apart, ported it, & smoothed some areas up after reading some tutorials here. So, I have a ported Fast 85 & 85mm TB for basically the same price as an LS6 intake & stock TB. I believe the Fast is perfect for my mods, although my original plan was LS6, which I think would be a great choice for others in the same boat as me.
Exhaust. Like I said earlier, I wanted great sound & free-flowing (who doesn't), but not too loud in the cabin. I had my local exhaust shop fab up some 3” true duals, x-pipe, 2.5” over the axel, out the back into a pair of Flowmaster Super 44 dual chamber mufflers & capped off with some Corsa tips. The sound is amazing & the cost was barely more than a good ORY/catback setup. It is literally perfect to my ears & for my goals. Sound so much better than any y-pipe setup I’ve ever heard on our cars. You can certainly hear it in the car, but it does not get annoying & doesn't sound raspy. Again, I can’t say enough about my exhaust. It’s exactly what I wanted!
Wheels/tires/suspension. I was so happy with everything when I finished up my head swap. I only had one problem. My 19” C6 wheels & run-flat tires were worthless for anything except looks! They were like the national media, spin, spin, spin, at any speed when I mashed the gas! I ended up selling off the C6 W&T & buying a set of 17” TTM’s wrapped in 315 Toyo drag radials. Amazing! I can finally hook up & feel the power of my car! Again, one of the best mods I could ever have imagined. I can’t believe how well these tires hook on the street, & they even perform decently in the rain. Between the W&T & my other suspension mods, I get no wheel hop at all & everything just feels so tight. On a side note, the subframe connectors were also an great mod for me. I would go as far as to say they are almost a necessity on a vert!
Last, but not least, TUNING! I cannot overstate this enough. Once you get everything else modded & where you want it, a good tune, no, a GREAT tune is a MUST for driveability. Long story short, I was screwed on a local dyno tune. I drove 125 miles round trip after my cam swap. For $450, the guy spent 30 minutes & 4 dyno pulls & said he was done. I didn’t know any better & drove back home. My car sucked. Driveability was terrible. I was depressed. I called him & had it back two more times & even left it overnight. That’s another 250 miles of driving, plus 250 more for my two rides back when I left it overnight. Every time he touched it, it was worse than before. This was the ONLY thing I paid someone to do other than stall converter & exhaust, as mentioned above. I finally figured if I want it done right, I needed to do it myself, just like everything else. So, I bought HP Tuners & began reading & learning. Long story short, I had a very generous local tuner hook me up with a free base-tune after seeing my story on here & how I got screwed. Turns out he fixes this guys broke-*** tunes quite often. After uploading the base-tune he emailed me, my car ran much, much better. Since then, I bought a wideband & have learned to tune myself. My car now runs like a million bucks. If only I knew then what I know now. I paid that jackwagon hundreds of dollars to dial in my WOT AFR. That is literally all he did other than cookie-cutter changes that he makes to every car, raise shift points, delete rear 02's, etc. Damn, pisses me off to even think about.
I know this was pretty long-winded, but I mainly wanted to say thanks for all the participation here. Sometimes you have to weed out fact from fiction, but if you read enough, you can usually tell the guys that really know their stuff. Keep following those guys threads & you can go from changing out an alternator to head & cam swaps in your garage!
Thanks again everyone, I’m gonna go take a drive with the top down & enjoy this beautiful Oklahoma day in my dream car (within reason )!
PS As an edit to the original post. I do actually have one small regret. If I were to do it over again, I would definitely do heads & cam at the same time. That was two pretty big jobs, & I probably could have saved about 12 hours of labor if I would have done it all at once. For that matter, the headers would have been a piece of cake with the heads off. That said, I did get to enjoy some of the mods a little earlier on, & I also got to actually feel the difference that each mod made. So, it's not a big regret at all, but if I had it to do over again...
