For those that know/remember me and my cars issues
As you know, I was having running/stumbling issues and was running incredibly rich, fouling plugs in just a couple of minutes, and was pulling really low vacuum. Turned out my manifold from the head/cam swap summer of 03 wasn't machined to match my milled heads. Golen Engine Service diagnosed this as they've seen it before. Off came the heads/manifold and Golen machined everything to match and get a good seal, yet I STILL got gasket failures.
Until last week. I swiched from a Fel-Pro 1284 with the raised bead to a stock replacement Fel-Pro which is the crushed metal material and completely flat. Ran the car on Thursday and it ran pretty good, wasn't surging or stumbling (save for a tip in hesitation which should be tuning related considering the 58mm tb), and felt pretty good. I pulled the manifold thursday night and the gaskets showed no sign of leaking. Then I pulled a few plugs and they were showing lean, not carbon/oil fouled. Only issue I still had was pretty low vacuum (75-80 KPA at 1000 idle).
So I put it back together and with a new baseline "semi-out of the box" tune from PCMFORLESS ran it yesterday. Ran pretty dang decent. Still had pretty low vacuum though. Not hanging a valve open or anything that I can tell, so it may just be the nature of the beast (one of Joe O's bigger grinds for the cam). The tell tale part was when I ran it against my buddies Z28 (383/TPIS AFR heads/230/236 cam/3.73's/fully dialed suspension -- 405/405 to the ground) with a KILLER starts at 2000 RPM powerband.
Run 1: He put a car on me from 40-130. Run 2: He put 2-3 cars on me from 15-130.
I'm pretty pleased considering I'm on a baseline tune, running the 93 M29/3.23 combo, 100% stock suspension, and have no power down low.
The biggest issue I saw yesterday while ragging on it was aparrent valve float at about 6500-6700 RPM. Car nosed over a little which you could feel.
Anyway, seems to be going the right way finally. Just gotta get that 12 bolt with 4.10's and dialed in all the way.





