A journey through the process of turning an ordinary classic car into a modern, pro-touring machine - all of today's amenities and Vette-like handling.
Now that we have the engine harness bug worked out, we can go back to finishing this puppy up! Re-checked the pinion angle (2 degrees down per DSE spec). After that, I torqued the control arms and the pan hard bar. These are torqued with the vehicle at ride height and the weight on the suspension. I also adjusted the driveline angle. This was done by adding a shim under the trans mount. When I fabricated the trans crossmember I intentionally set the angle a degree further down so I would have some range to adjust the driveline angle up or down.
Greasing the front end with Mobil One synthetic grease.
Torquing the lug nuts.
Here she sits in daylight for the first time in a while. Nice thing is that I didn't have to push her out!!!
And her first journey, just a short move from the lift area to the other side of the shop where I will have more room to work on the rest of the build.
Been a while since our last post but the news is good! Finally have the beast running.
Here is the short version of the last 3-4 weeks. At the much anticipated initial start-up, I ran into some trouble. She lit right up but only wanted to enter life as a 4 banger! I realized that the even bank was not running. Well since I reworked my own harness, I suspected that I had made a mistake somewhere. So I ran the pin outs several times, read the woes of countless others trying to fix similar problems....all with no solution. I decided to source another harness and just lay it in place to see if it would run right. Guess what? Had the same problem!!! The good part was that I felt like the problem wasn't in my harness rework. Then talked to a few other people that I know who I regard as successful and knowledgable in the LS conversion world. When I ran the pin outs (3 times!), I used the pinout table that came with the GMPP harness. (Also the info I used when re-working the harness). The problem is that the table does not include specific coil/cylinder locations (i.e. 1-8). Sooooo when I originally re-worked the harness, I reversed the even coil bank. Then to further complicate (and aggravate!!!) things, when I did the layover with the 2nd harness, I inadvertently connected the coil pack harness backwards......I know, go ahead and kick me in the rear! Moral of the story, get COMPLETE pin out info if you want to tackle this job! Thankfully my wife (who helps me TONS) asked the simple question, which led us to (almost immediately) spot the error. Flipped the coil pack harness and Voila! fired right up, on 8 cylinders! Then I went back to my original re-worked harness and swapped the coil leads at the bulkhead connector and re-fired the engine. Ran perfectly! What a relief! Took me a while, and the help of good folks, but I got it running.
Let your ears enjoy the video! I know I was like a kid on Christmas!
