🔧 BUILD LAME Turbo V6 Camaro

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Hello! Welcome to the shit show! I am updating this post in 2021 to explain what new readers are about to witness. If I knew that this thread and build were going to explode into what it is today, I would have started it out a lot different.

This car was (and still is) a basket case. The whole inspiration for starting this project was to start learning how to modify engines in a car that I didn't like. That way, if and when I screwed up, I wouldn't be ruining a nice car. It spiraled out of control from the first moment that I felt boost. I loved what I had created, but it took a ton of work to get to where I was. As soon as I got the car running nicely I was always saying "I'm going to fix______, and THEN I'll just enjoy driving it." You know the drill. Drive, break, fix, repeat! Before I knew it, I enjoyed driving and working on this turd more than the nice car I was trying to preserve!

The point is that the focus of this thread shifts A LOT. To complicate matters, I never have just one ongoing project open at a time. I listed some thread contents with links below. I will update this as new milestones or big updates happen. Just know that even if you click on the shortcut, you may have to scroll past other project posts to reveal the outcome. There are also some mini-projects and very helpful advice from other members in between, so read the whole dang thing if you want!

2018-2019
1. A late introduction
2. Discovering how a PCV works (and plugging it)
3. Custom grill for intercooler
4. Fuel pump trap door
5. Learning that I'll never learn anything from my goofy wide band gauge
6. Deleting AC completely, but retaining heat
2020
7. Low profile heater hose fittings
8. Deleting an air bag without setting a light on the dash
9. Starting a second round of floor repairs
10. ABS delete and line lock installation
- A separate thread for the electrons
11. Installing catch cans with nice brackets (Way overkill)
12. Figuring out the "blow by" problem once and for all (F-body intake plug)
13. Second clutch job, first rear cover job, and preliminary transmission swap research
14. Floors are "done", and Interior is installed.
15. I don't know how to tune, but this wide band might help.
16. Poly trans mount. Yeah, it actually deserves a link.
17. I waved the tuning white flag. Dyno Brian sets me straight!
18. T5 Pro5.0 shifter
19. New shifter was too much fun. OG T5 explodes, and my transmission conversion ideas start to get serious.
-TKX conversion
-TKX swap official write-up
20. Reconfiguring my exhaust for a quieter and less leaky future
21. I'm not done enjoying this car for the year, so I install a $100 T5 instead of a bulletproof conversion. SPOILER ALERT: It only lasts two months.
22. Minor repairs/updates that make the car livable (lighting, stereo, speedometer re-zero, and a clutch master cylinder that actually does it's job!)
23. Wheels and addressing rust again since I got time!
2021
24. Custom center caps
25. 1.9 roller rockers and LS6 springs
26. CAI V2.0
27. TKX is delayed so it's time to address the little annoyances.
-OE pan is junk. Dorman pan gets hot rodded
28. TKX is still delayed, so I install just one poly engine mount and beef up my flimsy turbo drain plumbing
29. TKX does NOT ship the following Monday. Flywheel bolts upgraded to ARP M10 x 1.0
30. When you're on a Chinese garbage budget, you better be ready to work harder. (Oil drain fitting hot rodding)
31. Finally repairing the oil sender pig tail, replacing the other engine mount, and test fitting the TKX.
32. Finally addressing rear brake lines while I wait for more transmission parts.
33. Modifying an ICM for a WOT box
34. Dash gets re-instrumented so that diagnostics become possible.
35. N2MB WOT box
36. Porked crank key. PSA: Be careful installing your balancer!
37. Car runs great after plug change, but the rear main seal needs to be changed again.
38. BURNOUT! Also, I kinda bought a cam.
39. Turbo drain finale (better be) and full exhaust commenced
2022
40. Downpipe V3 and BMR strut tower brace
41. Panhard bar and relocation for bro truck exhaust
42. Muffler, driveshaft, torque arm, and giving up smoking.
43. First trip to the GS Nationals (feat. time slip)
44. The very custom AC project is born
45. New dyno results (up 50 hp!)
46. Exhaust hanger repair before Michigan/S.S. Badger/Wisconsin trip
47. Sizing a better turbo
48. Painting but still not installing the IS3 heads and Monster clutch unboxing
49. Firewall brace
50. New ECM
2023
51. Out of storage and SC engine buy failure #3
52. Modified double roller and spitballing crankcase evac ideas
53. Completing the rear suspension. UMI rear control arms.
54. Cracked headers and L32 swap begins
55. My newest L32 was trash. I'm upgrading the L36 instead
56. Side project: The ultimate-ish intake manifold takes shape


