progress on the banshee...

[ericjon262]

My plan is to place the DUT under tension, because that's what I would really like to see. My plan was to make a platform that fixes to or underneath my engine crane, with a load cell in between the hook and the DUT. I still need to develop a method of measuring elongation of the DUT for more informative results.

I have an idea for a device that would fit into a shop press as well, but I do not currently have a press of my own, and probably won't pick one up until after I move later this year.

[ericjon262]

I'm almost ashamed to say, the only progress I've made on the car in about 2 weeks, is purely aesthetic... I painted and reinstalled the sail panels, they look so much better now.

[pmbrunelle]

Will Uncle Sam take care of moving this Fiero home (guess you won't be driving it) at the end of your service? And the Pig-Rig?

[ericjon262]

Will Uncle Sam take care of moving this Fiero home (guess you won't be driving it) at the end of your service? And the Pig-Rig?

So typically, the Navy will move one additional vehicle. at the moment, I have the Fiero, The Pig Rig, My 2006 Chevy 2500hd, and my Harley up here in Washington.

My current plan is to rent a U-haul (or equivalent) and a trailer to handle the stuff in the house, the Harley, and the Fiero. Then I'll fly my dad up here, and we'll load up and drive the U-haul/trailer/Harley, which I will drive, and my dad will drive the 2500hd. Then once we get to my destination, wherever that ends up, we'll fly back and pick up the Pig Rig and road trip it back, in a fashion similar to how we took it to Alaska back in 2019. Maybe hit Arches National Park, or Moab, or some other cool 4x4/adventurous spots, kinda a mini vacation for both of us.

[ericjon262]

I did a little bit of messing around with the tune today, I think a big part of my problem might be my injector timing data, I put a call out on one of the MS3 pages on FB to see if anyone had any data that I could try and see if it would work better with it. I input the new data, and started the car, and it definitely changed the characteristic of how the engine ran, but it seems like the plugs needed to be swapped before I could keep working on it, so I swapped them out, and tomorrow, I plan to fire it up for at least a few minutes, and try and see if it made any difference.

The new dead times are longer than the old dead times, so I suspect that once the car came out of warmup enrichment, it was trying to command a PW that wasn't fully opening the injectors, and then when the tune was compensating, it was adding too much fuel and fowling the plugs. I can't say for sure this will change anything, there's a logic train in my head that makes enough sense to be plausible, so hopefully it helps.

[ericjon262]

oh boy! new injector dead times made a HUGE difference, I now have a car that idles on it's own! not the smoothest idle, but it's huge step in the right direction. I need to work on getting the cooling fan idle adjust to work a bit better, ATM, it bogs the car a bit, but I should be able to fix that with some small tuning changes. Now I really need to work on the exhaust so I can drive it a bit more without pissing off the whole neighbor hood.

Edit:

I also bled the brakes again, unfortunately, it didn't seem to help. AFAIK, the master cylinder is the OEM part, seeing as I don't see any leaks, and wasn't getting any real amount of air while bleeding, I'm thinking the piston seals might be toast. I don't want to replace it, but I also want working brakes so I think tomorrow I'm going to order a new one and give it a go.

[ericjon262]

I worked on the brakes a bit over the past couple of days, and I'm not making much headway... no matter how much I bleed them I still have s soft pedal. I don't see any obvious leaks and I've bled the master a couple of times now, is there some trick that I don't know or something?

[Honest Don]

What's your bleed method?

[ericjon262]

What's your bleed method?

Vacuum bleeding. starting at the nearest caliper, and working to the furthest.
-front left
-front right
-rear right
-rear left

I have a new AC Delco master on the way, hopefully it solves my problems.

[pmbrunelle]

Did you pitch the car nose-down? This is to allow air trapped inside the master to evacuate via the reservoir.

You can see how the rocker panel on my car isn't horizontal.

