🔧 BUILD Turbo 3800 T56 Swapped G-body Grand Prix w/ Holley EFI

[Yaj Yak]

Wait till he throws an hx40 compressor on too.

:fyws:

it was moreover a jab at someone...

 

[Mr_Roboto]

:fyws:

it was moreover a jab at someone...

Jab or not, I think he needs an HX40 wheel.

 

[bs009]

Wait till he throws an hx40 compressor on too.

I was looking at those when I ordered the rebuild kit. They were more than I wanted to spend at the time though.
If this holds up I'll definitely look at it more seriously though! Looks like a really easy way to upgrade the turbo!

 

[bs009]

So I haven't done much driving with this thing since it almost always will start missing betweeen 3500 - 4500 rpms.

After the turbo rebuild it still seemed to be losing some oil out of the turbo and I realized that the oil drain had to be the issue, so out came the oil pan.

Had to lift the motor a few inches to clear the crossmember.

I put on a much larger oil drain bung on the front of the oil pan above the oil level and closer to the turbo:

Installed:

I used an original oil drain for the holset turbo instead of the aftermarket "-10 AN" fitting that appears to have a much smaller inside diameter than -10AN.

the aluminum one is the aftermarket one:

I also replaced all of the ancient steering components with new moog components:

So this car is still misfiring at high rpms. So far I have:
- replaced plugs with 104's, tried 103's, and have also gapped down to 0.025" without any noticeable change.
- swapped Coils
- switched ICMs
- Swapped injectors with L67 injectors
- ran a compression test, shows 180 psi in all cylinders
- tried 3 different pcms with different tunes specific to the build, a stock Camaro tune, and a stock GTP tune.
- I've also gone through the wiring harness and looked for loose/exposed wires and checked continuity on every connection with an ohmmeter.

When it does misfire the logs don't show anything, the only sign of an issue in the logs is a blip of a lean AFR due to the unburnt fuel as well as a single row of a very low RPM while the car is in gear.

Here is one example of this:

Despite all of this, the car runs and drives great as long as I don't rev it up too high. I took it out to a cars and coffee about 30 minutes away last weekend and on the way back I was actually able to get it to rev up really close to redline without misfiring. It hauled ass and felt great until I went to drive it again and it started acting up again.

Here it is at its first cars and coffee:

I'll be bringing it out to the w-body/3800 gathering here in Detroit next weekend if anyone around here is crazy enough to head out here.

Between now and then I'm going to switch out the crank sensor with the old one to see if that helps. I'm really close to tearing out all of the engine wiring and redoing all of it.

 

[SleeperLS]

Does it misfire for 3500-4500 rpm only or does it misfire on anything above 3500-4500?

 

[bs009]

It's not really that consistent as to what RPM range it comes up. Sometimes it will hit over 4,000 before it breaks up, sometimes it will start to miss around 3500.

When it does miss it pretty much falls on its face so I usually let off the gas. I've usually let off as soon as it starts to misbehave. I might have some sort of video of it somewhere that I can dig up.

 

[bs009]

Here are some of the videos I have of the misfiring. Some of these are recorded with the terrible audio of my dash cam, some with my cell phone so sorry about the bad audio.

 

[RICH17]

Check the came and crank wiring?

 

[bs009]

The camaro I pulled everything from was in a front end accident and had a few cut wires where the hood was smashed in and I resoldered everything that was cut.

There is one place in the harness where some of the wires had some damaged insulation though that I wrapped with tape since the cores seemed fine. Some wires in that area were pretty bent but didn't appear to be damaged. I didn't spend the time to cut out and replace those sections since the car seems to run well for the most part.

I did go over all of the wires for continuity and didn't see any issues.
However I did see some damage to some of the insulation around the cam sensor wire and I wrapped that one up as well. The 18x and 3x signals didn't have any noticeable damage anywhere, but looked like they had some sharp bends in them.

Maybe I should pull a whole new ICM/Crank/Cam harness from another car and put that in here just to rule out the wiring.

 

[Mr_Roboto]

I don't know about 3800s but on the Turbo Buicks the coil packs and module were problematic. What's your plug gap, and have you tried tightening it at all?

 

[bs009]

It was the crank sensor.

