Trinten's SBC/F23 build - The work has begun! (Page 65/76)
Trinten MAR 14, 10:35 AM
Thanks!! I guess it's something going on with my Firefox browser that is only allowing audio to come through.

Yeah, there was no notable tuning done there, and no mufflers. I'm pretty excited about getting more of the tuning done this weekend. I'll be more excited when we can call that main harness "done" and install it in the cabin, and I can put the wire loom on it.

Top of my head, remaining items so I can get it to Carlisle and the 40th are:

1. A few more auxiliary sensors need to be wired in.
2. Idle tuning.
3. Radiator pinhole needs to be welded up
4. Coolant pump driver needs to be configured (La Fiera might be invited out to help with this, as he is familiar with that setup/controller)
5. Transmission harness wiring needs to be built
6. Intercooler hoses need to be run to/from the reservoir.
7. Alignment checked
7a. If necessary: adjustments to upper control arm bracket positioning
8. Finish welding up/boxing in upper control arm brackets
9. Powdercoating (some pieces are currently just painted with some VHT paint, since they might need to be modified again for alignment)
10. Refresh the steering column (new ignition module, key cylinder, signal stalk)
11. Slap in a basic interior, even if it looks janky for now.
12. Take back one of the wheels/tires to Discount Tire and ask them to check it for the slow leak, as well as rebalance it (one of the freaking weights is already dangling loose! so wash the barrel before I take it up there).
13. Put as many miles on it as possible without getting too far from my house or Mikes, to catch any bugs. I suspect I will become very familiar with the I-40 beltline around Raleigh...

[This message has been edited by Trinten (edited 03-14-2023).]

Trinten MAR 19, 03:53 AM
Saturday was productive, though cut short due to an on-call issue involving Mike's day job.

We finished wiring up all of the auxiliary sensors (back pressure, wide band, fuel pressure) We cleaned up a little of the wiring.

The current iteration of the engine harness was a modification of the original 2007 GXP 5.3 harness. When we were putting it together, the LS4 King Moroso pan was on there (so no low oil sensor provision anymore), no EGR, no DBW, so all those wires were removed. The rest of the original harness was used. Here's where we are scratching our heads. There is a lone brown wire.

I searched the internet for a 2007 5.3 wiring diagram, and found one that was hopefully correct. The two components with a plain brown wire were the EGR sensor and low oil sensor. Since we don't have those, we weren't sure where on the engine that wire is terminating. So for the moment we're leaving it alone and we'll see what doesn't work as we go through things.

Once that was done Mike finished wiring things up for key-on / ignition from the C500 and to the auxiliary fuse box we have stashed where the OEM trunk blower motor was. After that we started doing a little start-up tuning, letting it run for about 5 seconds each time. We have it starting up pretty easily now.

We need to verify our fuel pressure, right now we're guessing on that, and having told Fast what to map to the transducer. So at some point Mike will likely break out an old school fuel pressure gauge and put it in line someplace.

Next week we'll be putting the center/cabin section of the engine wiring harness in the car (and then I need to get some non-plastic split loom for it). Then getting into some more tuning and starting to clean up the rats nest of wires in the frunk.
Trinten MAR 22, 10:23 PM
Lazy guy update - I finally bothered to connect my phone to my computer to move the video off from this past Saturday. A short video after we did some tuning, this was just before we wrapped up for the day.

Hopefully in the next few weeks, LaFiera will be able to stop by and dial in the TecMotive controller for the water pump I'm using and possibly one of the radiator fans. I'm going to let him and Mike hash that out. I hope that the FAST can be set to kick on the second radiator fan when A/C turns on or when there's another coolant threshold that is breached.

Anyhow. After that's done, we'll be able to run the engine longer for tuning and videos!

This one is still without mufflers. You can tell it's running a lot smoother than it was in the last video.

zkhennings MAR 23, 07:21 AM
That sounds epic, please take some good driving videos when you get it dialed in! Too many cool fieros with only a few 30 second vids filmed with a potato. Hope I can make the 40th and see it!
Trinten MAR 25, 09:22 PM
IT MOVES!

Today was a good day. LaFiera made the trip out to speed up getting the TecMotive controller wired, making sure it works, and giving me a crash course in how it works and the different modes.

