Vertigosity's Verdigris V8 Wagon

Awesome...stop by my place anytime the too-much-money-itis is bothering you...

Nice work, glad you had some fun

I'm good now, nice seats cure that disease

Nice job - always a treat to see another one on the road.

Postmortem on the carnage from the Targa Southland:

• A torque rod bolt came loose
• All four transmission-to-bellhousing bolts were loose. I used SAE bolts, of essentially correct thread, that were the correct size for some years of BBC, but were half a size small, where the LSx-adjusted reproduction 621 bellhousings... are apparently metric. The bolts you get with 240 lower ball joints (which I have a million of for some reason) are in fact, correct.
• Either of those could have caused or been caused by (at least exacerbated) the driveshaft hitting the body under weight transfer

Holy fawk, I'm firing my mechanic (plot twist: it's me).

Don't have a pic (I always have my phone on the stereo playing music instead of ready to shoot pictures...) - but a stock M46 front section is exactly the right length for the TKO in this configuration, so I got the yoke adapted on, and it's held up in the last two weeks of extremely mixed DDing.

Got a late Mustang spare, and moved the roadside kit over from my wrecked '74.
Planning on working on adding a basic stereo some evening this week.

I plan on breaking it at the ARSCCA AX in Blytheville this coming weekend!

Last few months of updates:

• Took it to Blytheville and AXed it. Pretty fun. 400/250 isn't enough spring for this car, and that's way more apparent with the V8's power than it was with my budget B234FT setup.
• Had problems with the car making a neighborhood-covering smoke cloud on startup, so I swapped the early truck valley cover for the LS6 arrangement (which is an upgrade to the PCV system), replaced the valve stem seals, and did a trunnion bearing upgrade kit at the advice of a friend who had experience racing LSxes. The oil consumption problem was fixed (likely from the PCV setup, as the stem seals weren't that bad, and the oil level in the intake was quite high), and it honestly made more power and had better tip-in throttle response (from not, y'know, slurping oil constantly). Seriously, if you've got an early LSx, do the LS6 valley cover ASAP.
• Put a stereo in (2 way Pioneer speakers in the front HT-204/5 housings, and 3-ways in Retrosound housings in the back. For reference, their 2 ways fit in the shorter 204 housing, and the 3 ways won't fit even in the taller 205 housing), wired up the cruise control (which didn't work, and despite continued diagnosis, still won't), and put in a fuel pump check valve so I wouldn't have to regularly prime the pump 4 times to get the system pressurized.
• Added a Car Chemistry exhaust baffle (they sell them at the National Corvette Museum track if you blow sound, and I impulse bought one while I was there with my Spec Miata) to take the edge off for highway driving. Doesn't spoil the perfect exhaust note from the Magnaflow, and does a perfect amount of sound deadening for highway cruising.
• Painted and installed (using homemade spacers, long bolts from fastenal, and some miscellaneous HW from Home Depot) the trailer hitch I got with Spoon's 242, and put it on so I'd have a rear tie down if I needed to make a 450 mile flatbed ride, for some reason.
• Took it to the Tail Of The Dragon with my local BMWCCA chapter (we do a yearly drive, and Memphis is far enough you really need to go as a group and make a long weekend out of it). Pretty good fun there, too. Got 24mpg @ ~75mph in typical annoying non-constant-speed traffic on the way there.
• Towards the end of the day, smelled a hint of fuel but figured it was just sloshed out of the filler cap (which seems to happen with aftermarket caps). I /had/ been doing some cornering, after all.
• Nope! The next morning, a fuel injector O-ring had split and shot out. I figured I had just nicked it during assembly, and having the check valve in the system just pushed it over the edge. Got a buddy to drive me into town (An 1hr30m round trip! I owed him big-time.) to get a pack of replacement ones. Drove home, all seemed well.
• Took it to work in DD mode the following week. Nope! The ****ing wood-screw-into-plastic fuel rail mounting arrangement Dorman spec'ed for their replacement intakes stripped out, and the rail lifted itself clean off the engine. I think that pretty much kills any recommendation of it from me - if you're going to use one, get EZ-lok threaded inserts to use machine screws, don't even bother trying to use their mounting arrangement, unless you want a car-b-que. The problem didn't manifest itself until I had the check valve holding near-constant pressure on them while the car was off, and I owe the Flying Spaghetti Monster a case of beer for it not failing spectacularly while everything was at temperature.
• Got a used LS6 intake. Observations: the throttle body section is a few MM further back, adding some clearance between the intake elbow and the radiator/e-fan. The nipple for the canister purge has no clearance issues, as the Dorman one had. The truck MAP sensor didn't really sit right or clear the intake even with the forward clip cut off, where it did with the Dorman, so I got a real LS1 MAP sensor.
• I figured I'd switch to the used LS6 injectors that came with my intake, so I picked up some wiring adapters (ICT Billet) to try them out before permanently modifying my harness. Nope! The car ran extremely rough and threw injector control codes. I pulled 8 Orangetops out of storage and tried them (their flow rating is actually a margin of error away from LS6 injectors!), and it ran slightly better, but had the same code and still wasn't quite right. Checked the polarity of the wiring adapters - nope! All 8 are wired backwards (I'm guessing the earlier injector design of the Orangetops is less sensitive to that). So that's a hard fail on ICT Billet for that.
• Because I hedged my bets on the used injectors being bad, I also got a set of ICT Billet injector spacers at the same time. Those are actually perfect. The common formula for using truck injectors in LS1/6 intakes involves popping off the plastic caps on the bottom, and putting normal Bosch-sized O-rings on the bottom. This works on many LS1/6 intakes (including my Dorman), but some people's LS1/6 intakes (including mine) can't seat them in this configuration. I swapped on a set of the smaller truck-specific O-rings, and they seated, and sealed perfectly. ICT Billet gets a win for that, where their wiring adapters didn't.
• Win! Car is back in DD trim, ready for the winter with fresh A/S tires on Mach 1 wheels (235/45R17 fit, and 245/40R17 should as well come next tire purchase), and waiting on the next track / spirited driving event, to find the next failure...