IMG_4935.JPG (184.83 KiB) Viewed 2471 times

Theogre suggested to do this in his cave; I bled my brakes like this, starting from a master cylinder that I had allowed to drain out. No bench bleeding either.

********************************************************************************

Other thought... with your custom brake caliper brackets (non-stock orientation for the Corvette?), are the bleeder screws on your calipers actually at the uppermost point of the calipers?

[ericjon262]

the bleeders are on top, and at approximately the same position as they would be for the OE installation on a 'vette. I hadn't tried elevating the rear of the car, I'll have to give it a shot tomorrow, thanks.

[ericjon262]

I spent all day working on my kitchen, I wasn't expecting a cabinet I was waiting on to show up, so unfortunately, no car update. I might work on it tomorrow depending on how things work out, I'm still waiting to hear back on where the hell my countertops are...

[ericjon262]

I tried working on the brakes a bit yesterday and today, installing the new MC helped, but didn't entirely fix anything. I found there is a air leak in the combination valve, I took the safety switch out, and there was fluid in the cavity. I picked up another valve, and I am going to try and see if I can find new Orings for it before installing it. I am also going to try and see if I can have a bias adjuster made for it as well.

I did unbolt the front calipers and try rocking them around while bleeding them, and did get some additional air out, but not much. I still have more troubleshooting to do, but I think the leak in the combination valve is in the portion servicing the rear brakes. I have some things going on this week which will prevent any further progress until the weekend.

[ericjon262]

I'm going to be moving soon, so I wanted to get some parts of the car put back together so I would have less stuff to move or worry about breaking in transit. I got the headliner put in, and have the interior about 2/3's of the way complete for the first time in who knows how long.

for those of you with broken hard plastic interior bits, here's a useful tidbit.

The interior trim parts are all ABS plastic, and ABS pipe cement appears to do an acceptable job of holding the parts together. in this case, I repaired the A-Pillar trim where the tab broke off. I roughed up the area where I applied the cement, applied cement to both parts, held them together for a few minutes, and now they're stuck together nice and tight.

The downside, the cement is black, and will likely not match if it is visible. for things like the console skeleton, this is fine, visible stuff, not so much. I painted my "A" pillar trim black, so it doesn't matter to me.

I'm told the cement is ABS plastic, dissolved in acetone, I have not confirmed this, but it may be possible to dissolve some of a non-salvageable piece in acetone, and have a "DIY" cement in the factory colors, to avoid an obvious repair job being an eyesore.

[ericjon262]

bleh, I hate brakes so much... My buddy with the LZ9 GT came by to help me bleed the brakes, we bled them and bled them, and got nothing. I used a phoenix systems reverse bleeder on the calipers as a last ditch effort, and the fluid that left the front right caliper was disgusting. almost black, all the others were clean. the calipers on this car, were a hybrid of C5 and 4th generation F body calipers, which took a ton of effort to assemble, as all the parts look the same, but are different enough to cause problems. so instead of just replacing the front right, I swapped all four for off the shelf C5 calipers to prevent any further headache down the road should I need to replace the pads or hardware. The next night, my buddy came back over and we bled them again, this time getting a better pedal, but still very low. at this point, I figured the master cylinder was too small, so I stepped up bigtime.

Here's the new master alongside an S10 blazer master:



The new master is off of a 1996 chevy C3500hd and has a 1.57" bore, it physically bolts in place fine, but the reservoir is HUGE, so I pried it off and installed a stock fiero reservoir. The reservoir removes by simply pulling it off, not fasteners hold it on. The lines connect in the same position, but, the fittings are not the same size. I fixed this by cutting the lines just behind the flare, and removing the OE tube nuts, which I replaced with nuts of the correct size, then I flared the line and bolted everything back together.

where I cut the flares:





use a double flare kit, it looks like this:




The parts list:

New MC:

https://www.summitracing.com/parts/aaz-13-2754

1/4" tube nuts:

https://www.summitracing.com/parts/sum-220115

3/16" tube nuts:

https://www.summitracing.com/parts/sum-220137

now, lets talk results. with the S10 MC, the pedal feel was crap, and the travel was very long. Using the C3500HD MC I have a firm pedal, but the travel is very short, honestly I think it might be too short, so if I have a reason to crack the system open again, I'll probably install a 3/4 ton master to replace the 1 ton, it's 1.25" instead of 1.57" and should be a direct bolt in now that the I have the 1 ton master installed.

