So last night, we happened to remove the rear cradle from the car. I took the opportunity to take a quick shot of the front engine mount pad.
A couple posts above, I showed the engine mount that we had made for the front of the engine.



To make it actually work, Rich cut a piece of channel to straddle and more or less conform to the cradle. The cradle in that corner kind of drops from the side-rail down maybe 2-3 inches to the side rail. Rich cut the channel to match the cradle contour and create a flat, level pad for the engine mount to rest on. He then drilled a couple holes welded two 1/2" flanged crowned/crimped locking nuts to the underside of the pad.



By welding in the nuts, he could box the ends for additional strength. The final result is what you see here.



Look past the dirt in the picture above. It was late when we got the engine out and interestingly enough, Photoshop doesn't have a "make it look like it was freshly cleaned" button. But you can also see that the alternator was mounted low and at the front edge of the engine. I don't recall the over-riding reason why we mounted alternator in this position, but I think it was in an attempt to keep the back area cleaner and more accessible.

Later on, when we added power steering, the placement of the alternator in this position was very fortunate. But that's like 6-7 months from this part of the story.

Let us start with the final piece. This is the alternator actually mounted into the finished bracket.





Recognizing that the alternator bracket needs to have minimal flex Rich figured that we needed to make the mount or bracket out of either 3/16 or even 1/4" steel. He spent some time looking at what was available in the area we wanted to mount the alternator and figured that we needed to have a 90 degree bend in the parent material. We can do alright bending 20 gauge aluminum, but this was outside of our capabilities. Unless we went blacksmithy all over a piece of steel plate. Rich's wife Chris said no way to the idea of setting up a coal fired furnace in the garage. So the solution was to look for something that already had that 90 degree bend in it. What he found was a square...well I'm not sure what to call it. It was a remnant at the local steel supply joint. It might have started life wanting to be a beam of some sort. But it is an 8" square 3/16" wall (maybe 1/4") piece of steel. Rich whipped out the plasma cutter and went to work.












You can see the small tab that was added to further brace the top arm to the cylinder head. The lower arm mounting hole (towards the outward end of the arm) was turned into a slot to allow some conventional tightening of the belt. This was to compliment the belt tensioner and give us a bit of breather room in the tightening function.

We used a stock '86 Fiero alternator. We did have the alternator from the Park Avenue, but Rich elected to use the Fiero. Something about the Park Avenue requiring a somewhat more complex and therefore possibly troublesome method of exciting the field. Or it might have just been uglier, I don't know.

[This message has been edited by DonP (edited 10-14-2013).]

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Build thread for my 88 + 3800NA swap

There's a well known theorem concerning working on race cars. The amount of work will always expand to slightly exceed the amount of time available to finish it. Maybe more than slightly.

Just a couple details that we had to work out. With the 2.8, we had used a very short glass pack. I have posted pictures near the bottom of this earlier post. http://www.fiero.nl/forum/F...L/090867-3.html#p101
With the 3800 now going into the car, we upped both the diameter and length to match. So our 9" muffler now grew to 23 inches.



Recall that we are using the series 1 engine. One thing that worked nicely for us was the fact that the series 1 exhaust incorporates a donut gasket as opposed to the flange that is used on the series II exhaust. That's pointed out with the arrow in the following photo. This configuration gave us some flex in the system without having to use those braided wire exhaust coupler we see used elsewhere. Without having a trunk, we were able to create some nice curves in the pipe as shown here.



Obviously we used a single exhaust pipe which terminated nicely in the stock exhaust cutout in the rear bumper cover.

Rich checked out several threads here on PFF showing where folks had relocated their 3800 coil packs. Because of the fact that we seem to be removing the engine on a fairly regular basis, and his desire to keep the wires as short as possible, Rich elected to basically mount the coil pack to the engine. He made a bracket to allow him to turn the pack 90 degrees and run along the top of the valve cover. This gave us just enough space to clear the hood hinges and the firewall top ledge.






