Replaced all the old vaccum hoses with new ones - a pain in the *** and I should have done it while I was putting the engine back together last Fall. At the time I was just too anxious to get it done that I reused the 25+ year old ones. Fail.

 

Put in a new speedometer

and replaced my broken nitrous nozzle. bye bye brass, hello stainless.

 

looks good man. really does, that 5.3 on N2O will be fun

got the GM harness sorted out today. I started to cut holes in firewall to route them but my dad got pissed because the body saw was too loud. I need my own garage damnit.

 

Well I can finally post here lol. I buttoned up the audio "upgrade" in my 79 today. Installed 6x9's in an undisclosed location and made up an aux input cable with a 1/8" headphone jack to put my MP3 player through the original radio. All worked out well as everything looks stock besides the headphone jack which you have to look real hard to find. I even powered the 6x9's with an external amp for a little more volume than the stock radio is capable of. Overall, it sounds good for basically going through a 33 year old radio.

Now I wait for my exhaust parts and Hawk HPS brake pads for the front to arrive.

 

[AN6 to 3/8" Push-On for EFI] AN6 to 3/8" Push-On for EFI

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Sku: 61764940 In Stock
[STAINLESS STEEL BRAIDED LINE, AN10] STAINLESS STEEL BRAIDED LINE, AN10

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LENGTH: 20
Sku: 620310-20 In Stock
[STRAIGHT FULL FLOW SWIVEL HOSE FITTING, AN10] STRAIGHT FULL FLOW SWIVEL HOSE FITTING, AN10

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Sku: 6201004 In Stock
[90 FULL FLOW SWIVEL HOSE FITTING, AN10] 90 FULL FLOW SWIVEL HOSE FITTING, AN10

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Sku: 6201018 In Stock
[Flare Male Union, AN10] Flare Male Union, AN10

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ALUM / STEEL: A
Sku: 6176037-A In Stock
[Flare Male Union, AN6, Aluminum] Flare Male Union, AN6, Aluminum

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Sku: 6176035 In Stock
[STRAIGHT FULL FLOW SWIVEL HOSE FITTING, AN6] STRAIGHT FULL FLOW SWIVEL HOSE FITTING, AN6

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[90 FULL FLOW SWIVEL HOSE FITTING, AN6] 90 FULL FLOW SWIVEL HOSE FITTING, AN6

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Sku: 6201016 In Stock
[LS1/LT1 AN6 to 5/16" Fuel Line Adapter Tube Fitting] LS1/LT1 AN6 to 5/16" Fuel Line Adapter Tube Fitting

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Sku: 61764860 On Order
[NICKEL ADAPTER, MALE STRAIGHT AN10 TO 3/8" NPT PIPE] NICKEL ADAPTER, MALE STRAIGHT AN10 TO 3/8" NPT PIPE

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[NICKEL ADAPTER, MALE STRAIGHT AN6 TO 3/8" NPT PIPE] NICKEL ADAPTER, MALE STRAIGHT AN6 TO 3/8" NPT PIPE

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Sku: 61760460 In Stock
Sub Total: $291.75
Discounts: $0.00


****!!!

 

New housing before paint & detail:


After a little cunning polishing & detail painting:




Inside the stack:


Also touched up psg side engine bay paint a bit, got new motor mounts looking shiny, cleaned and repainted trans crossmember, & started a final going-over of engine parts.

Plans is for (sucessful, this time!) keg reassembly Friday night, followed by dress-out & insertion of trans & motor into the chassis on Saturday.

Then I should have room on the bench to start working thru carb & exhaust issues.

 

Glen, I have a feeling you and I would get along really well together. Hahaha. You are the only person I've ever seen who is as OCD as I am. Well done sir.