My WS6 was BONE stock, clear down to the airlid & exhaust. It was owned by a local Dr. who took excellent care of it. He used it to commute to & from the hospital, kept it garaged at home & parked in the covered parking garage at work.
So, first thing I did is register here at LS1tech & start reading.
I’m a hands on kind of guy, but as of last summer, I had done little more mechanic work than swapping out an alternator, changing belts, etc. The easy stuff.
That said, I was ready to get my hands dirty on this car & see what I could do.So, I set out with a goal & a budget in mind. I wanted the most powerful N/A car I could have while maintaining excellent street manners. I wanted it to sound amazing, but not like a pro-stock, & certainly not too loud in the cabin of the car. I didn’t want the exhaust to ever become annoying, & I also have four children that I caravan around when my wife is gone somewhere in the Expedition. I wanted to keep excellent dependability & I didn’t want to have to spin it to the moon to make power. The more power under the curve, the better. I might make a trip or two to the track at some point just to see what she does, but make no mistake, this is a 100% daily driven street car, & it will never see any kind of power adders.
So after lots of original research, research along the way, & an end-plan in mind, I feel like I have finally accomplished everything I set out to. I don’t have one single regret & I feel that I made the best choice for my goals with every single mod I’ve done. Thanks be to LS1tech!
There are probably a LOT of members here that have very similar goals for their car. I think I’m representative of a pretty large percentage of us, so maybe this can help some others in decisions on their car.
I’m not going to go through every single mod. I’m just going to assume everybody knows that you really need to have most of the bolt-ons taken care of before you start with the big stuff. That said, here are some of the more major decisions I made along the way.
Stall converter. Yank SS-3200. This & the exhaust are the only mods on the car that I paid someone to install. I did all other labor myself. I had so many old time hot-rodders ask me why in the hell I would want a 3200 stall for the street. They all thought I would hate it. Not only were they wrong, but this may be the single best mod to do on an A4! I don’t have experience with cheaper stall’s, but this Yank drives excellent! I honestly don’t even know it’s there until I hammer the gas, THEN you know it’s there. If this car was gonna see track time, I would have really considered the SS3600, but as it is, I feel this is the PERFECT stall for a TRUE DD.
Cam. Comp 228/232, .588 .574 113+3 LSA. I did a ton of research on cams. Looked at a BUNCH of graphs, & this is what I ended up with. I was very close to a TSP 228r, but decided to go just a little bigger (thanks to Damian for quite a bit of PM info here). This cam sounds amazing, drives amazing (once tuned correctly), & pulls like a ****. Excellent power everywhere with a very flat torque curve. Perfect cam for my goals!
Heads. PRC Stage 2.5 5.3's. This is the last engine mod I made, as I just finished the swap about a month ago. I have about 500 miles on them now, & they really rounded out everything about my setup. Power is better everywhere, especially 4k-6300k where my shift points are set, & the car sounds meaner than ever! Again, I think these were the perfect heads for my goals & within a limited budget.
Intake. Fast 85 & 85mm TB. I really think an LS6 intake is the best bet for most in my shoes, but I ran into a great deal locally on a Fast 78 & Summit 85mm TB. I did some research & ended up boring out the throat of the Fast intake to 85mm to match the TB. At that point, I took the intake apart, ported it, & smoothed some areas up after reading some tutorials here. So, I have a ported Fast 85 & 85mm TB for basically the same price as an LS6 intake & stock TB. I believe the Fast is perfect for my mods, although my original plan was LS6, which I think would be a great choice for others in the same boat as me.
Exhaust. Like I said earlier, I wanted great sound & free-flowing (who doesn't), but not too loud in the cabin. I had my local exhaust shop fab up some 3” true duals, x-pipe, 2.5” over the axel, out the back into a pair of Flowmaster Super 44 dual chamber mufflers & capped off with some Corsa tips. The sound is amazing & the cost was barely more than a good ORY/catback setup. It is literally perfect to my ears & for my goals. Sound so much better than any y-pipe setup I’ve ever heard on our cars. You can certainly hear it in the car, but it does not get annoying & doesn't sound raspy. Again, I can’t say enough about my exhaust. It’s exactly what I wanted!
