New motor for my vette...

Well, the nightmare still isn't over with. And what I have posted here is but a small fraction of the entire story I posted over on my CorvetteFlorida site.

I found two bolts missing and another loose by a quarter inch on the bell housing. So the bell housing wasn't secured and likely flexing the drivetrain. I was on the way to the Chevy dealership to let them put the bolts back in (this is unbelievably tougher than you would think to do) and check out the drivetrain as much as possible when the clutch failed on me. Wound up driving the remaining few miles in first gear when I was finally able to get the shifter to go into gear with the engine off.

The clutch slave cylinder had failed. The drive shaft had punched through the torque tube and drilled partially into the pilot bearing. The clutch got trashed. So everything between the engine block and the transmission has to be replaced. Again...

That work might be done by the end of this week, but who the heck knows what else the people who previously worked on my car might have screwed up on it. And then I can't find ANY Excedrin Migraine on the shelves when I went looking for a resupply. :crying:

All in all, this has made for a real crappy beginning of retirement for Connie and I.

Well, long story short, MAYBE my car is done and roadworthy now. Took the car to the vette tech at the local Chevy dealership and let him take a look. Besides the missing bolts on the bell housing, the carbon fiber drive shaft I got from Pfadt was too long and contributed to it's own set of problems. So after replacing the drive shaft, torque tube, clutch, clutch master and slave cylinders, and the pilot bearing, maybe nothing else is wrong.

Been putting some miles on the car to break in the clutch properly. So far things seem to be holding together well.

Here's a short video of just stretching the car's legs a bit. Didn't push it too hard, as I didn't take the RPMs over 4,000...

Getting there....

Still working on the tune with my tuner. He sends me new tunes, I load them up and do data logging and send him the results so he can generate a new tune based on that data.

Cold startup was a lot better than it has been. Not as rough and not nearly the stumbling it had with the earlier tunes. So that was a good sign of things to come, I thought.

Car just felt stronger to me and sounded stronger somehow. Still a minor problem with throttle crispness just when the gas pedal is depressed in the 1500 to 2200 rpm range, but then it seems to snap together with just a little bit more pressure on the pedal. Definitely improved though. And there is still that minor surging at around 1,000 rpm or less. But overall it feels pretty darn strong.

So I tried to get some logging while the engine was under boost more so than I have done before this time out.



Quite honestly, the car kind of startled me at speed when it felt like the steering got loose on me. I was expecting the rear tires to maybe break loose, but wasn't prepared for the front tires to feel like they weren't exactly gripping the pavement. Maybe it was just my imagination. Or maybe it was just the road itself. But it sure as heck felt strange. And just a tad bit unsettling, even. And heck, I only went as much as 51 percent throttle the entire time. I've NEVER had the throttle to 100 percent yet.

Speaking of strange, I was cruising back towards home and was on a flat section of road running around 65 mph in sixth gear and I noticed the gas mileage was at 33 mpg. Man, can't complain about THAT!

So all in all, things seem to be pulling together rather nicely with the tuning.

Still playing around with the tuning on my car. This is kind of complicated stuff, made all the more complicated because the software (EFILive) kind of just keeps you in the dark about what all of the tables, switches, triggers, and modifiers really do and how they affect other tables. Descriptions are terse, to say the least. So you pretty much have to just try to figure it out, then make a change, then take the car out for a drive while logging the data to see if the change you made was for the better, worse, or made no difference whatsoever.

So, I did another data logging run yesterday. I've noticed that the short term fuel trims were fluctuating quite a bit, so I wanted to disable closed loop mode to see what was going on.



Car ran really well in open loop, but seems to be running a bit rich in most areas of the VE map. I disabled the fuel modifiers last night and will do another run today or tomorrow to see if that helps lean it up a bit before modifying the VE (volumetric efficiency - B0101) table.

FYI, the reason I take videos of every run I make is so that if something bad happens, I will have a record of at least the audio so I can go back and try to analyze what happened. Along with the audio and the data logging, it would help a lot to try to figure out exactly what went wrong. So far I've only had one failure, and that was my own fault. When I was working on the fuel system to replace all the lines with teflon lined fuel hose, I had wanted to replace the fuel filter, but couldn't get one of the connectors off. So I left it, possibly thinking I would go back to it. Well, I didn't go back to it, and apparently I had loosened up the connector, as it popped off while I was driving down the road, stranding me till a tow truck could get the car back home.



