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Went to an event this weekend. Northwest Nights Motorsports held a no-prep, no time, street race (we didn't even has on the track, just the adjacent piece of old runway) at Bremerton Raceway. This is how I lived for three days.
Before I left, I had to do a slight retune to the car because it was now running on all 8 cylinders perfectly. It's a dream to tune now. Accelerates smooth at part throttle, returns to idle...even in bumper to bumper Seattle traffic. I loaded up the car with slicks, tent, cooler, tools, etc and drove the 75 miles to the track.
My plan was to just hang out, do a few runs for data and tune the car as best I could guessing at improvements in performance on logged runs. I used MPH at the moment I let off at the finish line as my yard stick. Started off at 119mph, which was a disappointment because the car did that on the old setup. My final run was 124mph after adjusting fuel, shift points and adding timing. It spun fairly hard but didn't completely blow the tires away.
I spent most of my time just hanging out and watching other people beat on their junk. But I left plenty of rubber behind at the track and went home with a car that runs better now than it ever has.
That 95kpa on my MAP has been bugging me all day. I should have investigated that while I was at the track. I had thought about it, but didn't want to mess with a car that was running really well. I suspect the air straightener I put infront of my MAF is now becoming a restriction. Can't imagine it was the filter. Maybe I need to check my throttle blade and make sure it was actually going open all the way. But, I bet it's the MAF and I will end up doing a SD tune for the track. The MAF is working so well in the car as a daily driver that I don't want to chuck it just yet. Been there, done that. Maybe this week I will redesign my cold-air intake and delete the MAF and do start doing a pure SD tune just to see if that was where my 5kpa went. We were at almost 101 kpa when I was doing these logs.
I did it at first for simplicity. Then when it turned out to be not very loud or obnoxious when driving every day, I've kept it. So nice to not have to deal with tail pipes over the rear.
Sounds great and you can definitely hear that Circle D stall working.
Like I've said before. Love that thing. Between the stall and the 4.30 gears, this cars is always a split second away from being in the meat of the powerband.
Like I said before, getting 95kpa at WOT in 100kpa conditions was bothering me. So I did some work today. First I verified that I'm getting WOT. I am pretty close to full-open, there was a bit of slack in the cable so I tightened that up and it made a slight difference. Then I turned my attention to the cold-air intake. It is a 4" tube with a card style MAF and air-straightener the runs to a filter that hangs just below the right front edge of my air dam under the bumper. It looks like this:
The new intake moves the filter to where my battery used to be. There's and opening there that is fed cold air. It's otherwise just pulling in warm under-hood air at idle.
My initial drive to redo the VE resulted in having to add a TON of fuel to the VE. Have to discount this because I fixed the rocker issue while tuning just the MAF and never did redo the VE. Car feels like it gained a boatload of torque. Off-idle throttle is a bit of an on/off switch right now compared to the buttery smooth MAF tune. 50% thorttle resulted in 91kpa. Still need to do some full-pulls to see if the KPA is back into the 99-100 range at WOT. Ambient temp today was 72 degrees, IAT went up to 99 degrees at idle where is used to be only 5 or 6 above ambient. It went down to 80 degrees at speed. Not too shabby.
I'm no stranger to running in SD full-time, and I might go with a hybrid closed loop eventually, but the wideband is pegged lean until well after 3,000rpm...so that might not be viable. And running it in our wonderful weather here in the Pacific Northwest means constant monitoring and adjustment, but again, I'm used to that.
I bet I end up cutting the honeycomb out of the MAF eventually and putting it back in...but for now the car is running strong.
Finally got a chance to take the car out for some open-road tuning. Late night on a Saturday works fairly well. A lot of the surge and hesitation is gone in the lower RPMs now, which is nice, but the main goal was to verify WOT AFR and KPA. It's a success. Dropping the screened 4" MAF, and losing a 90 degree bend has resulted in a 3kpa improvement. I'm at 98kpa WOT now instead of 95kpa. Car feels so much more powerful in the mid-range it's insane.