 

[SleeperLS]

Fuck yes

 

[bs009]

I went back through and fixed most of the photobucket links now and realized that I hadn't updated this after the 3800 gathering. So here is that update pretty much copied and pasted from its build thread elsewhere:

So I took this car to the 3800 gathering out here in Mt Clemens last weekend and took home an award for the car. It was great to meet a lot of people I have only seen posts from online and really cool to see some of the oddball things people brought there.

I haven't driven the car much at all yet and there's so much more I want to do to clean things up and make it better so it felt great to have an award despite all of that.

To prep it for this I did some things to the tune and ziptied a few more things down it to make sure nothing goes wrong. Here it is getting ready for a set of front tires:

Ready for its long day of driving:

First alignment for this car in more than 10 years. No idea when it was last aligned but apparently everything was way out

Filling up on corn to make sure everything is safe:

At the gathering:

It took home a second place award for 3800 swapped cars at the meet this year:

and it also shredded a plastic pulley. Thankfully the guy next to me had a spare while I was there and I was able to change it quickly!

For fun, some night shots of the car:

Finally, a few glory shots of the car in daylight:

The car still has a long way to go before I'll be completely satisfied with it. For now though, I'm going to try to stop putting money into it and enjoy driving it!

 

[RICH17]

Sweet man! How was the meet?

 

[bs009]

Sweet man! How was the meet?

I thought this year turned out pretty good. If this were my first year though I would have been more excited about it. I've been to the 2013, 2014, and 2016 meets before and I think this one was the largest of those.

There were a lot of GTO's and G8's there this year and most other cars were w-body's.
There were very few different things that I noticed like a Fiero and a Grand National but I didn't notice too many other cool oddball things this year.
I'm kinda tired of seeing the FWD racer thing myself, but there were a lot of neat things done to the w-body's too that wow-ed me when I looked harder at those cars.

To me it seemed like for every really neat car I saw there, there was something really stupid too though. You probably get that at a lot of modern car shows now though.

It was cool to meet people that I hadn't met before though and put faces to the screennames and the cars.

 

[Dirty Vegas]

This is an awesome swap! Keep up the good work!

 

[bs009]

I drove the car out to Woodward over the weekend with some friends and noticed after it got there that it had leaked enough coolant that the level was halfway down the radiator.

I filled it up with water before driving it back and I think it was fine, but I didn't really have a good coolant gauge to look at since my laptop turned off while I was driving. I couldn't focus on the laptop to start scanning again since I was driving the car without a clutch after the hydraulic line disconnected itself while I was on the freeway.

I wish I had brought my dash cam or had been filming because this was some serious roadkill shit lol.

The car made it back fine and when I pulled in and popped the hood there was steam everywhere. It was running fine and everything and my dummy gauge hadn't really moved too much so I'm assuming it was just all from the leak in the radiator. I'll have to look out for anything that seems off though in case I did overheat it.

I pulled the radiator the next day and found a spot where the fan had been rubbing on it and just barely pierced through a fin on it. When I emptied the coolant too there was not much in it, but I'm hoping that was just because it all leaked out over night.

So now I have a much larger radiator for it:

And this required me to make a new upper mount for the radiator and to mess with the intercooler plumbing to fit it in there. I also made a completely different fan mount this time and used a different fan since the last fan was wobbly AF.

Old stuff:

New radiator, different fan, better mounts:

There is now almost no wiggle room upfront around the radiator, and the fan is really close to the turbo, but it has a heat shield so it's cool.

I also had to oval out the charge pipe that goes by the radiator to make enough room for it.

I also finally grabbed a set of bucket seats for the car. They're sort of intended to be temporary but they'll probably end up being in here for a long time.

They're from an 05 Monte Carlo and the driver seat is so much better for the car now than the plushy seat that was in there before. I no longer feel like I'm falling into a couch cushion when I get in the car, and these seats have side bolstering and adjustable lumbar support!

They sort of look out of place, but it's not enough to bother me too much right now. I do have the matching back seat for it but that'll be another adventure to install since it has a pretty involved rear bracket for the pass through those cars had.

I'm thinking I'll probably sell the factory seats since they're in good shape and I'm tired of having parts lying all over the place. If they do sell then I'll have a reason to put in the monte carlo rear seat.

 

[bs009]

So I found out why the clutch hydraulic line kept popping out. Apparently this thing got pretty chewed up by the clip in the new slave.