But all in all, the car is really running pretty well, even with my fumbling attempts to figure out this tuning stuff.

Cool to see someone enjoying their retirement (well, maybe not the stranded part lol)...have fun Rich

Yeah, I'll be glad to be able to drive the car without monitoring everything via laptop and camcorder. Well, actually Connie and I did take the car down to St. George Island with some folks in a local car cruise. But I still had the camcorder running, just in case..... :grin01:

Well, I've got the car finished, tuning and all and it runs REALLY well. However the weather has just been crappy, and haven't had a chance to take it out for a ride in, well, months now. Mostly because of the scattered rain we've been having. I live on a sandy dirt road, and after it rains, the road stays muddy for a few days. Maybe I'm just being odd about it, but I just hate getting globs of mud all in the wheel wells and all underneath the car. The car has been on the lift for so long that during spells when I was either waiting for parts or just trying to figure out what the heck I need to do to fix the latest problem I found, I would just clean and polish stuff underneath.

We had rain overnight so the road is still crappy today. Maybe it will dry out in a couple of days, but more rain forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday, too.

Maybe I just need to consider another mod for the car.... :laugh:

Here's one of the latest posts I made on my corvette site concerning the finishing touches on the car.

=================
Found an EXCELLENT road to let it all hang out on yesterday. Virtually the middle of nowhere and nice and straight and flat. Gentle curve in the road just a bit past where I need to be slowing down anyway to let me know when to quit pushing it. So I dropped it into fourth gear from a rolling idle and once the rpms were high enough where I didn't think it would bog, I opened it up to 100 percent until just over 6500 rpm. I didn't take it to redline because the slight curve in the road was coming up pretty darn quickly. :ack2:

Boost comes on pretty strong and earlier than I had expected. I was at 105 kPa at just 1750 rpm at 69% throttle. I was only going 39 mph at that point. Acceleration was very smooth all the way to the point where I bailed off of the gas pedal.

Here's a video of that run:


The logged data I took is showing a directly linear relationship between engine speed and vehicle speed, so there wasn't any clutch or tire slippage noted. Heck, I just remembered that I neglected to take traction control off. :headbang: Ah, no big deal I guess. It was a gradual increase in speed so I wouldn't expect traction control to really kick in anyway.

Car feels REALLY good lately. Throttle response is good, no errors showing up and the scans look OK to my untrained eye. Looks like car speed is pretty linear with engine rpm till I took my foot off of the accelerator pedal. Looks like a couple of rich spots in the AFR when I am in boost, though, but doesn't look too bad to me. Only thing I still have nagging me as some slight engine surging around 1200 rpm at 40 to 50 kpa while in higher gears. One of the guys on EFILive forum gave me some tips that might help out with that, so I'll make some changes to the tune and see how it does.
===========================

I really don't want to say how fast I was going when I let off the gas, but I will say I was going VERY fast at that point.... :grin01:

Glad to hear the car is finally living up to the 'retirement gem' it was meant to be. <G>

Another thread about cars on FC made me think about this thread and the fact that I never really showed closure.

Anyway, I finished up the tuning on 11-21-2013. Well at least as much as I think I'm going to do. The car definitely doesn't like to be driven under 10 mph and surges a bit to let me know about it. Other that that, it drives pretty much like a stock vette with a whole lot more oomph under the "GO" pedal.

I had to replace the TAC (Throttle Actuator Control module on 03-09-2014 because I was getting intermittent shutdowns at startup. It was pretty much a shot in the dark determining that the TAC module was the culprit, but after replacing it I haven't had a single incident up to today with the failures I noted. Oh, I also found the some dust covers were missing on the front of the bell housing, but they were easily replaced without too much hassle.

But since I haven't had any further problems (knock on wood) since replacing the TAC module, that is the date I am going to declare the car officially finished.

So, it is REALLY REALLY done. From 10-27-2009 to about 03-09-2014. Just over 4 years.