We put distilled water in the system, filling it through the surge tank (didn't want to use coolant yet, and it was a good guess). LaFiera made sure the pump was working and would kick on the fan, and Mike fired up the car and started doing some tuning.

I took a handful of disjointed videos, there was a lot of activity with the two of them doing different stuff. Out of the ones I took, I liked this one the best.

I didn't get the one where Mike tested to see if the car would move under it's own power (making sure it would shift into gear and listen for any odd noises from the transmission/torque converter). He didn't tell us what he was going to do, just said "Everybody get back." in a pretty firm voice, which made me think there was a problem at first. He just wanted to make sure no one wound up with crushed toes.

The downside is, once the distilled water heated up, we discovered a pinhole in the surge tank that was too small to turn up from a gravity check. It sucks that we already had that part powder coated, so that'll need to be done again. You can see in the video where I took the cap off to see if I needed to add more water as the air burped out, and where LaFiera is tweaking the TecMotive controller.

I still need to buy a vacuum block, the vacuum tubes are currently taped off, but it's not likely air tight.

We are really amped up about the progress!

Again, a huge thanks to LaFiera for making the trip and helping out. It was great hanging out with you for a while!
La fiera MAR 26, 06:48 PM
The three hour trip was justified by the awesome sound of the engine! Also, we haven't hang out in years and It was nice to hang out with you and Mike. I'm just glad I could have a little bit of an input in this project. Mike is a very talented, ingenuous and hands on individual. I was very, very impressed with his work. I can't wait to get a ride in it!
Trinten APR 05, 11:00 PM
Hey guys, small update from last Saturday - since we're running the car more, we put on a temporary air filter solution. Mike mounted the mufflers so we could see how it would sound.

After one of the test runs, one of his neighbors that likes to stop by warns me "don't touch anything back there, it's gonna be hot!!"
So I hover my hand near the exhaust, and yeah, it's a little toasty. Then I gingerly put my hand down on the turbo blanket. It was warm, but not uncomfortably. I could just leave my hand there. Mike and his neighbor were both pretty impressed. I was pleased that the combo of the Jethot and the blanket seem so effective. I'll know more after it's had some more run time than then ten minutes or so it was running/revving while Mike played with the tune.

So here is one of those videos so you can compare the sound with the mufflers to how it sounds without them. It's still rowdy, but when the throttle is pushed, it doesn't "scream/braaap", it just gets louder. Mike was worried the mufflers were going to make it too quiet, he was surprised it was still as loud as it is. I kinda hoped it would be a little quieter. We'll see how it when driving.

https://www.ncfiero.com/vid...up-with-mufflers.mp4

Beyond that, Mike finished cleaning up a lot of the wiring in the frunk, and he mounted up the FAST stuff again.
This weekend will be installing the engine control harness in the cabin and working on secondary wiring tasks, hooking up the vacuum distributor, and temporarily plumbing in a manual fuel gauge so we can calibrate what the FAST is seeing (and then probably change tuning stuff).

We are running out of weekends. I'm always a little pessimistic with schedules and time.
Some things Mike will need to do during the week (like the Alignment stuff).
Some he can do during the week if his schedule allows it (like finishing up welding things after the alignment checks out).
Then getting the last of the things powder coated.
We need to finish running/connecting the tubes for the intercooler.

Then there's dyno tuning (with and without mufflers. Yay V-band clamps) and putting as much miles on it as possible to make sure it's going to be up for the road trips this year.
Trinten APR 16, 10:45 PM
The last few weekends have been focused on cleaning up things that we are done with, loom and tidying up wiring in the engine bay, getting the intermediate harness loomed and going through the car (instead of just laying on top of it), and looming up the XFI and XIM.

Yesterday and today Mike spent some time getting the transmission harness built. One thing we realized is the metal information plate that is press-fitted to the transmission was gone. I don't remember it ever being there. So I don't know the final gear ratio of my 4T80. Worst case is we'll put in a gear ratio and see if the TCU throws a fit when we start to move it under it's own power. I'm going to email Triple Edge Performance, hopefully his documentation has the information on there. I looked through the emails we had and I didn't see it mentioned.

With the harness made, we hooked it up (laying it over the car until we know it's all working as intended), and hooked the TCU up to the laptop. It connects via a direct USB connection, and it has a canbus feed with the XFI. We confirmed that the XFI was passing information along (such as TPS and coolant temp), and that the transmission temp sensor was working.

