April update:

It's drivable!!

It sat for a few weeks while I dealt with other stuff, but as of this past weekend, it runs! The main remaining hurdle was getting the hood to close (interference w/ the lid -- resolved by softening the lid with a heat gun and squishing it down a tiny bit). Then I took it out on the road and quickly discovered some heavy clunking noises from under the car. Pulled back into the garage and discovered a couple loose bolts on the torque arm.

Then I laid some dynamat (off-brand cheap stuff) on and around the fuel pump door, re-laid the carpet, and buttoned up the interior. All the seats and speakers and everything are back in place!

I've now put maybe 30 miles on it, including a trip to Cars & Coffee on Sunday morning. There's still a bunch to do, but this is a huge milestone!

Remaining todos:

• Get it insured (have to switch to Hagerty, as my current insurance carrier doesn't cover highly modified cars)
• Change the front brakes (sitting for six years -> they make some very angry noises)
• Get some running and driving video and post it for you guys
• Re-bleed the brakes (soft pedal)
• Charge the air conditioning system
• Get it aligned
• Get new tires
• Wire the wideband to the PCM's EGR circuit
• Continue tuning
• Get the LCA relocation brackets welded
• Paint the rear axle
• Get it detailed
• Get it dyno tuned

Without the wideband in place, I have been restraining myself to <4000rpm. That's no small task in first gear with 4.10 gears!

 

It's been a busy spring! Almost two months have gone by, and all I've managed to check off the list above are:

• get it insured w/ Hagerty (valued at $30k -- way more than I could ever sell it for, but way less than it would cost to duplicate). We moved the Grand National to Hagerty too, valued at $50k, which might also be low.
• part of the wideband wiring. I added a small fusebox near the passenger shock tower and have it mostly wired. There's a relay on the box's supply side, which gets its power direct from the battery. I need to hook up a switched source to the relay's activation circuit. Once that's done, I'll have a few circuits available with switched power, one of which will power the wideband controller. (I have some future plans which will use the other circuits in the box.) Then I just need to splice the signal wires from the controller into the PCM harness. I've already configured HPTuners to read the voltage, translate it to AFR, and display+log the result.

Also, I lost my job, spent four weeks interviewing, landed a new job with 12% higher pay, got a new dog , and a deer ran into the side of the Silverado .

 

Progress!

• I've had the car out and driving a few more times. Strano springs + LT headers is not a very streetable combination. I'm contemplating what to do about that. Might swap springs to something a bit higher.
• I have the relay's activation circuit wired in to the unused Electronic Throttle Control (ETC) circuit on the factory fusebox.
• I have the wideband controller's output wired in to pin 55 on the blue PCM connector.
• I have EGR enabled in the tune, with the tables for EGR-based timing adjustments zeroed out.
• I can see my AFR and/or lambda in HPTuners Scanner app!
• I have an A-pillar gauge pod and a PLX DM-6 "smartgauge" that just came yesterday; will be installing that soon. Having numbers in the datalog is one thing, but being able to see them on the fly is important too.
• I finally opened up the air conditioning service kit I bought many months ago, and set out to charge the system. Unfortunately, it won't hold a vacuum. I don't have a leak detection kit, so optimistically, I inspected the o-rings on the top-side connections, and replaced them all with spares I had laying around -- no luck -- so it's either a faulty component or a leak at one of the connections down lower. I'm guessing it's where the lines connect to the compressor. Have to get under the car for that, and haven't had time yet, but it's near the top of my to-do list now!