3/4 ton MC:

https://www.summitracing.com/parts/dhb-m390257

after all this nonsense, I finally drove the car for the first time in ages. because my fuel sender works, and it showed empty, I figured it would be a good idea to stop and fill it up at which point I found out the O ring on top of my fuel tank is shot, or not sealing, as the pump clicked off, and I heard the splash of the fuel hitting the ground...thankfully it was a very small amount of fuel, probably only a 1/2 cup or so, but it was enough to let me know I need to drop the tank and fix it. the part I'm still unsure of, is if my car has an 85 sender still, or an 87+, I don't remember which I installed when I put the tank in 7 years ago, and I don't know how to tell the difference, if it's still the 85 sender, that would explain the leak, as both senders are different.

I ended up putting about 35 miles on the car today, and it felt really good, but it does need more front camber, tighter rear springs, and/or a rear sway bar.

as proof it left the house, here's a shot of it outside the brewery I frequent.

[ericjon262]

took the car to a meet around the corner from my house. it was oddly satisfying to see so many people not look twice walking by the front of the car, and then freak out when they saw the engine/turbo, it gets less attention than I thought it would, which I'm quite happy about.

[ericjon262]

well, the past week or so has been pretty frustrating. Since I got the car running, it would occasionally have a tick to it, which I thought was a lifter not playing nice. I drove it to a buddies house and on the way back, it very suddenly became constant, and clearly not a lifter...

Today, I pulled it apart.







I dropped the pan, and the number 2 rod bearing decided it wanted to spin. I'm not 100% sure why, I had some theories, but they don't seem to hold water, as all the other bearings looked like new, the only showing any sign of trouble was number two, which catastrophically failed. I didn't take pictures, like Will with the head milling incident, I probably would have thrown my phone...

when the noise started I assumed it was a rod, so I bought a set of rod bearings, I installed a new bearing on the worst of the existing bearings, and put the "worst"(which looked practically brand new) in number 2, because honestly, there's no way it's going to survive long term anyways. after I move I'll figure out a path forward, and I'll probably see how long it goes before it kills itself again, because I assure you, it will kill itself again, it's very difficult, if not impossible to remove forge welded aluminum from a steel rod. I worked at the cap off of the car for about two hours to make something "ok". the other half on the rod is damn near impossible to work without pulling the assembly out of the engine.

My current plan, is to get another LX9, put a "stage 2 turbo cam" from WOT tech in it, with my heads and intakes, and call it good. The cam change prevents me from having to cut new valve reliefs, as my current cam requires reliefs, which will make the whole process faster and easier. Ben at WOT tech also said his dynomation software suggests I should pick up a considerable amount of torque with the stage 2 compared to what I have. With the car running and driving again, I'll start working on an LZ9 on a spare cradle, because I can't leave well enough alone.

[The Dark Side of Will]

Sorry to hear all that, man.

At least you have glitter for Halloween now.

Keeping on after you get sucker punched is what gets the job done.

So you put a new bearing in it just to be able to drive it?
Was there bearing material adhered to the journal or just scoring?

[Honest Don]

Mix up some lye and water and it will take the aluminum right off of the crank journal. I use a wood handle q-tip to apply. Might save it if you caught it soon enough.

BE CAREFUL and wear gloves & goggles; you do not want the mix on you.

Wait, off the rod? How does the rod bore look? Did it blue up?

[pmbrunelle]

Oh shit... maybe the big end of the rod was elongated, not crushing the bearing enough?