The wiring took quite a bit of time and we were just a couple days from needing to head to the races. We had selected a local speed shop. Infinite Velocity (http://www.ivmotorsports.com/store/home.php ) to do the programming on our PCM or ECM or ECU or whatever it's called. We had the computer out of the '97 Park Avenue, not knowing of any differences with the more desirable later computers. . We showed up at Infinite Velocity and talked with Jay, the owner. And Rich presented him with complete wiring diagrams and pin-outs for the entire conversion. Being totally out of my depth, I quickly left and went back to work. Rich actually spent a couple frustrating days trying to get the car running.

Jay was able to do that magic stuff tuners do to the computer. Stuff like disabling the Auto tranny codes, remove the theft system and setting the rev limiter. On that last point, because this was a stock and well used original engine, we elected to keep the factory rev limiter settings. If I remember correctly, that was near 5800 RPMs.

Two big problems came out to bite us. First was a 12 volt power lead that was supposed to connect to the PCM. It didn't show up on ANY of the wiring diagrams we had. But Jay had access to some more complete sources than we did and finally tracked it down.

Secondly was that we did not have a MAP sensor. This was spotted fairly early in the process, and Jay ordered in a new unit. Unfortunately there were two different units available and you can guess which one was sent over by the parts house. I don't know what the sensor did, but the car would sometimes start and kinda idle, but that was all. We often times had to use a shot of starting fluid, something we usually only use in an "everything else has failed" situation. Not really good stuff. Because of this, we got side tracked with the fuel pump. Evidently, the computer needs a specific fuel pressure spike during the starting process. And MAYBE we weren't getting that. So I headed over to Summit Racing and picked up a Walbro 255 to replace our new AC/Delco. No joy, but we killed another day with a trip home to drop the tank and make the change.

Ultimately, the day before we had to leave for the track, one of the tech's questioned the MAP sensor. It didn't look like others he had seen. We got the replacement in, the car now started (usually) and would rev up. We took a can of starter fluid just in case.

[This message has been edited by DonP (edited 11-01-2013).]

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http://i16.photobucket.com/...ancis44/100_1147.jpg
[/URL]
[IMG]http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b50/francis4
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trueleo.com
RSpiderII@aol.com

Having fought the computer gremlins into submission, we took off to Thunderhill for the next LeMons race. That was September 15-16, 2012. We were a bit worried about how the car, now equipped with the supercharger, would be received by the judges. I mean, when we installed new shocks, the judges questioned us about using "racing" springs and shocks. The LeMons and (I believe) ChumpCar take their mission very seriously. Trying to gain an advantage at the expense of the "spirit" of the race is frowned upon. We had however approached the head judge, Judge Phil, very early on in the process. Let we quote our e-mail where we attempted to get the okay for our new engine.


------------------------------ Quote ------------------------
OK, we'll say $100 residual. That's enough to get a Bonneville SSEi engine.

On 7/17/2012 5:29 PM, Don Alexander wrote:
Judge Phil, sir!
I am looking for a residual value on our Pontiac Fiero.
We last ran at “the track formerly known as Infineon” in March where we finished strongly in the top 80%
We are looking for a residual value that will allow us to change out an engine. Ours developed an excellent crankcase ventilation system when part of the reciprocating mass declined to reciprocate in a synchronized manner. We were trying to demonstrate to the SCCA boys that, just because it’s a LeMons car didn’t mean it didn’t deserve respect. We were disabused of that notion rather quickly.
At an earlier race, you encouraged us to try swapping in a supercharged engine. We’ve found one at a proper LeMons price point and are hoping that it will not be looked upon too sorely during the judging session at Thunderhill. So we are hoping that advice stands. What could go wrong?
Regards,
Don Alexander
NAFM ( Not Another Freaking Miata) Racing
--------------------------- End Quote ----------------------
So Judge Phil effectively gave us the okay to spend up to $400 for an engine! Since the car is supposed to have a value of $500 or less, and he declared our car was worth $100, we had another $400 available to spend. Cool.

Now we had to see how that would actually work out.

The LeMons races have three different classes running simultaneously. They are A, B and C. the C class is most representative of the cars LeMons truly wants to see running. These are true $500 cars that nobody would really expect to see on a race track. Here are a couple examples of the C cars.



