Alright the transmission... Saturday night I went home and decided I wasn't messing around with seals so ordered a whole new Tilton hydraulic bearing and paid for overnight shipping which would get it here by Tuesday. Sunday I went and pulled the transmission back out, which I think is my fourth time this year. At least I'm getting practice, but I still don't enjoy it.
I used a piece of scrap wood and a carriage bolt to make this "transmission jack" and it did actually make it a little easier.
the offending seal
once Tuesday rolled around I received the new bearing, PN 60-6032, but was confused as it did not have the same bearing I had been using or expected. It turns out Tilton replaced the 52mm bearing with a 54mm radius faced bearings so it works with a wider range of applications. Below from left to right is the 52mm bearing I had been using, the new 54mm bearing, and a flat face bearing I started this all with in 2017.
The side benefit of this is that since I'm no longer using the swapped around housing/piston combo I had before the piston is much further down in the bore. That also brings the housing forward enough that I can easily reach into the bellhousing post-install and make small adjustments to the threaded adjustment sleeve with some soft jawed pliers if needed.
wouldn't it be nice if it actually stayed this clean.
By Tuesday night I had everything back together and was back to getting ready for fluids and first start. I filled it with coolant and started working on a few others things. I went back a bit later and touched around the water pump and pulled up a drop of coolant, turns out there was a tiny pinhole where I ended one of the welds at the cast-tube junction on the pump... damn it! Lesson learned as a welder. So I pulled the pump back off and Wednesday morning and made a repair which did not go easily and consumed way more welding rod than it should have. Wasn't proud enough of it to take pictures but it held water so at least it'll get me going. I have a new Hepu pump here now so I can have a re-do when I feel like it.
I had to overnight more waterpump gaskets from Japan, I mean FCP so while I was waiting I decided maybe I should have pressure tested the radiator. I capped it off and put 15psi into the vent port with a mity-vac and found another small pinhole right at that vent fitting. Thankfully it was right up on top so I could get away with leaving the rad in place. I wheeled the tig out and touched up that and one or two other spots I thought looked iffy and thankfully that repair went much easier than the cast pump.
Gaskets arrived Thursday at 5pm and my Dad was back in town so we slammed everything together and got ready to run it. I put just over 7 quarts of 10w-30 VR1 in it, a little over six in the pan and a full quart preloaded in the oil cooler. I wanted to prime the oil system but leave the timing belt undisturbed, so we made a flat blade screwdriver with a nut welded to the end to spin the oil pump directly with a bit driver. That worked really well and made ~40psi of pressure within seconds. After much build up I hit the key and it started pretty much right away... then ran absolutely terribly. Shaking, stumbling and barely able to keep it up at 2k-2500 to keep the cam spinning. There was nothing obviously wrong but we both thought it was only running on 2 or 3 cylinders. It was so rough I bailed out after like 5 minutes to try and figure out what was going on. This really sucked... I had a pretty meticulous break in routine planned and that immediately went out the window.
Scrambled around confirming spark, fuel, all the basics. Even pulled a coil off of Dad's CTS-V to make sure the strength of the spark was consistent. Everything checked out fine so we pulled the plugs and #3 and #4 were pretty soaked. I had another set of BPR8's on the shelf so I gapped those and put things back together. It re-started and ran only marginally better but I paid some more attention to the laptop and started pulling fuel out of it like crazy as I was managing the revs. I hadn't really noticed the first time in the flurry but it was running pig rich in the 10s and falling all over itself. As I started to get the fuel adjusted it started coming in and it was clear it was running properly on all 4. This was a huge relief. I still wish the initial start went perfectly but at least things were mechanically OK and I was able to get it reasonably smooth and finish the break in cycle. Apologies to my Dad's neighbors who had to listen to me run this thing in with the garage door open at 9:30pm.
Went back to the garage the next morning and changed the oil filter and put in another 7 quarts of fresh VR1 and went through it snugging things and looking for leaks. Thankfully everything appears to be pretty dry so far. I have two little weeps in the oil lines to watch but no more major issues.
The IC plumbing is lower now which allowed me to rotate my airbox further down which is nice. It's lined up perfectly now to cut a big hole in the inner fender and draw air up from the front bumper..
I finally got to wash off 10+ months of dust and grime and see it off the lift.
I've done probably 25 miles of driving it around, tuning and breaking it in. I never expected to need to remove any fuel for the big cam... my simple thought was big cam, more air, more fuel? I've leaned it out significantly everywhere in idle and cruise and only started to add a little more fuel in as I've gotten it into the 5-10psi parts of the table. So here's my initial thoughts on this cam setup:
- this thing means business. The RSI cams are tame in comparison. It obviously has a wicked idle chop and is certainly not more civilized.
- it sounds awesome. It sounds like some kind of vintage rally car, pure single cam race car noise. It has a really good deep bassy idle tone.
- Revs faster than with the RSI cam. I'm not redlining it yet but it really wants to scream. I have to watch the tach to keep it under 6k.
- not a ton going on under 3k but it has better midrange than the RSI cam and 4500+ it's super impressive.
- It changed every part of the tune. It's halfway decent now but accel enrich is kinda sloppy and it has a chop/surge at steady no-load cruise
- For years I chased a weird lean spot at 3k rpm that I documented plenty in this thread. It never went away and I had this weird super rich spot in my VE table forever which made it kind of un-smooth when crossing that range. The new cam seems to have eliminated that and it pulls smoother now.
other thoughts in general:
- The new clutch bearing setup made the pedal much lighter, to the point I didn't think I had a real pedal when I went to move it for the first time. Effort on the foot is now on par with my stock SAAB, nice!
- the extra camber and caster I put in are awesome, it's incredibly sharp and stable. I'm running a little bit of toe out though and it's kind of darty, so going to try a little toe in next.
- the oil cooler might work a little too well sometimes. Oil at cruise is like 175-180, but once in a while it opens up and drops a bunch of cool stuff and drops the pan under 160.
- intercooler is flawless and may be contributing some to how responsive it feels now. Never saw IAT's drift more than ~3 degrees from ambient.
- the water temps will still come up to 195 and trigger the fan if I'm behind someone under 40mph. I guess the combo of the giant radiator with a 3.5" block of intercooler in front of it was a net zero. It does manage temps well though, maybe someday I'll go whole hog and chop out the lower rad support and drop the intercooler down.
- the new fan is a lot bigger and blew a 30amp fuse on start up on the first drive.
- power steering pump continues to puke fluid... probably going to put the old oil cooler on it and see if that helps.
a couple clips of startup, idle and cruising around during break in. I may be biased but I don't think redblock sound gets much better than this.
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All around it's always a nice reward to drive the car after this kind of time away and effort put into it. I really hate the thing at some points during the big projects, but it's so fun to drive. It definitely wants to be driven fast and needs more tire.
Hoping to spend the rest of the year getting the tune right and just driving it. I'll tinker with some ducting in the front, work out a tow hook situation (stock hook doesn't line up with the skinny bumpers so well) and leave the rest for winter. I do have a Wavetrac to put in it and the KL control arms, and a couple special side projects I'm really excited about.