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Great Job


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I got a package from DIYautotune.com on Friday that had the 16-pin 4L60e transmission plug and a generic wiring harness, which is the last computer part I needed to install a 4L60e in the Firebird. I have a MegaSquirt 2 I removed from the Thunderbird that can be re-purposed as a transmission controller.

The next question became, do I gamble and install the 4L60e, I bought a while a go, as is (or with a slight shift kit) and see how it does, or do I completely disassemble it like I did the 200-4r? The rebuild kit with stronger internals and new electronic's, etc is $625. The guy I bought the trans from was also selling the Chevy 350 with a rod knock it was attached too, so I have some faith it's in somewhat decent shape. It's got a rebuild sticker on it from a shop in Utah, which he said it was rebuilt in 2008. For about $120 I can do a shift kit and external servo. Which for a naturally aspirated six would likely last a long time. I also already have the adapter plate and shims needed to bolt it to the Pontiac block.

Looking around, a professionally rebuilt units run around $1100 plus shipping. Some require a core, some do not.





I put the trans on the bench and popped the pan off. There was some dirt piled up under the brush cover and it got into the pan when I popped it loose, but otherwise it looks pretty good over all. I think I'll get a Trans-Go HD2 shift kit and a "Corvette" 4th gear servo and call it good. Summit has the kit for $80 and the servo is $12 on Amazon.


Looks like it got a new TCC valve when it was rebuilt.


The pan easily wiped clean and minimal amount of material on the magnet.


And I've been driving the car to work for the last week.

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Hard to tell - is the fluid red or brownish?

The one part that can fail on these is the sun shell - if it does it usually takes the case with it. Fix once and forget about it.


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Dark red. It's old fluid, with some condensation from a couple years of sitting both in my barn and for a while under a tarp outside. It does not however smell burnt. I've smelled burnt ATF before and this just smells and looks like old ATF.

Behind a naturally aspirated L6, the stock shell should be fine. I do plan on turbo'ing this engine, but how much boost I'll run through it is probably fairly low with stock pistons and a ton of blow-by. When I pull the engine to put a better one in, I'll disassemble the transmission for better internals. Who knows, maybe when the rebuilder rebuilt it, they put a better sun shell in, they don't cost that much and with the warranty their website boasts, it may be a SOP on overhauling these.

It's a $200 transmission I plan on sinking another $100 (shift kit and servo) into and installing it. If the $300 transmission grenades, well that's what it does, but from what I see, I don't think that's going to happen.

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I looked some more at possibly installing piston squirters, and took a short section of tube and welded another section onto it and was planning on hooking a rubber hose to it try it out, but after a few bends and tweaks, it was pretty apparent I wasn't going to get a pipe to run down the right side of the block (up throw side), nor get the lines to easily clear the counter weights, connecting rod, and the piston skirt hanging down below the cylinder walls. The clearance between the piston and counter weight just don't leave much room to work, and running ~5 inches of unsupported tube is looking plenty like a bad idea. Tabled once again.

I also ordered the Trans-go kit for the 4L60e as well as two sonnax pin-less accumulators and a corvette servo. Should show up in the mail later in the week. And a fellow Drag Weeker was going to throw out a set of 4.56 gears for a 8.5" rear end if no one wanted them for the cost of shipping, so I took him up on the offer. I had 4.56 gears on a mini-spool with the 8.2" rear end. I got tired of the spool and swapped in the 8.5" with a GM positraction and 3.42 gears. So will probably swap those gears back in after the 4L60e is installed because screwing with the governor speedo drive gears on the 200-4r sucks. The 4L60e will just be a few clicks on the computer and call it done.

My mock up. Unfortunately I couldn't find a configuration that would allow me a full crank rotation without hitting or pinching something.


The piston/counterweight clearance.


The oil tube complicated things as well.

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The shift kit showed up this last week, as well as some Sonnax pinless accumulator parts. It seems the sonnax pinless accumulators have a different shape that make the transgo springs come up short. Glad I googled it now rather than after opening it all up. I'm waiting for the corvette servo to show up, but that is an easy external piece if I get to installing the kit before it arrives.