The solution would be to replace the stock hydraulic cable with another stock replacement. The problem was that these things are listed for $160 locally and $60 online. I could have ordered it online and waited a few days for it. The only problem there is that I figured I would have this issue again a few hundred miles again down the road since the new slave doesn't grab the entire circumference of the fitting like the stock line did.

So I did some digging and it sounds like some other guys have had this issue before too. What I learned was that you can get AN fittings that fit to the clutch master and slave cylinders. For under $15 for both.

$30 later I have a much better hydraulic line for the clutch that shouldn't ever pop out on its own. It's also a larger diameter than the factory hose (-3an). There is so much win in this that I didn't care that I had to drop the tranny again:

I haven't done much testing with it yet, but I'm hoping to take the car for a longer drive this weekend. We'll see how it does.


Also, I sanded and polished the face of the wheels:


One of these is sanded down to 320 grit, the other is just scuffed up some

One of these is sanded to 2,000 grit and polished with mother's. The others are just sanded to 320:

All finished:

I'm super happy with how they turned out!

 

[Mr_Roboto]

Overall this car really sounds like it's on the down hill slope in terms of work. You're doing awesome, and it's good to see you getting to drive it.

 

[bs009]

Overall this car really sounds like it's on the down hill slope in terms of work. You're doing awesome, and it's good to see you getting to drive it.

Thanks a lot! I've probably driven this car more in the last few months than I have in the 10+ years that I've owned it
I do feel like I've made a lot of headway in finding its issues and working out a lot of the quirks.

I know one of the biggest issues I still have to tackle is the exhaust since there's a leak in one of the manifolds and the tube that leads into one of the wastegates is at a terrible angle and is allowing more boost than what the spring should. I'll probably pull it all out over the winter and fix all of that.

I'm also probably going to pull off the muffler I have on here too and leave on the glasspack since the car is way too quiet lol.

 

[bs009]

So the car was great for about a week after my last update. But things happened

I had it towed back to my place

and I towed it the rest of the way to the shop.

I added some timing to it and did a pull in 3rd and the car shook quite a bit and I would hear a rattling when I let the clutch out.

I figured it was something broken in the clutch rattling around in there so I assumed it would just need a new clutch. I still had the original clutch so I figured I'd throw it in there to get the car around for now.

I pulled the tranny this weekend

The T5 is history.

$70 later and I now have a replacement.

Sadly, that is a 4l60e. No more manual


bye bye flywheel

Hello Flexplate:

All bolted in:

Driveshaft clearance is excellent:

Seeing a trans dipstick in here makes me feel like I violated the car...

'Tis a sad day for manuals everywhere...


I've learned that manuals are expensive AF, even though they are fun. I can always convert it back and it would be stupid easy to do it now since I'm leaving the clutch pedal in there.
TKO600's are expensive AF, T56's are too.

The auto should be cheaper to build in the long run I think and it would be better for drag racing with all of the lag my turbo setup has. Plus it works and I only put $120 or so into this swap vs the >$600 I have into the T5 setup. This one is throwing a code for a stuck TCC though so it will need some work in the near future. When it does get rebuilt though it'll get the works.

It's been a hell of a weekend.

 

[Mr_Roboto]

Holy fuck at the T5 going. That looks brutal. On the plus sides:1)That thing looks like it was making some power and 2)You'll likely be faster with the 700 anyways although it will not have the "row your own" fun factor.

 

[10sec]

RIP 5 speed, RIP.

to the new auto tho!

 

[cap42]

damn that old T5 said NOPE!

Sorry to hear it's down again, but that auto should be fun with the turbo.

 

[bs009]

I'm glad the T5 was good for the carnage pictures at the very least Those parts will make for some great trophies if ever pull the tranny apart.

The new tranny is quite good and the car definitely feels a lot faster now. After I put it in it was shifting at 5700 rpm with the stock 4l60e tables and I couldn't believe how hard the car was pulling. It's been a while since I had driven the car hard though and I don't think I ever shifted above 5500rpm so that might have had a lot to do with it.

It is absolutely putting some good power down, but with the tcc issue and the 2.41 gears it is a dog off the line.
It might see some track time next weekend if things go well this week. I'm sure the ET will suck, but I bet the trap speed will be great!