Time to go big

All known issues have now been fixed. The driver side header had a nice size crack and the crossover had a nice crack where the external wastegate was attached. They are all welded up and it feels like a completely different car. Spools great!

Pat's having the similiar issues with his headers cracking and wondering if the 2-step could be causing it.
 
Installed the new driveshaft yesterday, so I'm all set for the track today.
 

Attachments

  • 2012-12-01_11-40-36_274.jpg
    2012-12-01_11-40-36_274.jpg
    145.2 KB · Views: 104
Installed the new driveshaft yesterday, so I'm all set for the track today.
Eric: Keep everyone on this sight informed on the progress. I've got about 180 miles on my new build .
I have not hammered on it yet but it fells pretty crisp just driving around town. I'm kind of babying for the first 300 or 400 miles. Good Luck at the track. See ya! John
 
Eric: Keep everyone on this sight informed on the progress. I've got about 180 miles on my new build .
I have not hammered on it yet but it fells pretty crisp just driving around town. I'm kind of babying for the first 300 or 400 miles. Good Luck at the track. See ya! John

Hi John, sounds like your really close to being ready. When do the tracks close there. We have one more Test N Tune after today, then will have to wait till new year.
 
Today's Test N Tune didn't go well for me. There were a ton of cars at the track and most I could get was 3 passed in over 3 hours.

This was not one of my better days at the track. Just didn't seem like forces were against me today. The biggest issue was my 60 foot just wasn't going to happen today. Too m cars and the track wasn't there for me.

60' ET MPH
1.810 7.435 97.75
Spun some of this pass.

1.629 7.277 87.02
This was my best 60 foot, however when I snapped off the transbrake, I left it in 2nd gear. So this pass was mostly in 2nd gear.

1.850 7.469 97.49
My 60 foot problems came back and after 3 hours and only three passes I decided to go home.

One last Test N Tune for the year, that's in a week.
 

Attachments

  • IMG_0308.JPG
    IMG_0308.JPG
    148.3 KB · Views: 100
Hi John, sounds like your really close to being ready. When do the tracks close there. We have one more Test N Tune after today, then will have to wait till new year.
Eric: Beechbend is down until March it closed after Thanksgiving so I've got a couple of months to wait. Did you get your new drag radials yet? How much do you think you got out of the intake Slo GN did for you? I still have the stock intake that had some work done in the EGR area. Been debating in my head what to do $750 seems like a big lick. I'm a retired guy and don't want to spend that much. Good luck next week. Seeya! John
 
Eric: Beechbend is down until March it closed after Thanksgiving so I've got a couple of months to wait. Did you get your new drag radials yet? How much do you think you got out of the intake Slo GN did for you? I still have the stock intake that had some work done in the EGR area. Been debating in my head what to do $750 seems like a big lick. I'm a retired guy and don't want to spend that much. Good luck next week. Seeya! John

No new drag radials yet, that's next years budget:rolleyes: I've pretty much done all the spending I'm going to do on the car other than new tires. There's plenty of tuning opportunities left in the car, so I'm done with all the performance mods.

I really don't have any numbers to backup the intake. I've been running a gutted intake for years, Pat (SloGN) basically refined it for me. I agree, $750 is quite a chunk of change. However if you don't have access to someone that can gut and port an intake then it's probably the only way. The Champion intake has some good flow numbers, but I haven't seen anyone's experience with it.
 
Just to clarify was I was talking about with the intake. I bought my car about 8 ½ years ago. It had 130,000 miles on it with a freshly rebuilt motor by someone who didn’t use the proper parts. It had cast pistons and a cam for a naturally aspirated V6. Two years after buying the car, I saw a listing on ebay for a $40 hotair intake that was gutted. I purchased that intake and installed it on the car and ran with it for 4 years with a personal best of a 7.78 second pass in the 1/8th mile. The cast pistons gave way at the end of the 4 years and I cracked the ring lands on a couple of them. We pulled the motor and I decided to build a stroker. Shortly after completing my stroker motor and running it in the car, champion made its new hotair intake. Pat and Richard decided to dive into flowing hotair intakes and convinced to pull mine off to flow it. We flowed it and it was better than a stock intake, but the ports didn’t flow evenly. Pat did his porting magic and was able to get the ports to flow a lot closer. At that point I could have made a decision to go with the Champion intake or put my freshly ported intake back on. My belief was the champion didn’t flow that much better to warrant spending the $750 (which building the stroker pretty much tapped me out of cash anyway). So there have been a lot of changes that went on and I can’t really say what performance benefits I received using my intake.
 
Just to clarify was I was talking about with the intake. I bought my car about 8 ½ years ago. It had 130,000 miles on it with a freshly rebuilt motor by someone who didn’t use the proper parts. It had cast pistons and a cam for a naturally aspirated V6. Two years after buying the car, I saw a listing on ebay for a $40 hotair intake that was gutted. I purchased that intake and installed it on the car and ran with it for 4 years with a personal best of a 7.78 second pass in the 1/8th mile. The cast pistons gave way at the end of the 4 years and I cracked the ring lands on a couple of them. We pulled the motor and I decided to build a stroker. Shortly after completing my stroker motor and running it in the car, champion made its new hotair intake. Pat and Richard decided to dive into flowing hotair intakes and convinced to pull mine off to flow it. We flowed it and it was better than a stock intake, but the ports didn’t flow evenly. Pat did his porting magic and was able to get the ports to flow a lot closer. At that point I could have made a decision to go with the Champion intake or put my freshly ported intake back on. My belief was the champion didn’t flow that much better to warrant spending the $750 (which building the stroker pretty much tapped me out of cash anyway). So there have been a lot of changes that went on and I can’t really say what performance benefits I received using my intake.
Eric: I wasn't trying to put you on the spot about the intake. I had followed the series Slo GN did then remembered when he posted he was done messing with the hot air intake. I though maybe you could give me your opinion on the subject. Thanks. See ya! john
 
No problem John, just had a little bit of feedback on my previous post from Pat and thought I'd better clarify it a bit:)
 
John.