At this point in time I'm not going to worry about installing the rev' kit (>5500rpm) which requires disassembly of the transmission because I don't anticipate really going over 5500rpm at this point. After installing the turbo, if I find I'm making decent power and want to install some good hard parts internally, then I'll install it at that time.

The 4.56 gears arrived in good shape. I'll get the 4L60e installed first and make sure it's working well before I swap the rear gears.

I'm hoping to order a turbo kit (turbo, IC, piping, etc) this week, then some real fun can start!


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I had 30 minutes to kill and decided to poke around the transmission some and much to my surprise I could have saved myself $25 as the transmission already had the Sonnax pinless accumulators in it! Pretty interesting considering it was a medium sized commercial rebuild shop sticker on it. It doesn't seem to have the extra springs or modified valves from the Trans-go kit from what I seen. Tomorrow I hope to pull the valvebody off.




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Finished up installing the shift kit yesterday. The 4th gear accumulator also had a sonnax pinless accumulator in it, but the servo was a standard smaller truck servo, so I put a larger "Corvette" one on. I couldn't see, or know well enough, to tell if it had any upgrades internally to the drum or sun shell. Overall, everything inside looked about as expected. I'll have about $275 into this transmission (including the cost of the transmission and the accumulators I ended up not needing), so if it doesn't work I'll backup and get a full rebuild kit.



I also finally plunked down the cash and bought a turbo kit. I didn't get the "perfect" size I'd get if money were no object, but went with the turbo kit the Sloppy Mechanic's guys use for the 4.8L LS's. They're making 600HP with them, so figure the HP figure is about right. It's a 69mm inducer wheel and appears to have a 1.05 A/R. Hopefully I know more when it arrives.

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Things hopefully will start to get more interesting now....



I picked up one of the Sloppy Mechanic's "Denmah" turbo kits from VSracing. Not all the pieces have arrived yet, but I got the turbo and intercooler in. It's their standard Chinese GT45, 69mm inducer wheel, 77mm turbine wheel and 1.05 AR, T4 flange. I'm going to do the first install pretty quick and dirty. I'll get some non-mandrel bent 1-3/4" pipes made up from a local shop and run it as a twin scroll set up. Front three cylinders and back three cylinders. If my calculations are right, I have enough fuel injector on the engine to cover about 350 horsepower, and based on 1/4 mile data the engine N/A is making around 175HP.

I plan on having the turbo sit right about here. I'll do some clocking of the turbo to get the cold side outlet where I want it for the intercooler. I'll probably require some minor re-plumbing of the coolant and transmission cooler lines to keep them from interfering/melting.


Looks like I'll just have to do some minor hood latch support cutting to fit the intercooler in front of the radiator. Fortunately I have a spare core support to use to reference where I'll need to make the holes for the piping in the car. I'll likely need to re-locate the battery too, which is a bummer, but not unexpected.


And a reminder on how the exhaust manifold is. I've since cut out the cross over, and later I may build my own headers (I have a header pipe kit on the shelf), or even bolt the set of fancy headers I have on. I rather get the fancy headers coated before using them and not ready to spend dollars on that yet. If the twin scroll plumbing isn't quite enough to get it to spool up reasonably, I'll try some EFI tuning tricks to try and move it along better.

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What stall converter are you planning on using. If the turbo was a dual scroll inlet you could have a little less lag. The A/R is pretty big.


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What stall converter are you planning on using. If the turbo was a dual scroll inlet you could have a little less lag. The exhaust A/R is pretty big.


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I haven't ran the part number on the sticker on the torque converter to check the stall, but I'm expecting it to be a truck 1,800 stall. Unfortunately my 200-4r converter won't work on the 4L60e, which has a 2,500 stall converter. After I drive the car for a bit with the turbo I plan on diving deep into the 4L60e and fully rebuild it, with some good parts, and at that time I'll get a decent torque converter for it with a much higher stall. In the mean time, I have a set of 4.56 gears I may be installing in the rear.

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The stock stall on my Silverado was 1400, I put in a 2400 stall now and is much better


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I agree with you on the stall being low. What ever it is, it's going to be too low. I'm hoping I can see how the engine behaves and make a better educated guess on what stall to order than making a guess at this point.

