David Neibert
SCCoA Admin
I've been gathering parts for about 9 months for this year's round of mods. Dave Dalke and his son Phillip spent Monday and Tuesday at my house where we installed everything and retuned the car. Unfortunately we were not able to get the new MP 95mm throttle body in time to be installed with the other stuff. We decided that since there wasn't going to be another oppurtunity to work on this car until next year..we would go ahead and do everything we could without the the larger TB, and I would install it later and cross my fingers that it didn't require much to fix the tune.
So we ended up replacing the stock brakes with 13" Cobra fronts, KVR slotted and plated rotors, late model spindles, sway bar end links, stock size KVR slotted and plated rear rotors with new pads and caliper repaint. I was also able to witness Dave's whack it with a big hammer method of removing ball joints without using a pickle fork and no damage to the boot. Prior to installing the spindles they were stripped down to inspect the hub bearings, and the rivots for the bent up rusty backing plates were drilled out, then everything was cleaned with a drill and a wire wheel to prep for repainting black.
Good thing Dave and Phillip were involved, because if I had done it they would have just gotten sprayed with brake cleaner and a splash of paint on the side thats visible. I think they put 3 coats of paint on them and they looked better than a brand new parts. The painting of the rear brake calipers was a much bigger production with everything all masked off and painting the frames black after replacing the slider pin boots and regreasing, then painting the calipers red to match the fronts..I was very impressed with all the effort that went into making everything look so nice.
Oh yeah...my 18" Boyds wouldn't clear the Cobra calipers without using at least a 1/4" spacer. I ended up using a 5/16" aluminum spacer from AutoZone that had to be ground to fit the 4.25 bolt circle.
The Pro-M 87mm bullet MAF and MP 3.5" cold air intake pipe was replaced with a custom 4" pipe and integrated SCT slotted MAF and a much larger K&N oval filter. The air box opening in the fender was also increased to about 3 times the previous area and the MP cold air divider was modifyed to match. This was also the perfect time to ditch the nasty plastic coolant tank and install the new aluminum Canton tank.
In order to tune/datalog the car without crawling under it and screwing sensors in and out, Dave installed an LC-1 wideband and switched my dual pillar pod over to a triple pod to accomidate the wideband display gauge. This involved cleaning up my previous wiring on the pillar and under the shifter console. I was even able to keep my blue nitrous purge button for o2 the sensor calibration.
We also added the second meth nozzel back onto the return plenum like it was originally planned (when fighting an overly rich condition and missfiring at WOT last summer, we eliminated one nozzel) We later discovered the reason for the missfiring overly rich issue was because we tuned it with a faulty wideband sensor that was reading nearly two points lean. That was another reason for getting my own wideband.
We even had a little time left over so Phillip installed a new set of headlights I've had on the shelf for more than a year.
Once all this stuff was done Dave made the tuning changes look easy and the motor fired and idled smoothly on the first turn of the key (that's always a good feeling). Then we all jumped in the car and drove it over to the dyno and Dave monitored stuff with his laptop on the way.
After 4 back to back pulls to tweak the A/F ratio and WOT timing we were done. That SCT slotted MAF is really a sweet part and I would highly reccomend it to anyone making 400 plus rwhp. Even without the 95mm TB the car has never felt stronger or ran better than it does now. On the 4th pull wich I shortened from 6500 to about 6200 because the motor was heat soaked and pulling timing...it made 483 rwhp. On a cooler day or even with a cooler motor on the same day, I think it will pull 500 before installing the bigger TB.
Anyhow I'm so pleased with how well the car turned out, I may change my mind and bring it to the Shootout instead of the turbo car.
Here are some random pictures I took.
David
So we ended up replacing the stock brakes with 13" Cobra fronts, KVR slotted and plated rotors, late model spindles, sway bar end links, stock size KVR slotted and plated rear rotors with new pads and caliper repaint. I was also able to witness Dave's whack it with a big hammer method of removing ball joints without using a pickle fork and no damage to the boot. Prior to installing the spindles they were stripped down to inspect the hub bearings, and the rivots for the bent up rusty backing plates were drilled out, then everything was cleaned with a drill and a wire wheel to prep for repainting black.
Good thing Dave and Phillip were involved, because if I had done it they would have just gotten sprayed with brake cleaner and a splash of paint on the side thats visible. I think they put 3 coats of paint on them and they looked better than a brand new parts. The painting of the rear brake calipers was a much bigger production with everything all masked off and painting the frames black after replacing the slider pin boots and regreasing, then painting the calipers red to match the fronts..I was very impressed with all the effort that went into making everything look so nice.
Oh yeah...my 18" Boyds wouldn't clear the Cobra calipers without using at least a 1/4" spacer. I ended up using a 5/16" aluminum spacer from AutoZone that had to be ground to fit the 4.25 bolt circle.
The Pro-M 87mm bullet MAF and MP 3.5" cold air intake pipe was replaced with a custom 4" pipe and integrated SCT slotted MAF and a much larger K&N oval filter. The air box opening in the fender was also increased to about 3 times the previous area and the MP cold air divider was modifyed to match. This was also the perfect time to ditch the nasty plastic coolant tank and install the new aluminum Canton tank.
In order to tune/datalog the car without crawling under it and screwing sensors in and out, Dave installed an LC-1 wideband and switched my dual pillar pod over to a triple pod to accomidate the wideband display gauge. This involved cleaning up my previous wiring on the pillar and under the shifter console. I was even able to keep my blue nitrous purge button for o2 the sensor calibration.
We also added the second meth nozzel back onto the return plenum like it was originally planned (when fighting an overly rich condition and missfiring at WOT last summer, we eliminated one nozzel) We later discovered the reason for the missfiring overly rich issue was because we tuned it with a faulty wideband sensor that was reading nearly two points lean. That was another reason for getting my own wideband.
We even had a little time left over so Phillip installed a new set of headlights I've had on the shelf for more than a year.
Once all this stuff was done Dave made the tuning changes look easy and the motor fired and idled smoothly on the first turn of the key (that's always a good feeling). Then we all jumped in the car and drove it over to the dyno and Dave monitored stuff with his laptop on the way.
After 4 back to back pulls to tweak the A/F ratio and WOT timing we were done. That SCT slotted MAF is really a sweet part and I would highly reccomend it to anyone making 400 plus rwhp. Even without the 95mm TB the car has never felt stronger or ran better than it does now. On the 4th pull wich I shortened from 6500 to about 6200 because the motor was heat soaked and pulling timing...it made 483 rwhp. On a cooler day or even with a cooler motor on the same day, I think it will pull 500 before installing the bigger TB.
Anyhow I'm so pleased with how well the car turned out, I may change my mind and bring it to the Shootout instead of the turbo car.
Here are some random pictures I took.
David
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