Now back to 2018!
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Now that this car is running and driving, I figured I would start a thread dedicated to all the questions I’m about to pummel this group with. This is the first time I've really built anything to move quicker than stock, so I'm hoping to learn a lot from you guys before I make unnecessary mistakes. I also have a thread in the Turbobuick.com 3800 section, but I'm not getting as much input there due to a lack of audience. Here goes nothing...

The car I have is a 2002 Camaro with only ONE factory option (rear window defogger). The story supposedly goes that my buddy's dad was looking forever for a new Camaro because he never buys anything for a penny more than the best deal. He almost ran out of time as this was the final model year for the F-body, and '03s were already on the market. The dealer from which he found this car bought it for the sole purpose of being able to advertise "Brand new Camaros for under $10k", so this was the one he took home.

Fast forward to 2018. The car was structurally a wreck from living in the rust belt, but has a great interior, okay black paint, a third pedal, a 3800 (which is a plus in my book), and a lot of sentimental value since I remember riding in it when it was brand new. My buddy’s dad handed me the keys in hopes that I would enjoy it and make it a race car. To be honest, I don’t care for F-bodies, but I couldn't resist this one for the reasons above despite knowing that the floors were in desperate need of existing again.

I already had my dream car which is a 1986 Buick Regal Grand National. As much as I love that car, I like it the way it is in fairly stock form and modifying Buicks has gotten terribly expensive anyway. I figured a black 3800 Camaro could easily fulfill my childhood dreams of racing a badass turbo Buick V6 car while being on a budget, so here I am.

The car is now equipped with:
-6765 ebay turbo
-Precision PW40 wastegate
-Custom turbo exhaust utilizing a stock Camaro and FWD manifolds
-Air to air ebay intercooler
-AEM 50-1200 fuel pump
-Siemens Deka 80# fuel injectors
-Open 3” downpipe
-Custom 3” charge pipes
-Intense mail order tune
-Very ugly but functional upright radiator conversion (the core support was all just rust anyway) :dunno:
-Custom space saving AC delete without bypass pulley
-Midwest Chassis bumper support modified to mount my intercooler
-Spec Stage 1 clutch kit

The car is far from refined and has a lot of little issues to sort out, but I will leave the first post as sort of an introduction to that. I hope you enjoy hearing about it. It’s been fun to build!

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v6buicks

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The following are all pictures during cruise.
wd3TCGB.jpg

i2WowXN.jpg

VAgwRLM.jpg

z6G7PUh.jpg

A2uSbWQ.jpg

jBHzSgE.jpg

I took this short video while trying to blip the throttle, but naturally, it was raining so hard that my engine was sucking in water....
https://i.imgur.com/8UTg3YS.mp4]

Anyway, I'm not sure if that helped at all. lol My Long terms never seemed to "lock in" unless I was still holding onto WOT. Maybe I misunderstood, and that's what you meant? I guess the point is that the long terms went negative about 4-5% every time I stabbed it. I just find it odd that when I cruise the trims are almost always very high with bank 2 being much higher than bank 1.
 

10sec

I haz dat teddy bear smile.
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The banks could be different because one side is much longer than the other to get to the turbo. They would eventually even out at the same RPM for couple miles, unless the tune is super jacked up. Cruising is off, but wide open throttle sounds like it's doing okay. I wish you had a way to scan a WOT run to see how that looks, cause if that's fine old girl just needs some maf scaling to clean up the cruising and start adding boost. I'd bet I could get that on the first shot.
 

v6buicks

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Who tuned the pcm? It's odd that your banks are that far apart. You should scan both o2's and make sure they are oscillating like they should.

Nice build btw.