I'm going to make another go at building my own headers. I have some 1.5" primary pipes that I thought are too small to use as a high performance headers, plus I have larger header pipe on hand as well as an assembled equal length header that has a larger primary pipe diameter, so didn't think much about using them. But now, given I'm trying to make a twin scroll exhaust setup, the guidance I've gotten was to keep the secondary pipe fairly small, so with that in mind I could keep the primary pipes smaller as well.

So the plan is to use the 1.5" primary pipes into two individual collectors, keeping them as equal length as I'm capable of, then run two 1.75" secondary pipes to the T4 flange, and again keeping them as equal length as I'm capable of. I have several 90º 1.75" bends on order to get the piping to the passenger side of the engine. I was going to simply have a local shop bend me up a few non-mandrel 90º's and plumb off the exhaust manifold, but I was getting the run around by the shop I was going to use. So I'm abandoning that idea until I get frustrated with these headers, lol.

When I digitized the exhaust ports to calculate the area, they averaged 1.82sqin, and 1.5" pipe should be around 1.77sqin, so fairly close. I'm going to keep the pipe tucked up along the top of the port as best I can and stretch the metal downwards from there. I believe there are two headers worth of pipes, hence the huge pile of U's.

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Go Man Go!


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65 Chevelle Wagon and 41 Hudson Pickup
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Originally Posted By: TheSilverBuick
I have a set of 4.56 gears I may be installing in the rear.

Running gears like 4.56 will make the boost come in even latter in the RPM range.
The sunshell is a weak link on the 4L60E need to get "The Beast" sunshell my Silverado was loose and needed replacement & my truck is just a daily driver.


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Cold side plumbing arrived! The $64,000 question will be if I can get these piece to fit without resorting to cutting! They are aluminum so if I need any welding I'll have to outsource it. I'm thinking I'll want to install an intake air temperature sensor port in one at minimum.


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Progress! First set of headers I've ever attempted to build, but so far I'm satisfied with the progress. Before I stitch the tubes together I'm going to get a smaller wire for my welder to reduce the chance of blowing through the metal. Once I have the tubes welded, I'll build a pair of collectors down to the 1.75" pipe, then do final metall stretching and welding to the flange.




I'm going to be giving it more thought, but I think this routing will let me use the pipes I have as is. I just need another 90º coupler or two. This routing will require just one hole through the core support on the driver's side. Then I'll build a new intake manifold and line up the throttle body with the tubing.

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First go at building a set of headers is moving along. Building the collector ended up more complicated than I had hoped, so hopefully it doesn't leak... I have a game plan of what I'm going to do differently, and better, making the next one. Basically for the next one I'm going to install a ring around the three pipes, seal it up on the three pipes and then weld the reducer to the ring. I may cut this collector off just before it reduces in diameter and re-weld some parts just to be sure it doesn't leak. Live and learn! The next three should go much easier as I'm pretty sure I've figured out what settings to use on the welder when simply welding versus filling gaps. Fun fun.


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Finally got some time to work more on the headers. I have them exiting straight back, so I can run them naturally aspirated a bit. Both to possibly install them sooner and two to make sure they are completely heat cycled and all the possible crap I missed cleaning them up out. With the 90º's on, they should clear the torque converter and transmission. I still have to work over the flange and do final stretching and welding on the ports.

The merge for the rear collector.


​

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damn man that looks awesome

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Bent up some straps to bolt to the head to support the turbo. I will probably make a bolt on lower support from a stud ran through one of the transmission mounting holes just to put some extra stiffening in the support.





In the car, I'll have to move the external oil pressure regulator and re-plumb the electric water pump and reverse cooling hoses, but its doable.




It supports the turbo, but will likely need extra support from the rear, particularly if I put flex couplers on the cross over pipes.

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Well after packing up and moving across the state in October to a place with significantly less garage space I'm slowly working my way back to moving this forward again. At the end of January I finally got the Firebird and welder over to my new house. Unfortunately the majority of my tools and parts remain in two storage units. I'm waiting for a contractor to install an RV gate in my fence so I can get a few nice storage sheds to get all my things here and set up a small workshop in one of the sheds.