Wheels/tires/suspension. I was so happy with everything when I finished up my head swap. I only had one problem. My 19” C6 wheels & run-flat tires were worthless for anything except looks! They were like the national media, spin, spin, spin, at any speed when I mashed the gas! I ended up selling off the C6 W&T & buying a set of 17” TTM’s wrapped in 315 Toyo drag radials. Amazing! I can finally hook up & feel the power of my car! Again, one of the best mods I could ever have imagined. I can’t believe how well these tires hook on the street, & they even perform decently in the rain. Between the W&T & my other suspension mods, I get no wheel hop at all & everything just feels so tight. On a side note, the subframe connectors were also an great mod for me. I would go as far as to say they are almost a necessity on a vert!
Last, but not least, TUNING! I cannot overstate this enough. Once you get everything else modded & where you want it, a good tune, no, a GREAT tune is a MUST for driveability. Long story short, I was screwed on a local dyno tune. I drove 125 miles round trip after my cam swap. For $450, the guy spent 30 minutes & 4 dyno pulls & said he was done. I didn’t know any better & drove back home. My car sucked. Driveability was terrible. I was depressed. I called him & had it back two more times & even left it overnight. That’s another 250 miles of driving, plus 250 more for my two rides back when I left it overnight. Every time he touched it, it was worse than before. This was the ONLY thing I paid someone to do other than stall converter & exhaust, as mentioned above. I finally figured if I want it done right, I needed to do it myself, just like everything else. So, I bought HP Tuners & began reading & learning. Long story short, I had a very generous local tuner hook me up with a free base-tune after seeing my story on here & how I got screwed. Turns out he fixes this guys broke-*** tunes quite often. After uploading the base-tune he emailed me, my car ran much, much better. Since then, I bought a wideband & have learned to tune myself. My car now runs like a million bucks. If only I knew then what I know now. I paid that jackwagon hundreds of dollars to dial in my WOT AFR. That is literally all he did other than cookie-cutter changes that he makes to every car, raise shift points, delete rear 02's, etc. Damn, pisses me off to even think about.
I know this was pretty long-winded, but I mainly wanted to say thanks for all the participation here. Sometimes you have to weed out fact from fiction, but if you read enough, you can usually tell the guys that really know their stuff. Keep following those guys threads & you can go from changing out an alternator to head & cam swaps in your garage!
Thanks again everyone, I’m gonna go take a drive with the top down & enjoy this beautiful Oklahoma day in my dream car (within reason
)!PS As an edit to the original post. I do actually have one small regret. If I were to do it over again, I would definitely do heads & cam at the same time. That was two pretty big jobs, & I probably could have saved about 12 hours of labor if I would have done it all at once. For that matter, the headers would have been a piece of cake with the heads off. That said, I did get to enjoy some of the mods a little earlier on, & I also got to actually feel the difference that each mod made. So, it's not a big regret at all, but if I had it to do over again...
Last edited by osuhog; 04-06-2011 at 08:42 AM.
04-01-2011, 12:40 PM
#5
I finally figured if I want it done right, I needed to do it myself.
This is my motto ALWAYS. Glad everything got figured out.
HPTuners is a GREAT tool to have not only to be able to tune the car yourself but for diagnostics as well. The scan tool portion is awesome! I'm not sure how people have a modified f-body without something such as HPT.
This is my motto ALWAYS. Glad everything got figured out.
HPTuners is a GREAT tool to have not only to be able to tune the car yourself but for diagnostics as well. The scan tool portion is awesome! I'm not sure how people have a modified f-body without something such as HPT.