Thank you! John at Intense did the mail order. To be fair, he warned me ahead of time that this is only to get me going until I can get a real dyno tune. It's not intended to really be beat on or driven daily.

When you ask about scanning does my attachment tell you anything? If not I can probably figure out how to ad PIDs, but ST and LTFTs are in there. Just take it with a grain of salt. That's with a slipping clutch, and god knows what other issues were going on at that time.

The banks could be different because one side is much longer than the other to get to the turbo. They would eventually even out at the same RPM for couple miles, unless the tune is super jacked up. Cruising is off, but wide open throttle sounds like it's doing okay. I wish you had a way to scan a WOT run to see how that looks, cause if that's fine old girl just needs some maf scaling to clean up the cruising and start adding boost. I'd bet I could get that on the first shot.

You beat me to it. I was going to ask if my exhaust design could be something to do with it. Bank 2 is in no way the same as it was from the factory, and I wondered if I could have introduced some odd turbulence. I don't know. I'm reaching.

Check my attachment. It's kind of a crude way of compiling data, but I'll bet I can figure out how to graph it. My exel skills just aren't very good yet. I would also take the car out for another drive to get more recent data, but I just spent about 15 minutes playing musical cars. It's blocked in now.
 

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10sec

I haz dat teddy bear smile.
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Get more important data, I didn't see a throttle % over 35-ish the entire scan. Cruising data is good, but the computer already tells you what it needs for adjustment. It's the higher TPS %'s that tell the story of what's going on. IMO, just cruising around it's lean, but it's not bad and under the little bit of load you put it under it was great, which is important so whoever sent that mail order tune did a good job. Kept it safe so you don't hurt the motor. I didn't see an O2 on that scan either, did I miss it?
 

v6buicks

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Sounds good! I'll be sure to cycle the throttle a few times next time it's out. You didn't miss it. It's not set up, and I have no idea how to do so. My wideband is physically wired in place of the AC pressure switch, but I don't know if that's even set up right in the ECM. If it is, I don't know how how to log "AC pressure" lol I have some work to do there.
 

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That's advanced shit, so I don't blame you. Stock 02 stuff tho should be part of the scan tho, you just have to add them. If that's over your head, that's fine, I can tell you with 100% confidence the car is perfectly fine to drive around. I can't confirm WOT though, not without an o2 reading, both would be the best. IF I was sitting in the car with my laptop with the scanner running and seeing what I saw in your scan without the o2's I'd be confident for a full 1:1 pull, because it looks great, but I'm not haha.
 

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Narrow bands get a bad rep, but you can reference them with the wideband readings to get a good platform to work with. Some read lean, some read rich, but if the wideband is reading 11.5:1, you can take that number and compare it to what the narrow bands are reading, and easily tune the car. The Wideband is always just a reference, unless it's a piece of shit and isn't reading right. So with that said, if you have 2 narrow bands reading one thing (good) and the wideband reading another (rich/lean) it's 2 against one, they win. In that case the wideband is either in the wrong place or isn't reading properly.
 

GTPpower

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In my experience, that isn't true. The narrowband is neither accurate nor consistent at anything other than stoich.


You have a problem somewhere. Your trims shouldn't be that high. If the trims aren't in the +10/-10 range, there is almost always a problem.

Can you create logs with torque pro? It's so much easier to figure this out when we have an actual scan to look at.
 

v6buicks

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Bank 1 (stock)
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Bank 2
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Of course it's hard to tell just by looking at it. I could see how this sensor would be in a high pressure spot though. Bank 1 merges only an inch or so down stream, and the turbo is less than a foot from there. I hoped that opening up the diameter 1/2" post sensor would alleviate back pressure problems on that bank, but maybe not. I've been monitoring the exhaust runner temps and that sensor every so often with my temp gun, but it doesn't really work in place of live EGTs. Besides, I'm sure the wrap in conjunction with cast manifolds can hide a lot of temp inside!

Interesting read Mr_Roboto. I saw what you were referring to on page 4.
 

v6buicks

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I would disable o2's temporarily and see how itruns.