And I picked up another vehicle with an inliner, a MAX II with an inline 2 cylinder 2-stroke engine =D As soon as we get some of the stuff there sold/yard saled off I'll be able to put my tool box at the back and get back to turbo'ing the Firebird. In the mean time, I need to change out the transmission pan gasket and then plan on driving it semi-regularly.

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Hate it when life gets in the way. Did you move to a city?


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I did. I'm now in Sparks, NV, where there is a large Summit Racing store =D Which I've already used. My Skylark broke a ball joint last month so I took the opportunity to pick up new upper and lower control arms from them =D

Other than being down a bit of land/enclosed space, I didn't get rid of anything and finances are even more robust. Just a matter of getting everything fully settled and organized to get back to the projects. I just need to find a decent local machine shop to really get stuff done!

I'm still eyeballing some of your flat top 250 pistons still for when I get back to putting a short block together.

There are seven L6 engines/blocks in there =P I sort of regret putting the tool box drawers against the wall because I cannot access some of the things I'd like to pull out of there, but that's why I did it, so it'd be harder to steal from if it were broken into. My other storage unit has many of the smaller parts and stuff.



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Congradulations on the move!

Had a question for you. When using a 4 pin hei with a mega squirt 2 v3.0 pcb board

And a relay board to wire it up for spark control I removed 4 pin module wired 5v ref from vref on relay board to (+) side vref sensor wired the (-) side to tps return wired tach on relay board to tach on distributor then (s5) on relay board to the (c) on the distributor. Does that sound correct?


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Thanks!

That doesn't sound right to me at all, the Vref shouldn't be involved at all. To control timing with an HEI four things need to be wired/set.

1) Inside the cap. Pickup coil in the distributor needs one wire going to the "TACH" port on the relay board, and the other wire from the pickup coil just needs to be grounded.

2) Outside the cap. Relayed** +12v needs to go to the power side of the distributor, essentially like normal with the 4-pin, then "S5" from the relay board goes to the negative terminal on the HEI cap.

3) In the Megasquirt. On the 3.0 board make sure the VR sensor jumpers are in place for VR IN. You may need to adjust the R55/R56(?) pots to clean the tach signal up. I think turning them all the way counter-clockwise will get it started up, but double check the directions.***

4) In the software. Set the settings for Basic trigger wheel up in TunerStudio, make sure you have the right dwell settings for one coil. 2.5-3.0ms I think? Expect to adjust the trigger offset angle to get the timing light to match the megasquirt.

When it's all wired up, I'd unplug the +12v to the HEI cap and crank the engine and look for rpm in TunerStudio. You may need to adjust the R55/56 pots to get tach signal. Do not bother hooking up the +12v to the HEI cap until you get a good rpm reading of at least 100rpm while cranking. My other tip at this point would be, set your timing to "fixed" under ignition settings (instead of table) to 8º or 10º, trigger angle to 5º and it should start right up. Then adjust your trigger angle until the timing light shows the same timing you are commanding "fixed".

**You can leave the factory +12v wiring in place and it'll start fine and such, BUT it could overheat the ignition coil as the 4-pin had a protection circuit in it. It's recommended the distributor coil(s) get their power from the fuel pump relay. So if the fuel pump isn't running, the coils don't have power either.

***Once running, I've left the cover off the megasquirt and adjusted the pots while the engine was running. I believe the base setting will get it idling and a couple thousand rpm, but if you see it loosing tach signal at higher rpm, you can adjust it, rev it, adjust it, rev it, etc until it revs up the full rpm range and picks up the tach signal at low rpm too. Then put the lid back on it.

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Thank I remember you helping me with it before life had gotten in the way since then and I had forgotten

But they make it very hard to find specifics on the Internet about using the vref out of a 4 pin and have lots of info on 7 pin distributors


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Would it be easier or more reliable to get a 7 pin hei unit or is running a 4 pin with the 4 pin module removed and the distributor advancing methods voided or no diffence?


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The easiest is to use a 4-pin module distributor with the module removed, the vacuum advance disconnected (from vacuum) and the mechanical advance either pinned or wire tied so they can't move.

