Not to hi-jack the SP3 thread. Looking at the link I read this: Dang, I knew the regular splash shield wouldn't fit the SPX because how far it sits into the valley, but I didn't realize one for the SPX was offered, let alone one set up for extra baffling for a vacuum pump, which is the direction I'm going! Too late for this round, the engine is bolted together. Maybe next time.
I wanted to have it up and running by now, but such is life. I did get the car into place to put it back into the shop area so I can upgrade the fuel system and then install the engine. I still have a few other minor things to do as well like minor clean up and re-wrapping the engine EFI wiring harness and I plan on installing a CS140 alternator like I have on the Firebird, which may require some accessory spacing adjustments, which I'll do on the engine stand. I also have to clean up the work area, and who needs to go to the gym when you can push a car around on gravel..
Got the fuel pumps re-mounted under the car. They used to be under the hood at the front of the engine bay, but they should do fairly well right here where the mufflers used to be under the rear seat. Its the same bracket I used before, so I welded a nut to the floor board to bolt the pump bracket too, then the bolt that is seen holds the second half of the bracket in place. As long as that bolt doesn't come out the other one doesn't have any room to back out. I'll put a small tin heat and debris shield on around it after I have it all plumbed in. While I had the welder out I also welded in some tabs on the radiator core support so I can bolt in the upper part of the support I cut out.
Cleaned up the wiring harness some and put it on the intake manifold. I'm going to make another electrical quick connect like I have on the Firebird so disconnecting and reconnecting the harness to the chassis is a two second task instead of a couple minutes and a bunch of double checking.
Been working on a few things on the car in the last few days and today I finished cleaning up the brackets and prepped the engine for re-install. Tomorrow morning I have a few minor things to do, like replace the power steering pump in the reservoir, then will roll the car back some and hopefully re-install the engine and transmission. I'm really getting antsy wanting to drive it. I've upgraded the alternator to an off the shelf 140 amp CS alternator like I put in my Firebird. It will need some minor re-wiring when I install the engine, but other than a different plug, it wires up the same as the SI alternators. I'm tempted to paint the new alternator's fan grey or silver.
Had a pretty productive day. Did a few minor tasks before installing the engine in the car. One of them was setting up the new CS alternator's rear support. The rear bracket interfered with the alternator, so I cut it off and welded it over a bit to make it work. I thought about re-clocking the alternator, but the plug fits and should work nicely there. By lunch time I had the transmission and engine together. After lunch I set the engine in, and the new SRE oil pan temporarily got hung up on the cross member, it was a tight fit but managed to wiggle past it. Where I ended the day. The drive shaft and starter are installed and the exhaust hooked back up. I got a new power steering pump and high pressure hose because the old one was leaking at the fitting and over the last several years its been ran dry'ish. So some time was spent swapping the pump out of the reservoir. And ended the day presenting on the monthly Rock n' Roll Geology train. Hoping to be able to fire the car up tomorrow.