We also tested out some of the faults, and we saw the TCU send signals to put the transmission into "limp home" mode. We won't know for sure if we have everything wired up correctly until we start rolling it around on it's own power, the nice part is the software for the TCU gives you a very informative dash, that includes what gear you're currently in, what gear the TCU is going to ask for next, immediate fault codes, stored fault codes, etc. And you can select which fault codes you want it to monitor/ignore.

After that was done, Mike started working on the vacuum manifold plumbing, he came up with a solution he liked better than his initial setup, so we had to pop the intake off to get to the bits going to the bottom of it. That's almost done, I had to order a tube sleeve & nut, as well as an NPT to AN adapter.

Mike is going to chase the powdercoating guy this week, if we don't have everything back by the weekend, we've got plenty of other things to do. Finish the vacuum tubing, hook up the AC line and do a vacuum test, door hinges, steering column components, taking two of the wheels to Discount Tire and asking them to find out where/why they are slowly leaking and fix it. And that's just the stuff I rattled off to him off the top of my head that we can do before the car is rolling on it's own.


Trinten APR 23, 11:17 PM
Still waiting on powder coating, so we put some things back in the car for now so we could move forward.

Mike finished a few odds and ends today, including getting the vacuum manifold/distributor all hooked up, and the brake booster to vacuum as well.
Once that was done, we reconnected our beta-transmission harness, started the car up, and carefully drove it down a dead-end road to see if it would shift. This also highlighted the amount of engine tuning left to do, it was running pretty lean anytime we were giving it gas. We also were taking things very easy here, there's still some parts of the suspension mounting points that are just tack-welded, and we wanted to make sure the brakes were going to work properly.

The good news is, the transmission did not default to "limp home" mode. The bad news is, it didn't shift out of first. Sensor, setting, or wire(s). First thing Mike will do is confirm the VSS output sensor is working (and check the wiring for it by happenstance). If both of those check out, then it's something we missed in the TCU settings.

We also decided we either need to find a way to plumb in the TecoMotive coolant sensor in closer to the engine or find out if the ohms range their sensor uses is the same as the GM sensor and we can do a split from the feed going to the FAST into the TecoMotive water pump controller.

The TecoMotive also has a lot of advanced settings options, but it works sort of like a combination lock. You start at 0, then do a 3 digit code, and the last thing you leave it on is the overall program you want those mods to apply to. It's not so much complex as it is tedious, and looks like it takes some practice on timing/speed so it doesn't think you're choosing an option that you didn't intend.

We thought it was in a 'pulsed' mode where it would be doing a slow trickle feed even at cold temps, but that didn't seem to be the case, the temp at the engine got to 200, the hoses at the radiator were dead cold and the primary radiator fan hadn't kicked on yet. So for today we switched it to one of it's "test modes", where it runs the pump and fan at full tilt. That fixed our cooling issues. After idling for about fifteen minutes the temp crept up to about 175 and stayed there.

The second radiator fan is being controlled by the FAST, and set to come on when the coolant hits 160 or when the A/C is running, and that was working perfectly.

Lastly, power steering in the Fiero is awesome. Sitting still on 255 Michelins and I could turn the steering wheel with two fingers behind one of the spokes.
Trinten APR 29, 08:20 PM
Discount Tire had a sale going on for one of the tires I wanted to put on my Z06 wheels. So I now have the Nitto NT555 G2s. 275/40-17 in the front, 295/40-18 in the back. I thought about getting 305/35-18 in the back, but apparently the tire-to-road patch will be bigger with what I got.

We also discovered that two of the coupe Vette wheels had a very slow leak, that was gradually accelerating (it took a year to get low the first time, then a few months, then a few weeks...). So we brought those in to DTC at the same time. They claimed they couldn't find the leak. Okay, so for now the Z06s will go on and stay on there. I'll figure out what I want to do with the coupe wheels later.

We drove it a little more today, doing some tuning and trying to get the transmission to behave. Discovered the new VSS was bad. Put in another one, verified we were getting signal. Now validating wiring. We discovered that the instructions that came with the box are for the TCU-EZ, which is a different diagram than the TCU 2.0. I've emailed the company and Summit Racing to get the right information.

If I don't hear from either of them with the right instructions by Tuesday, I'll burn up my lunch hour trying to call TCI and hopefully get through to someone.

Eye candy!