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To compliment Snowman's thread,

I'm slowly making headway on getting mine back on track. Last weekend I made the big leap of getting 95% of my tools out of storage and to the house. I've got it set up but I need to unpack the tools from the buckets. I need to first get my ATV up and going, do some minor work to the Skylark, then hopefully drag and engine, engine stand and the partially built turbo header home and get back to it. I did change out the transmission pan gasket and have been driving the Firebird around from time to time though, so still inlining it.


Last edited by TheSilverBuick; 03/31/17 02:13 PM.
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I haven't really updated this in a while. The family and I have been taking the Skylark to a Sunday cars and coffee car show that happens every other weekend and been wanting to take the Firebird but it didn't have any rear seat belts so was a no go. Fortunately Summit Racing is right down the street getting a set of universal seatbelts wasn't a problem, but the bolts were a bit back ordered. Finally got them all installed about a month ago.


Then this weekend was going to be the moment of truth and we were going to go to the car show in the Firebird.... Almost.

So starting Friday night, even after putting a new transmission pan gasket and rtv in it, and even letting it sit for 24 hours before putting fluid in it, it still leaks a fair amount of fluid so I wanted to jack it up and slightly tighten all the pan bolts and wanted a working surface in the backyard until I save up for some dirt work and concrete so.... For about $100 I now have 64 square feet of working area on the gravel. Still seems to be seeping a bit, time will tell if snugging them helped at all. I'm getting ready to put the 4L60e in it and am going to simply get a Microsquirt controller for it. In the mean time, I've pulled the 4.56 gears out of storage and am thinking of putting them in sooner rather than later.
[url="http://s42.photobucket.com/user/TheSilverBuick/media/Firebird%202/IMG_20170519_182944_zpskjxrsmhg.jpg.html"][/url]


Then Saturday morning.... Since it was a car show we were going to the next day I thought I'd clean up some wiring under the hood and then go get it washed, and be ready for the cruise. Well..... The wiring I was cleaning up I decided to move the water pump relay and shorten up the wires, well I apparently got two wires crossed and when driving to the car wash the engine got hot so I pulled over to troubleshoot. I could smell electrical burning in the car, not good, and the water pump wasn't running. It also popped the 15amp water pump fuse so yanking some wire connectors off and hotwired the water pump to the battery which cooled down the engine quickly but strangely the fan stayed on. BUT, it still fired up and everything on the screen was normal, so drove home to yank the Megasquirt out. At which point in time the Dog thought he was going to go for a ride, d'oh!
[url="http://s42.photobucket.com/user/TheSilverBuick/media/Firebird%202/IMG_20170520_140258_zps42a8n6ul.jpg.html"][/url]

And now the carnage. Opened the Megasquirt and the INJ outputs were toasted, particularly the one the water pump was hooked to was completely vaporized away. If you've read through this thread, you may recall when I first got the Firebird running I toasted the Megasquirt's power circuit when I mis-wired the alternator to the wrong side of the cut off switch, and that white wire down by the exposed copper was a jumper lead I had to put in from burning out the connection in the board.
[url="http://s42.photobucket.com/user/TheSilverBuick/media/Firebird%202/IMG_20170520_142253_zpszpmjnkmo.jpg.html"][/url]

This resistor (R20) was toasted.
[url="http://s42.photobucket.com/user/TheSilverBuick/media/Firebird%202/IMG_20170520_144740_zpslgxacxlz.jpg.html"][/url]

Looking at some troubleshooting schematics, R20 is part of the INJ1 circuit, which is what I had the water pump wired to.
[url="https://www.diyautotune.com/support/tech/other/troubleshooting-ms-injector-driver/"]https://www.diyautotune.com/support/...jector-driver/[/url]


So I had another Megasquirt board I've scavenged parts off of before (such as the power circuit when I toasted the one here), so thought I'd could just take a few pieces off, maybe make a jumper wire or two and be back in action....
[url="http://s42.photobucket.com/user/TheSilverBuick/media/Firebird%202/IMG_20170520_150205_zpsnj8tulfa.jpg.html"][/url]

But after transferring the resistor and doing some other continuity checks, something else was shorting the INJ outputs to ground and I'm not sure where. SO I began transferring parts from the burned out board to my spare parts board until it was complete! Look Ma I put the smoke back in! A new board from DIYautotune.com is $219.