I finally got it fired up. All the changes I made to the fuel system and some wiring just seemed to eat away at my time. Had two injector o-rings that got cut on install so had to replace them. I didn't RTV the bottom side of the valve cover gaskets and I may have to go back and do so as the passenger side one appeared to weep a bit and the driver's side plain leaked until I put more torque down on the bolts, but I'm not convinced it fully stopped the leaks. The new cam pulls a ton more vacuum than the old one for sure. Before it used to idle at 65% load (MAP/Baro) and the new one idles around 22-25% load (MAP/Baro) so the old tune was not happy at all. So back to the basics of tuning EFI yourself. First step was to lock the timing and verify it at the crank. MegaSquirt makes that easy with a simple drop down selection to lock the timing at a set value. I picked 18 because if the timing is off one way or the other ~15 it shouldn't hurt the engine. Due to the crank trigger's location being fixed the timing was spot on :TU: Then leaving it locked so the only variable should be fuel. Then over to the VE fuel table (which I already tampered with to get it to idle long enough to check the timing) I had to re-bin the tables because the lowest on my old table was 35kPa, and the engine now wanted well below that. Then I grabbed a group of blocks around where it was idling and added fuel until it was happy at 13:1 AFR then re-scaled the rest of the table from there so it had a similar shape as the old table. Of course it's just a base line that will need re-fining. A few free rev's already told me it was too lean to start with, but it was getting late and I'm sure my neighbors don't want me at this hour repeatedly revving the engine as I make changes. The old and "new" table. Its set to be running rich at idle at the moment as its far easier to tune rich to lean than lean to rich. The y-axis is the load range, which I re-scaled, and may re-scale again depending what it wants when actually driving. I re-scaled the spark advance table as well, but have the timing capped at 32 to keep it on the safe side. I'll give it more timing when I am satisfied enough with the fuel that it won't ping from too much timing. I have a pile of yard work to take care of tomorrow, but if I get it done I'm hoping to get the car out on the road :3gears:
Got it up and running and does it run smooth, and the exhaust note is certainly quieter. I cheated and turned the MegaSquirt's Auto-Tune on to take it for a quick drive down the street and back and does it ever have a bunch of torque. However I am fighting some oil leaks. May just be the valve cover gaskets, which are definitely weeping (I didn't RTV the bottom side of the gasket), or it may be the equalization line is leaking despite testing it on the stand. So I'm looking at pulling the engine Wednesday and sticking it back in the car on Friday. I have softball games after work Tuesday and Thursday, but shouldn't take too long as many of the changes/updates I made actually make it easier and quicker to remove and install the engine now that they are in place. It was good to be back behind the wheel of it again. [video=youtube;eJ9iX9aXIbw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ9iX9aXIbw[/video]
Thanks! The good news is many of the changes I made to simplify removal and installation have worked like a charm and I pulled the engine out in a bit over an hour. The downside is the valve covers did not appear to be leaking anymore and the rear was fairly dry, and the equalization line fitting and tube were dry as can be so not the source of the leak, but the oil pan rail in the rear were wet with oil, so it was coming from somewhere. Then I saw this thread. Wish I had saw it sooner. http://www.v8buick.com/showthread.php?298806-TA-Perf-7-Qt-Oil-pan-Leak I think I am seeing the same issue so tomorrow or Friday I'll un-bolt the oil pan and remove the rear seal and Right Stuff it. I may destroy the oil pan gasket, so will probably have to change that too. Will see how the grey RTV behaves.
I pulled the pan down some, removed the rear oil pan seal, beaded in some Right Stuff all the way around and tightened it back up. I also did not like how easy the oil pan bolts came loose even though I had "re-torqued" them a day after initially putting the pan on, so each bolt got a dab of blue loc-tite too. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to put the engine and transmission back into the car. And the lower two bolts of the valve covers got long clamps and the short ones I had moved to the outer two top bolts.