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04-01-2011, 02:17 PM
#11
Great Story!! I would love to hear your car on the inside and outside. Maybe you could upload so vids for all of us!! Yes I to learned alot on this site. I started off with installing my own lid to installing h/c/i/e by myself. You always appreciate it more when you do the work. all the blood and sweat pays off.
Good luck and enjoy your car!!
Good luck and enjoy your car!!
04-01-2011, 02:33 PM
#12
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Today in Oklahoma is the reason God made convertibles. I did not want to come back to work after my extended lunch.
That said, thanks for all the kind words!
I see Thunderstruck checked into this thread. I should mention, he was my original motivation to bore & port my intake. Thanks again for the help on that man!
MM98 checked in also. He had a big part in me getting the free base-tune from our local tuner after my crap dyno tune. He turned me on to the right guy & it payed off. Thanks to you too man!
Here are a few pics I just snapped, as well as an exhaust video I just took real quick in my driveway. I don’t know how much good the exhaust clip will actually do to support my case. After listening to it, my digital camera microphone & computer speakers just don't do it any justice.
I should also mention, I’m quite sure there are plenty of other parts that would have fit the bill & made me just as happy. I know there are other great sponsors here with great products besides Yank, TSP, Comp, etc. These are just the particular parts I chose (after a lot of deliberation in some cases).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBFr6mLOFVU
That said, thanks for all the kind words!
I see Thunderstruck checked into this thread. I should mention, he was my original motivation to bore & port my intake. Thanks again for the help on that man!
MM98 checked in also. He had a big part in me getting the free base-tune from our local tuner after my crap dyno tune. He turned me on to the right guy & it payed off. Thanks to you too man!
Here are a few pics I just snapped, as well as an exhaust video I just took real quick in my driveway. I don’t know how much good the exhaust clip will actually do to support my case. After listening to it, my digital camera microphone & computer speakers just don't do it any justice.
I should also mention, I’m quite sure there are plenty of other parts that would have fit the bill & made me just as happy. I know there are other great sponsors here with great products besides Yank, TSP, Comp, etc. These are just the particular parts I chose (after a lot of deliberation in some cases).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBFr6mLOFVU
Last edited by osuhog; 04-04-2011 at 09:30 AM.
04-01-2011, 02:47 PM
#13
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Awesome man! I have a similar cam and similar mods! My car was tuned in Oklahoma (live here also) recently for the cam. It seems like it def could use more tuning though, I'm very curious who tuned yours the first time? Pm with the name if you would?
04-01-2011, 04:40 PM
#15
Not sure what's up. I believe the OP, but I also know when Brett did mine he did a bit of idle tuning and a while running the car on the dyno...I assume he was tuning part throttle values and things like that. He then did a WOT run and my trans/driveshaft grenaded. Went back a few months later and he finished the WOT tuning. $450 total.
I do think my car can benefit from more tuning, it has occasional problems coming to stops and will hunt for idle. His tune is still better than my previous mail order tune.
From now on I would like to learn to do it myself though.
04-01-2011, 05:17 PM
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Great post. I can't wait to do my cam. How much did you gain with ur heads after you did the cam? I plan on getting a cam very close to that one (228r) and I am trying to decide if I should wait awhile and do the head swap while im there.
04-01-2011, 06:15 PM
#17
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Also, in case anybody was wondering any more about the crap dyno tune I paid for. I have a lot of examples of where this tune was really bad, fuel trims +20 all over the place, surging at stop lights, undriveable cold starts, & just bad overall driveability, etc. Here's one that really pissed me off. I asked this tuner multiple times as my car was on the dyno what my injector duty cycle was. I was concerned with whether or not I needed bigger injectors. He told me over & over again that my injectors were fine, but he could never give me a # when I asked about the actual duty cycle. One of the first things I did when I got HP Tuners was went out & logged a WOT run. I was NOT happy when I got back & saw my injector duty cycle was 121% at 6277 RPM's.
It's a miracle that I didn't grenade my engine.