Back together with the new "old" board.
[url="http://s42.photobucket.com/user/TheSilverBuick/media/Firebird%202/IMG_20170520_210009_zpsz4pgyxtw.jpg.html"][/url]


Now Sunday morning.... Re-wired the relay, triple checked it was wired correctly, and plugged in the Megasquirt, and success! The water pump cycled on and off as it was supposed to, so off to go get it washed.
[url="https://www.facebook.com/randal.burns.3/videos/10211918502611604/"]https://www.facebook.com/randal.burn...1918502611604/[/url]

Then apparently the car show location changed at some point between 7pm Saturday night and Sunday as went we arrived there, no one was there and I checked the Facebook page and it had an "Alternate" meeting location that I didn't want to drive 30 minutes more too. So we decided to go have the coolest car at the Wilbur May Arboretum. Put 40 miles on the Firebird today in 80ºF weather, mixed freeway and surface street driving and it ran flawlessly. So I'm going to call that a win.
[url="http://s42.photobucket.com/user/TheSilverBuick/media/Firebird%202/IMG_20170521_115502_zpsmsgu1fhu.jpg.html"][/url]
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Ain't that the way it goes. Good job getting her fixed up.


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Made its first trip to my "new" job, and didn't have to drive or park on dirt! It gets warmer in stop and go traffic, but that is expected when there is no airflow across the radiator. When I get a VSS hooked up (like with the 4L60e swap) I'll probably have the radiator fan come on at 190ºF and below 20mph instead of just over 205ºF and no speed criteria. It never actually broke over 195ºF, but it's something to watch.

Anyone ever make a heat shield or such to help separate the exhaust manifold heat from the intake?


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Originally Posted By: TheSilverBuick


Anyone ever make a heat shield or such to help separate the exhaust manifold heat from the intake?


I used to use them on the dyno when running official published HP numbers. Hey, the procedure didn't say anything about not putting a heat shield there. TMSAISTI.


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On this car my intake air temps (IAT's) are consistently 90º+F above ambient, whereas my Skylark is closer to 30ºF above ambient, and that one makes sense given since the air passes through the radiator.

One test I haven't done is put the hood scoop plate back in as the low pressure over the hood may simply be pulling exhaust heat upwards. Short of re-installing the scoop plate, a metal deflector around the carb base may cut that down.

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I'm ramping back into this project. Call it the Drag Week Motivation Bounce if you will, but I want to get the Firebird setup to run Drag Week in 2018.

The bare mininium plan is:
Finish my turbo header build.
Purchase a Microsquirt and install the 4L60e transmission into the car.
Purchase a $300 tubular core support, so I can mount an open box aluminum radiator I picked up for a steal at Summit. Also lightens the front end and opens up the area for intercooler plumbing. (http://www.rhodescustomauto.com/prod...ort-1967-1969/)
Repair my sheetmetal intake manifold (cut off flange, weld in new one).
Upgrade fuel injectors.
Install Turbo and turbo cam.
Install 4.56 gears
And Go!

Ambitious plan, to do in addition or instead of the items above:
Purchase aftermarket 6" rods and flat top forged pistons. Have valve relief's cut into the pistons to maintain non-interference design.
Send short block out to be machined, balanced, etc. Done proper.
Send head out to be ported.
Get 9" rear end with 3.50 gears. Maybe borrow the rear axle from the Skylark, including the 3.89 gears.
Upgrade the 4L60e to a professionally built unit.

With that, I have just started the process of purchasing one of CNC-Dude's multi-port EFI intakes and sending it with a cylinder head to Smithberg Racing for porting and finishing work on the intake. I'm pretty excited about this!


As a side update, I took the Firebird to Hot August Nights and it drew a crowd fairly regularly.
https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t...amp;oe=5A4C1591

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Randal, i'm looking forward to you upgrading your build with this intake.



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Between your intake and Nick's porting magic, suddenly I don't feel like 600HP is out of reach. Won't necessarily be easy, but I'm feeling more optimistic about it.

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I think you'll within reach of that goal pretty easily now.



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