The garage and my tools have been taking a beating recently and currently R.I.P to my trusty angle grinder, a electric drill, my bench-mounted vise, and something is jamming up the wire in my MIG welder. Everything is dirty and metal shrapnel/dust over everything. getting impatient to wrap this project up and do a garage re-set and cleanup.
Anyways, I spent some time bending up all new transmission fluid lines to replace the oem steel ones that had been well abused, bent, cut up, and simply always in the way for many years. I made nice clean new ones out of 5/16" copper-nickle tube and flared the ends. I also re-routed my fuel lines, rear-brake line, fuel pump wiring harness, and oxygen sensor wiring harnesses, higher up inside the trans tunnel to keep them away from exhaust heat. They should all be safe from moving objects and heat now, and I will probably wrap them in that heat-shield sleeve stuff later on. I got the two powdercoated pulleys on the engine too (no belts yet). Added in a secondary oil pressure line which will go to a new autometer oil pressure gauge on the A-pillar. Also bought a nitrous pressure gauge and the AEM UEGO X-series wideband oxygen sensor. Only the oil pressure gauge was hooked up so far, but not yet installed in the A-pillar.
(probably going to roder that silver bezel for the AEM gauge so it matches the silver bezels on the nitrous and oil gauges.
After all that was installed, (and the headers with new gaskets), I wanted to check for leaks before proceeding with the fabrication of the collectors and merge pipes. So I got all the car's electronics hooked up and fired it up. I put the sniper in open loop, because I did not have the oxygen sensor installed.
--- Damn, this thing I was way louder than it ever was with the dyno-dons shorty headers. I decided to take a video of it, and the phone camera/microphone really does it no justice. Its loud in a good way, but too damn loud and if left like this it will be causing a ruckus everywhere. I am curious to see how the volume changes once the collectors, merge pipe, 4" pipes and magnaflow muffler are in place.
video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1Z4ayM82tM
I had a few hours real quick today to try to fab up some collector pipes. I originally intended to get all creative with stainless 3" pipes and lots of pie cuts, but this project is wearing me down and I decided to just use some of those 18" long 3" diameter sections of pipe from autozone for $12 piece or something. I did a few pie cuts, but I don't have a metal chop-saw with a base-clamp, so I essentially just used the angle grinder to guess my best guess at some angles and chopping things up. If I gotta re-do this one day, I'll make it more professional, but now its more about getting the project done and moving onto the next stuff...because Island Dragway opens March 6th this year.
-I used the TIG to tack the pie-cut pieces in place, which was NOT my initial plan. I was going to tack them quick and easy with the MIG welder while everything was under the car, but the MIG is acting dumb. So I had to lie on my back, holding the TIG torch in one hand, filler rod in another hand and using either my shoulder and sometimes my knee to work the welders foot-pedal amp control. Not how I intended to do it, but its tacked in place and now I can put the pieces on a bench and weld them up properly... after I go get more Argon, because the bottle ran out today as I was tacking stuff in place. Just can't win recently !
not thrilled about any of these quick-n-dirty tack welds, but they are holding and I will get it all zipped up nice on the bench once I get TIG gas refill.
The headers themselves do fit good. I did run into a clearance issue when I went to index the starter, so I had to cut a slice off of the mounting area on the starter body so that the starter gear could index the flexplate properly. I built a bracket/hanger off the starter to hold the trans lines too. I've noticed that the drivers side header does come down a bit lower than the passenger header, and there is nothing I can do about that, so I just worked the 3" collector pipes on each side accordingly. I do like these v-band clamps at the header/collector flanges, so i am glad I did that. Not sure if I will cut in a v-band at the 4" pipe too, but for now, I am going to leave the area where the flowmaster merge pipe connects tot he 4" main pipe as a slip fit with a band-clamp. Can always change it later on.
As for the oxygen sensors.... My gameplan has changed from a few weeks ago when we discussed where to put them. I initially planned on them landing somewhere near where the tailshaft of the trans is, but thats where my flex-pipes are. So I am going to squeeze them in alongside the trans body right about where those red pieces of tape are. They will be angled just slightly off from vertical, so basically at the 11:00 position and the 1:00 position. Anyone foresee any problems with that? Its about 8ish inches away from the header exit, so the airflow will have a blend of all 4 primary pipes. Thoughts?