Hmm, I didn't update the thread, but I got the engine back in and all seemed good, but drove it into town and got some fuel and when I got to the gas station it was leaking just as fast as before :af: So I figure it must be the rear main seal and ordered one but won't be here until Wednesday. Since I have a softball game to play on Tuesday, after work today I pulled the engine, stuck it on an engine stand, removed the oil pan and cleaned up the gasket surface. Now I wait for the new rear main seal to show up on Wednesday. To humor myself, several months ago I bought a camera for my dog's collar that takes a picture every 5 minutes, however the camera was only $8, so it doesn't take the greatest of pictures and a few come out corrupt. But, I did manage to make an animated GIF of the engine pull (and off screen remove the transmission, mount on the engine stand, removed the oil pan and cleaned up the gasket surface). :laugh:
Haha, if only I could get him to sit that still! I updated the photo this morning after I used a better animated GIF program. It actually put all the photo's in proper order so it runs in sequence and looks a bit smoother. Here is a link to an album of all the pictures used in the GIF. Its interesting to see how incrementally the car moves up as the radiator and exhaust system is removed. http://s42.photobucket.com/user/TheSilverBuick/library/Engine Pull GIF
After a comedy of issues I finally got the car up and running yesterday afternoon, made a successful drive around town, and now its out in the parking lot at work, and so far not leaking any oil :TU: When I pulled the rear seal out it was apparent I goofed the installation as some ultra black RTV and squeezed under the seal lip and caused it to warp, and thus not provide a good positive seal to the crank. So I called NAPA up for a new seal and their local warehouse did not have one and would be three or four days before they'd get one, so I went on Amazon.com and ordered two through their Prime service hoping the 2-day shipping would get it here on Tuesday, but sadly it showed Wednesday, which I figured was a push or better than NAPA so ordered it anyways. Then FedEx shipped it to the wrong town which caused a delay of delivery until Thursday :af: Then when it showed up on Thursday the delivery driver didn't bother to ring the door bell and proceeded to "hide" the package (ignoring my "Packages Here" box next to the gate he walked through....). It was 1.5 hours after the "delivered" e-mail popped up before I found it. Only to open it up and find Felpro packaged rope seals in the boxes (http://www.v8buick.com/showthread.php?299764-Felpro-Rear-Main-Seal-BS40012-(Cadillac-368-472-500) :af: So now it's Thursday, I call NAPA and have them order one, and it'll be Monday before it arrives, grr. Fearing the same problem as Amazon, I ordered two off E-bay and one was scheduled to be delivered on Monday. On Monday I went to NAPA first thing in the morning and was told UPS would be bringing it to them, but they didn't know when, but on the drive home I saw the postal lady at the mail boxes and sure enough one of the E-bay seals arrived and it had the 2-piece seal in it :TU: So at 9:30am I got to work. Trimmed it up, got a nice fit, and put the engine back together. Then it was just stubborn from there. The engine fought me going back into place, the exhaust was stubborn, one of the upper radiator hose clamps decided to freeze up/break, and the battery decided it didn't want to put out amps anymore*, once up and running the O2 sensor wanted a new free air calibration, and my air temp sensor was on the fritz screwing with the tune and caused me to chase my tail for about 30 minutes. *On the battery end, it had a solid 12.8 volts on the volt meter, but the starter would just clunk, which made me suspect the new starter I got. So I pulled the starter and tried bench testing it with some jumper cables and got nothing out of it. So I got my old OE style starter to bench test and nada. Finally left the volt meter connected when I jumped the solenoid and voltage would go to zero. So I wandered over to the Firebird with the starters, jumper cables and volt meter and set it up and both starters whirred just fine. The battery that worked just fine a week and a half ago, and shows 12.8v, is bad, go figure. Swapped the battery out and the car started right up. Its not that old of a battery, a year or two tops top end NAPA battery so I'm going to see if they'll warranty it out. After I got the car idling good again, I turned on the Auto-tune and hit the road. Took it out on the highway and the new cam just has a nice smooth torque curve and does it ever like to lite the tires up :grin: Overall I drove it pretty gentle because the auto-tune was doing its thing and I didn't want to risk something weird and damaging happening. The Auto-Tune has its limits, but from the highway and a bit of around town driving it gave a nice trend on the VE table for me to extrapolate the rest of the table from. I also had it targeting a fairly rich 13.5 AFR to keep it on the safe side. I'll manually lean it out over the next few days. I also hooked up the crankcase vacuum system :TU: It appears to be self limiting to around 5inHg, so I have a vacuum leak somewhere. My suspicion is either the catch can itself or the fitting coming out of the intake manifold. But it does run a pretty consistent 4-5inHg while driving around, which is good enough for now to keep oil seeps at bay, minor help to the rings and not major enough to be sucking large volumes of dirt in. I wanted to get a video, but by the time I decided I wanted to take one it was getting late and I didn't want to make my neighbor's angry by revving the engine outside at 8pm. So maybe today.
Thanks! I tried to take a video yesterday but my new phone did not do a very good job of it, so I will try again tonight. For now I'll substitute a picture of it out in the parking lot at work through from my office window.