Nice update...thanks for the reliability tips on the LS!
Enjoy

I finally got both computer-controlled-AC and cruise control working. The (which really only apply to the 03-07 blue/green era) finer points:

* You can use the OE Volvo cruise switch, since it's a Dana/Rostra "normally closed" type underneath, with a relay setup like http://67-72chevytrucks.com/vboard/showpost.php?p=3895589&postcount=10
* If you start with an automatic tune, even if you copy all the parameters from a manual tune over and it's not throwing any codes, it'll stay in "cruise lockout." I segment swapped over the transmission and trans diag parts from a manual 4.8 of the same year, and it worked like gravy.

* If your green/blue ECU came from a DBW vehicle, it almost definitely can't take a 12v AC signal - even if you're using DBW, it needs to come from a cable-throttle vehicle - van, '04 GTO, or 4.3, or downgrade to an earlier red/blue ECU. I swapped to a 4.3 van ECU, and it worked right out of the box. Built my own hoses! It's actually pretty simple once you have a crimper, not black magic at all.

Nice work!

V8 green wagon

Wow amazing job in your project. Thanks for the tip in the master clutch. I got to fix mine , although i used toyota clutch pedal parts and MC, I think the travel does not let the slave push the fork enough to release the Pressure plate.
Keep up the good work
DZ

Once again, update wall-'o-text time:

• One of the OG '93 PS hoses gave up and started hosing the engine bay down with PS fluid, likely because it was looped at a pretty sharp angle. Replaced the hose, and swapped the truck alternator/power steering bracket for the ICT Billet Camaro-arrangement-but-Truck-spacing setup, which positions the PS bracket in roughly the same place as the original Volvo. I adapted my original Volvo pump to the ICT bracket by drilling out the two threaded holes, swapping the fluid reservoir for a Camaro one, and swapping the pulley (the original pulley was bent when I got the car) for one for an LS2 GTO (same diameter and offset as the LS1 pulley, but has holes to put a socket wrench through, so you don't have to remove the pulley to remove the pump).
• Swapped my original but True-trac'ed 3.73:1 rear axle to the also-True-trac'ed 3.3:1 from my father's 242. With the truck cam, it actually feels like it's quicker with the higher ratio axle - takes better use of the M-cam-like low-end grunt. But, I was mainly doing it in preparation for...
• ...taking it on a 3000 mile road trip to visit my grandfather in DE, and took a day detour to visit some TBers in CT and MA to do cheap delivery on some ARE wheels, and some 242 quarterpanels (from the same car as the 3.3 axle, heh). Wagon power! Averaged about 27MPG, and not a single hiccup!
• Got it home, and two days later drove through a puddle and immediately lost clutch actuation, in traffic, in the rain. To add insult to injury, I broke the shift handle off trying to bangshift it into a parking lot, and then had a couple of months filled with various family, racing, and social engagements, so it took a while to get around to tearing it down. Found that both the slave cylinder seal had blown out (spraying brake fluid over the inside of the bellhousing, making a royal mess), and the snout from the input shaft retainer had snapped off - no idea which happened first, with one likely causing the other. I got a new input shaft retainer, and took my own advice and got a (self-adjusting) Tilton 6000 slave cylinder, set that up and got the driveline reinstalled...
• ... and it should be ready to stuff into a tree again, just in time for Christmas!