I don't like the fact that where I used to get near ambient IAT from having the tube run completely out of the engine compartment, I now get 90 to 100 degree IAT...and it doesn't drop much during WOT. It's currently 64 degrees here... I will revisit this at a later date. I bet I could get an air-bell to work in my bumper.
Oh, and the trans makes noise now in 2nd at half-throttle or so. No bueno. It made a little bit of noise before, but it's much louder now. It's a junkyard trans with unknown miles that I've abused for 12,000 more after doing a shift kit. I shouldn't be surprised.
Not really, but it was 99kpa KOEO at the time. It was 96-97kpa for most of the run and hit 95kpa near 6,800rpm then went back to 96kpa after that. Just two frames prior to the snapshot, it was 96kpa. If I had run again that night, I would have pulled the filter for a run just to see if that made a difference or not. I'm looking into running an unfiltered pipe to a bellmouth on the chin to see if I can get some positive pressure. Something that goes 90 degrees off the throttle-body, between the radiator and accessories, 90 degrees under the radiator and straight to the nose. But, as it is, the 2 to 3 kpa drop isn't bad. The 20-30 degrees higher than ambient IAT is worse.
Unfortunately, with my stock radiator configuration, I will have to run a 90 off the throttle-body, squeeze the tube between the radiator and waterpump pulley.
Then under the radiator, through the radiator air dam, then a removable section will snake up to the bell-mouth on the chin spoiler.
The plan is to make the last piece past the radiator dam to the bellmouth be removable and to install a cone filter on a 45 or a 90 for daily driving.
Went to a dyno day today and it was a disaster. I was messing with my IAT-ECT bias table this week to get my OLSD tune to drive a little nicer in the winter weather. I somehow managed to drag all of the lower airflow tables into the higher airflow area and my car ran so rich it left everyone in tears. It was so rich my wideband failed and my log read dead lean for the entire run. Didn't find my error until later and didn't get a chance to re run it. Made 395/510. Totally messed up. Sounded great though.
Something that goes 90 degrees off the throttle-body, between the radiator and accessories, 90 degrees under the radiator and straight to the nose. But, as it is, the 2 to 3 kpa drop isn't bad. The 20-30 degrees higher than ambient IAT is worse.
I'm working on R1 of my CAI this week and came up with something very similar. It's quite simple really, just a 4" 90 degree elbow and a 4" intercooler pipe with a 45 degree bend which puts the filter in the passenger corner. I still need to add the MAF, swap out the smallish filter and fabricate an isolation box.
Yeah, that's essentially how mine is currently set up for the winter. I'm going to do my ram air deal when it thaws. I need to get my filter out of there because the tank for my stand alone needs to go there instead. Pretty sure I'm not going back to the MAF. Want to buy mine?
My 4L80e took a dump on me and it took me 3 months to get it fixed. The input bushing failed and took out the forward drum and killed the torque converter. Had a buddy's shop do it since I don't have the time or space to do it. Anyway, it shifts hard and fast now and the 2-3 flare is completely gone. Shifts so hard in fact that the cheap rusty 3rd gen Camaro seats I had broke.
The insert just pulled right out. The previous redneck owner cobbled this together and completely butchered the floors since it was a bench seat car and doesn't have bucket seat brackets. So, I decided it was time to confront that problem and pulled both seats and the carpet.
It was all soaking wet and had to weigh 80lbs. So, how did the floors look? Like ****.
Tons of holes and rust. Not what I want to deal with right now. Looks like a complete floorpan replacement is in the near future. I decided to just temporary fix for now and snipped a bunch of 20g sheet metal patches and beat them to fit and epoxied them in place. This was after I wire wheeled the whole thing and vacuumed it out. Then I sealed over the whole thing and put down a coat of rustoleum. Got the seat bracket for the Scat Procar cheapie seat installed. Had to make some brackets for the inside parts. Super solid now.
And the seat installed.
I got the center console reinstalled and put the floor mats back in it and I'm good to go for a while. I'll eventually install a passenger seat, but for now I can't afford it and it never gets used anyway. Just need the back seat for taking my kiddos to school in the morning.
Next up will be the 102mm nitrous plate install and the cold-air intake...finally.
09-04-2016, 10:02 PM