 

last weekend i was going to try to tune the idle, found out that i still have a vac leak. So yesterday I: removed sterling carb and intake mani, cleaned and went over all mating surfaces, made gasktes for the acv and emissions tube thing, pressed in freeze plugs, cleaned/inspected all parts and reinstalled everything. I also put on new battery terminals, found out I need a tie rod end, and tightened up my wheel bearings properly. Starting it tonight, hopefully that intake mani gasket was where my leak was coming from.

 

I bought some fender washers.

 

pfft 5.3??? thats a 6.0

 

Ive alwasy had an issue of the car over heating in traffic, here was what I had before this is a dual pass radiator so it was only cooling the top half of the radiator.



Now this is what I did today, I added 2 more fans at the bottom of the radiator this shold keep the car a little cooler, or so im hoping.

 

Welcome to a really hot intake manifold.

 

why? From there not being coolant in there? what about all the aftermarket manifolds that dont have coolant ports?

 

if the acv is not filled, then you will actually be heating up the intake mani with exhaust.

 

nah there is no flow, so the gasses aren't hot at all

 

Ok...color me confused...lol. I must have read some posts incorrectly. So it's ok to have the coolant passages plugged and the rectangular port open??? I thought this was the recipe for a "super heated" intake charge? I may need to get left back a year in the jeff20b academy. Lol

 

I saw that Jeff mentioned that as well in one of his posts, but I have to say that has never been my experience in the past. On several occasions I have run 12A engines with the coolant ports blocked and the ACV open. The manifold stays very cold, almost ice cold on the bottom. It feels like grabbing an uninsulated copper refrigerant line. You don't get any flow thru that ACV hole because there isn't anywhere for the air to circulate to. Sure, there is a possibility for heat to transfer, but in stagnant air like that, it is very minimal. The venturi effect of the carburetor has a natural cooling effect, that appears to be greater than the heating effect of the open ACV port. At least in my experience that is the case. My manifolds have always stayed VERY cold, even with the ACV port unblocked.

 

the rectangular port is the "port air" port, so it goes from the air control valve to the exhaust ports. you'd think since it was open to the exhaust ports, it would be hot there, but its not because there is no flow.

we use a paper intake gasket, and those never look burned, even on cars with bad ACV's and plugged converters and 100k miles...

 

Interesting...thank you

 

Are those 7 inch fans off of an ATV?

 

I dropped the tank to clean it

 

Weird, my ran is still the original factory rad caked inside with calcium buildup and I'm only running one Flex-A-Lite fan and never had temperature problems. Plan to do the same with my new factory style aluminum rad. Maybe switch to a larger fan?

 

Re-cleaned keg components and mounted stationary gears.

Installed oil neck and breather stub into new center housing while shouting "Thou art virgin no more!" to the general astonishment of my neighbors.

Installed new front cover oil seal, rear OPR, rear plate heater hose connection (now an NLA part, guys) and various threaded plugs and such on plates.

Ordered new rubber isolators for the trans cross member to replace original mangled ones, and new firewall heater hoses to replace 8-year-old ones.

 

Hey DD, what are the torque specs for stat gears? I could look, but i bet you know

 

The stat gear bolt torques aren't listed specifically, so you normally have to go by actual bolt diameter from the table at the very end of the Technical Data section in the rear of the FSM.

The table lists torques for 6T and 8T strength hardware (Torque for an 8MM 8T bolt is listed at 13-20ft-lbs.); my stat gear bolts, however, are 10.9T .

There is a formula for calculating torques, but it's fairly complex to get the right data for it. This table is more useful:
http://www.cncexpo.com/MetricBoltTorque.aspx

Says for a 10.9 M8 bolt dry-installed, torque is 333in-lbs or 27.75 ft lbs. Wet install is 242/20.17; I split the difference & went with 24 ft-lbs.


Another useful table: Metric bolt sizes to bolt-head sizes in the three common systems:
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/me...ze-d_1458.html

(Which explains why replacement bolts from McMaster-Carr or other industrial houses often have larger heads than the ones you are replacing - - they are normally ANSI/ISO rather than JIS bolts!)