I see in your signature that you have a modded intake. What mods does it have?
 
John.

I see in your signature that you have a modded intake. What mods does it have?
Pat: I have used the same intake for years the area inside the round turbo opening was cut and smoothed out where the EGR hole is. Looks like it has been ported and polished but the plenum part has not been touched. This area is also where left & right aqua mist knozzels spray down into the plenum wings at 15lb of boost then around 20 lbs of boost I have the medium size AEM knozzel in the turbo neck. I still can't get the temp down below 200 degrees. Seeya! John
 
Okay, so I’ve finally looked over the logs from this past Sunday’s passes. As some of you may or may not know. I have a Stage Right transbrake. The basic operation is put the car in 1st to engage the transbrake and knock the shifter out of 1st to launch. There’s a gate on the shifter that stops it in 3rd, so you can’t accidentally knock it into overdrive (or even worse, reverse).

Anyway, this past Sunday I made 3 passes at the track. The 1st pass and the 3rd pass I launched with the transbrake and as usual it lands in 3rd. On the 2nd pass I didn’t hit the shifter hard enough on the launch and it landed in 2nd gear, so basically my run consisted of only a first to second gear shift with the rest of the run in 2nd gear (Realized this close to the end of the pass).

There’s a couple of things puzzling me. The first thing is that Richard changed the spring in the transmissions governor to allow it to shift at a higher RPM. According to my previous logs versus this past time at the track it didn’t make much of a difference. Shifts are pretty much the same.
The second more prominent thing of interest is in when I left the shifter in 2nd gear on my second pass. My other two logs are showing 1st to 2nd shift RPMS at around 5350. The 2nd logs shows the transmission shifting at 5700 RPM which is about where I’d like the shifts to be.

Just don’t know why there is a difference in 1st to 2nd shifts when the shifter is in 2nd versus 3rd.

Attached is a zip of my logs.
 

Attachments

  • 2012-12-2-logs.zip
    11.7 KB · Views: 69
.
Eric: Beechbend is down until March it closed after Thanksgiving so I've got a couple of months to wait. Did you get your new drag radials yet? How much do you think you got out of the intake Slo GN did for you? I still have the stock intake that had some work done in the EGR area. Been debating in my head what to do $750 seems like a big lick. I'm a retired guy and don't want to spend that much. Good luck next week. Seeya! John
Just FYi John has been running his hot air for a number of years and has ran some very impressive times. Regarding the Intake I don't think it would hurt your combination at all but it is a large investment, keep us posted on your health and how things are going for you over the winter
 
I'm sure I will Jamie. These unexpected surprises just tend to take away from the fun factor
 
.Just FYi John has been running his hot air for a number of years and has ran some very impressive times. Regarding the Intake I don't think it would hurt your combination at all but it is a large investment, keep us posted on your health and how things are going for you over the winter
Jamie I am doing great ! I've gained about 12 of the 20 something pounds lost. I feel strong and am walking 3 to 4 miles a day again. The new engine is in the car thanks to my good friends Lee and Pat and I'm driving it and have acouple of 100 miles on it. I haven't hammered on it yet 4000 rpm and 5 or 6 lbs of boost but it feels pretty good. No hurry I have until march before the track opens. Happy holidays to all. See ya! John
 
One of my better passes at the G-Body/Turbobuick Nationals Friday. Saturday I had issues hooking and the pressure line from the turbo to the wastegate was breaking during my passes. Line was fixed when I got home, but I beleive my MT drag radials are toast. Time for new ones

 
Thought I'd give an update on what's going on with my car. I sent my turbo off to Bison and he replaced the compressor with a billet 6262 and reworked the housing for the bigger compressor wheel. The new compressor wheel is 27 grams lighter than the wheel that was in it. It pools faster than the old turbo and very pleased with his work!

So that's the good news, now for the bad news. The last two passes at the Turbobuick.com/G-Body Nationals, I thought I was spinning the tires. Car was launching, but not feeling like it was hooking up. This past Thursday was the first time I'd been to the track since then and was really excited to see what this new turbo would do. My first pass was off the transbrake and once again my 60 foot was bad (2.0). Pat (SloGN) was there and he suggested I footbrake the next pass and see what happens. The second pass was a 2.1 60 foot.

I gave up on any more passes after that because there wasn't something right with the transmission or torque converter. The car feels fine on the street, shifts are good and there's no indications of any problems. Reviewing the logs show a .5 second period after launching were the RPM remain the same and the MPH stays at zero. The car gradually rolls out for .5 second and then decides to start going. I feel like it could be the 7 year old Pats Performance Converters torque converter 1003HD that's going. I checked the trans fluid on the dipstick and there's no odd odor and looks clean.
 
Top