Just driving and listening to the car it ran just fine before all this rain. It's the numbers that didn't seem right. I think disabling will only make it run worse and make me more blind to issues. I don't have the capability without tuning software anyway.

Besides... The car seems to have done that on it's own, but I'll get to that in a minute.

I tried to take the car on another test drive, but of course it's still raining. I was driving along just fine yesterday, but as soon as the rain hit and got the car wet it's been running like total crap. This usually happens after a car wash too, but I haven't figured out why.

I confirmed that the MAF isn't wet. the inside of the up pipe is bone dry.
With all that piping I have I wouldn't think that was the case, but its acting the same as another car I had in which case the MAF was the culprit. Any ideas?

Anyway, attached is my latest logs. The first one is from the drive and the second one was a test just sitting in the garage. Neither are any good once again because of the water problem. It popped really bad when I floored it. However, one thing I'm noticing is that my data does not at all match my scan gauge. I didn't actually see the gauge read anything but 815 for bank 2 O2 mV... I did keep it running once I got home to make the following video, but when I pulled the car into the garage, the reading went from 815 to 450. Then it stayed that way until the gauge shut itself off after I turned the car off. Clearly it should have read 0 at that point like the the other bank did.
Weird...

https://i.imgur.com/OQRlKWt.mp4

Then it gets weirder. The gauge just gave up on displaying that O2.

pN9bIQL.jpg


I wonder if it's the scan gauge malfunctioning. Maybe my OBD splitter?
 

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SaturdaysGS

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I had a similar issue where every time it rained my car would do funky things also as far as fueling (verified it on the wideband). Not sure what the issue was but I replaced the upstream oxygen sensor (I only had 1 upstream) and the “extension harness” that I needed to get the wiring to reach where it was mounted and the issue had gone away. It would seem to cause the car to go super lean while cruising and then it finally would snap back. Not sure what that was all about, thought it might have been a voltage issue.
 

v6buicks

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Straight from the Aeroforce FAQ

Can I use the gauge at the same time as other scan devices or equipment plugged into the OBD2 port?

Probably not as the OBD2 port is designed for only one device. You can try this, it won't hurt anything, and it is possible that some devices are compatible depending on how they are accessing data. Most devices are not compatible however and one or both may hang up and not display data.

I will try unplugging the bluetooth adapter, and see if that clears up. Then I will unplug the gauge to make some logs. Hopefully the logs remain looking normal so that I can just disregard the gauge when logging. Otherwise, I will will have to do some wiring to move my obd port. Right now everything is tucked up over the kick panel which isn't very convenient for changing scan tools out. I think we're getting somewhere!
 

bs009

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Sweet build! Wish I saw this when I was in the area last week for Power Tour, could have helped a little since I had my DHP with me.

I don't have much else to add that hasn't been mentioned already. Just keep an eye on that wideband when you're getting on it to make sure it's not going lean under boost.

If you have an exhaust leak before or slightly after the O2's that could be causing some weird readings on them causing the weird fuel trims.

+1 on the injectors probably not being scaled properly. Betting it has to do with the non-boost-referenced FPR in the stock rail vs what might be in the tune. You can always scale the MAF too to adjust for that though I guess when it gets tuned.

If you can somehow add the voltage from the analog output of the wideband to the log that'd be helpful.
Some folks use the EGR inputs to log the wideband since it's usually deleted on most turbo cars. No idea if that's possible with what you're logging with though.
Probably not a big deal though if you're not able to make changes to the tune anyway though.
 

v6buicks

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I've used a splitter before so I can watch the aeroforce and record everything with the laptop. Speed definitely decreases like that though. I can see it causing issues.


You really need to just invest in hp tuners.

I debated that for a long time when I was considering the idea of trying to tune the car myself, but it just doesn't seem worth it in the end.

Once I get this dialed in with it's current set-up, I think I'm done playing with it. The next step would be building up a more aggressive set-up on a separate k-member or maybe a whole different shell. At that point, I'd rather take the leap on something more user friendly and less limited like MS3 or Holly EFI. Who knows though. I may change my mind.

What model AEM gauge do you have? Just curious I've never seen the analog out one like that.

30-5143
 

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