And one of my favorites, a car that is actually driven to the track!!




It still drives to the races, even after this incident a couple years back.




The Fiero is, almost by definition, a "C" car. Unless it has been tweaked. In fact, during our first few races the tech judges just looked at it and automatically classed us as a C car class.

The "B" car is definitely expected to be a bit racier. It's hard to give definite examples. But lets say there's no way a Miata would fall in with the C cars. But it might be either a B or an A. Really prepared cars... A all the way. And interestingly, the prize structure heavily favors the C class cars.

To this point, we have always been a C car. Now we had to go through tech with a supercharger in the Fiero. Safety tech was easy. We built the car right and keep it pretty sanitary. The BS tech was a bit more difficult. We pulled up and as soon as the engine cover came up all the BS judges immediately abandoned the cars they were teching and came over to join in the bloodletting. We pulled out the documentation showing that judge Phil had officially sanctioned the swap. In fact, he wanted to see a v-8 installed. We were asked how much drive testing we had done with the new engine installed. Our honest answer was that we had driven it out of the trailer and straight to tech.

So the short story is that we were classified as an "A" car. That means we were in direct competition with some really stout cars. We could be in trouble.
Race day started out okay. I was chosen to start the race for our team. Being the starter is both a pain as well as a great advantage. The pain comes in the fact that 179 cars were entered in the race. It takes quite a while to get 179 cars onto the track and circulating. So there's like 15 minutes of driving around relatively slowly until everyone is ready. The good thing is that that means you have 15 minutes to learn the track before you have to start ducking, bobbing and weaving. All the rest of the team has to jump straight onto the track in the middle of a race with no idea what turn 3 looks like.

179 cars were entered in the race. When the green flag flew, at the point we made it around the track to the start line, we were scored as being in 154th place. I saw the green flag fly from across the track and throttled down. I got the jump on several cars and was really impressed by how much more torque the 3800 made versus the original 2.8. Yeah!

But maybe 1/4 mile later, before I made it back to the start line to officially start the race, I knew we had problems. It felt like the clutch might be slipping. I would step on the throttle and nothing would happen. The engine felt like it had lost something, or was overpowering the clutch. Darn.

I took the green, but actually left the track before completing my first racing lap. This wasn't going to be an exciting day. Our first thought, after the clutch, was that the tune on the computer was too lean or too far advanced on the timing or anything else connected to the computer. What actually happened was that we spun a bearing and things were seizing up. Our used engine didn't make it.

A second problem we found later was the interference between the clutch cover and transmission housing. I showed that problem a couple postings back. http://www.fiero.nl/forum/F...L/090867-5.html#p171


At the end of the first hour our zero laps had us in 161st place. By the third hour we had been dropped, as had several other cars. The official car count had dropped to 164 and we weren't one of them. By noon we were headed home.

The official gallery of that race is found here.https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151093333354495.447664.36766739494&type=3

And you can watch our entire race here. It's pretty short, so if you have a spare 7 minutes....
http://www.youtube.com/watc...H0M&feature=youtu.be

The Fiero Libre guys, still classified as a "C" car, finished in 44th place overall with 4 BS penalty laps given out during BS tech. The only other "C" car ahead of them was "The Soccer Moms" in 18th place driving a 1993 Dodge Caravan. The Fiero Libre's fast time was 2:27.028 versus a 2:30.620 for the Soccer Moms. By way of comparison, the overall winner, but not fastest car, ran 2:17:883. That was an "A" car - a '83 BMW 533i.

We slept in our own beds some 185 miles away.

Now we would be following the advice give here many times. We would go for a Series II instead of the Series 1. That 3800SC torque felt sooo good for the short time we had it.

[This message has been edited by DonP (edited 11-05-2013).]

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Red 1988 GT 5 speed LQ1 Powered
Poly all around, Koni's and Lowered
Items for sale - cradle support - 3800 tranny mounts
http://s733.photobucket.com/albums/ww339/CC_Rider/

[This message has been edited by DonP (edited 11-06-2013).]