1dirtyZ's Conversion by 1dirtyZ

10 minute(s) of a 304 minute read

well a quick update , i started tuning the car's idle and part throttle stuff , the car runs ok and shifts ok , but it still has that annoying lad when you first shift it into gear .

the other major thing to report is i broke another f'$% head unit!!! this time the F2 decided it would snap the input shaft i guess or some thing in there that disconnected the impeller from the input shaft! the thing that pisses me off is that this happened at part throttle , or even maybe at idle since I'm not tuning WOT yet .

this procharger crap is getting really annoying; i broke my F3 about 7 times ( impeller blades flying off, blades touching down , gear box seizing up ) , an F3 -135 touched down also , a friends F1x completely trashing the gear drive and impeller on its first pass and now this stupid thing . makes me rethink the turbo vs supercharger deal a lot now.

11-1-2015

time for some more updates !

so I shipped the blower out to get fixed by procharger ( to the tune of $1500+ ) and while I was waiting for the F2 to get back I decided it was only appropriate to slap the F1r back on,,, so I did


I also finished the switch panel for all the switches I need along with a few more dodads like traction control module and water tank temp : I made place for 4 switches - turns out I needed a fifth one- the switches are for traction control , 2 step , auto/manual, intercoolerchiller , and the fifth one that I didn't count for is for launch retard .
( sorry for got to take pics )

so after a few miles of tuning and messing with the car and dialing it in I decided it was time to mess with the intercooler system; one of the issues I have with air to water intercoolers is that you have to always add ice if you want the best performance . problem is that you can't find ice every where you go ,,, and the damn stuff melts if you keep it outside for a while 

so I was messing with the idea of an intercooler chiller type of deal , where the intercoolerwater would be chilled using an electric AC compressor and condenser, so after many moons of thinking and sourcing parts I decided to just go with a portable electric freezer 
so I want and looked for a freezer with the right dimensions and got it , then I proceeded to drilling holes in it 

so the plan was to make a mount for it in the spare tire area where the old tank was , here are some of the brackets holding it in place :





so after that was done I drilled some holes in the removable lid ( the nice folks at WACO actually had two perfectly placed dimples on the cover where I needed to pass the water hoses )





I then fabbed a plastic cover to help stop the water from splashing around and installed the water pump:



so after that was done I wired the cooled to a 12v source and uses the fuel pump signal to trigger the intercooler pump so it only stays on when the pumps are running . I then plumbed the hoses and I was ready for some more testing

and since I was messing with cooling I thought this would be a great time to swap out my old radiator to a new one since the old one I had was off my Camaro and had been using it since 2001 ,,, and you guessed it , it was showing signs of aging 
and while I was at it I decided to relocate the transmission cooler from the inner fender ( where is was getting all of the hot air from the radiator and heating up the transmissionfluid - something I noticed while logging is the trans temperature graph was almost mirroring the engine temp graph ) . so I also relocated the cooler to the more traditional location of in front of the radiator :





what I came to find out is the placement of my intercooler right behind the radiator with a big fan blowing hot air on it is not such a good idea ( who'da thunk it ) ; I was seeing intake temps of around 140 at cruising and rising to 170f+ at WOT, and the "chiller" was not keeping up and the water was getting pretty hot after a few passes.

so it was time for relocating the intercooler away from the radiator , and the best place I could find is in the passenger fender .

so a few bent bars here and a few brackets there and we had ourselves a new intercoolerbracket :







and after that I had to redo the charge pipes to fit the new location ( I only have one pic here ,,, the others will be uploaded soon ) :



pic of the AWSOME beads I made ( the vibrant bead roller is the bees knees when it comes to this) :



moving on , I got the blower back from procharger ,,, and proceeded to install it back on the car and get back to fine tunning it some more . after a couple of WOT passes I noticed that there was a bit more converter slip than I would like ( to the tune of %19 !) , so I drained the trans fluid and put in some hydraulic fluid instead . that felt better but I still need to verify how much slip I have now. and incase you were wondering how far a lokar dipstick sticks into a 4L80 pan here you go :



moving on ,,, I drove the car for about 70-100 more miles after swapping the blower back to the F2 and guess what ; it decided to brake again . I will not go into any details about this right now until I see what procharger has to say about this .

so I went ahead and swapped ol' whiney back on the car and moved on. next up on the to do list was the completion of my exhaust system , I needed to extend it to exit from the rear where the stock location exhaust used to be to be legal for a local race class,,,, so out came the welder and chop saw 

the plan was to have the exhaust pass under the axle instead of above it because of : 1- its easier to build , 2 I have no space for running dual exhaust above the axle because of the antiroll bar and the fuel lines there . plus I was planning on removing it when not racing and have it dump before the axle like before .





I didn't take a picture from the side but the bullets don't stand out too much when looking from the side , I still might paint it flat black to help blend it in .

and to keep legal when racing at our track we also needed to have a belly pan that extended under the engine all the way to the end of the transmission :



and finally , I got a pair of new ( rebuilt ) stock calipers to try to see if I can get this thing to stop better :




another thing I need to mention is that I noticed that I had a fuel pressure drop at wot a few times , and thanks to the holley ECU nothing bad happened since It corrected the fueltable right away. so I decided to start fixing it by starting with the simple and free stuff : I cleaned the filters ( no luck , they were clean) , I then swapped the regulator ( its just as old as the radiator - no luck there too ) , so all that was left was to change the fuelpumps ( old walbro 255 externals that were on the car since 2006 ,,,, with dual walbro 255 externals from - you guessed it my Camaro - that were on the car back in 2003 ! ,,,,not very smart I know )

I still don't have any logs on the new pumps to see if the solved the problem.