What a crazy weekend! The plan for this weekend was to clean up the wiring, make some coil mounts, and just start wrapping up the loose ends. Well sometimes things don't go as planned. This is basically what it looked like under the hood Friday when we showed up
And this is what it looked like Friday night
Let me explain how we got to this point real quick. During the week Chris was working on the idle and heard a noise which he thought was a coil rubbing. So Friday, since we had gotten the new plug wires, we made up the coil mounts. The mount is simple, just some 1/4-20 rod with 5/16 aluminum tubing as spacers. The over hang of the top rod sits in some cradles that I whipped up real quick so that the whole assembly is easy to install/remove. That little part came in quite handy more times than we would have like this weekend. Here is the coils mounted to the rods. I did not get a picture of the cradles, but you will be able to see them installed later.
BTW, we are using Fire Core 50 wires that were custom made for us by
www.customwiresets.com They have been great to deal with, and are highly recommended.
So once we had the coil mount made, we installed them with the new wires and started it up. I heard the noise that Chris was referring to almost immediately. It was not a noise I was happy to hear, a squeak which means that something isn't getting oil. I was hoping it was simple, so we pulled off the valve cover on the driver side and saw some metal flakes by the front most rocker. We then pulled the rockers, and the push rods and cleaned then throughly thinking that oil just wasn't making it up the push rod. Put it all back together and started it up, same noise! So then we knew the head had to come off. Chris suddenly found some energy and was able to get the head off Friday night. Got everything cleaned up, and put the lifters in some oil to soak over night. We did find one piece of metal down by the rear lifters which may have been some of the problem.
Saturday morning Chris get the head back on, and everything re-assembled. While he was working on that I was doing smaller things like running the line for the radiator overflow to the back of the car, extending the upper inter cooler pipe, and final installing the lower inter cooler pipe. So we get it all back together, fire it up.... SAME NOISE but now on the other side. This time we both traded off taking everything apart and pulling the head. We also checked everything out on the driver side to make sure it was doing OK. We got the passenger side head pulled and all of the parts cleaned and soaking early in the afternoon.
In this picture you can see the cradles for the coil packs in the cowl notch.
We took a break while the parts were soaking and tried to make sure we didn't miss anything else before we put it all together. There were a couple of things we checked, but they were all OK, so we put it all back together. While Chris was working on finishing everything up, I was able to get the seat bolted in, and most of the harness installed (I need some parts to install the crotch strap).
This time we got it all back together, started it up, and it was perfect!!! Car sounded great, and was holding an idle at about 800 RPM just fine. We ran it for about 5 min and let it get to full operating temperature. It was a lot of work, but we are more confident about how the valve train is installed, and we caught something that could have been a huge issue, that piece of metal down by the lifter. Here is a quick shot of how it looked when when we were done for the weekend.
We were able to do a few other things this weekend as well. Chris cleaned up the engine harness by removing unneeded connectors, re wrapping parts and so on. Cleaned up the grounds on the main harness as well. We also discovered that the alternator is no good, which is why its juts laying there in the last pic, a new one is on order. We temporarily hooked up the oil pressure gage (seen on the right side) to make sure we had good oil pressure, which we do (around 40 at idle). You will also notice that the MAF is still there in the last pic, even though I extended the upper inter cooler pipe (not installed), that is because we are having a hard time getting it to idle on a speed density tune up. Chris is already working on getting the speed density tune up good to go, so that we can finally get rid of that ugly *** MAF.
Well thats all for this weekend, thanks again for looking!
Sean
