Trinten's SBC/F23 build - The work has begun! (Page 67/76)
Trinten JUL 10, 07:20 AM
Well, late yesterday Mike managed to get his 3800 swap working. He drove it around last night and will be driving it to work today (which is also over an hour towards the 40th compared to where he lives).

He offered to pick me up in the Fiero on the way to the 40th (I'm another hour closer than he is). However I declined. Between both of our luggage and emergency tools, parts, and fluid that he may need for any roadside repairs, I just didn't see how it would all fit in the car. He wasn't comfortable with me driving his truck -- if I pushed I'm sure he would have let me, but I also know I do not do well on long drives by myself (I get tired very quickly when in a car for more than a few hours, and need to stop to walk around, do something else, talk on the phone, etc. then get back on the road). So this also ruled out me asking him to unhitch his truck so I could rent a trunk to tow his trailer.

Instead I managed to find round trip airfare that was less than what I would have spent on gas on his truck. It sucks that my car won't be at the 40th at all. At least we could have started it up and people could have checked out all the finished modifications that Mike came up with over the years. A few of which he had done by the first time we were at Carlisle and we noticed the idea was borrowed by another person by the next year after they saw it and talked with Mike, lol.

Anyhow, I'll be landing in Detroit tomorrow morning. See you guys soon!
Trinten JUL 19, 08:05 PM
So when I got back into town on Monday evening I stopped by Mike's.
We unloaded my car from the trailer, and I did some datalogging per the new TCU dealer's request. Mike also hooked up his line pressure tool to the main line pressure test port on the transmission.

When the engine starts, the transmission pressure is at 90 PSI. Shifting through the gears, it drops to about 40 PSI and stays there, even when revving the engine. Going back into park then into gear again, pressure dropped even lower, and again didn't move.

So while an issue with one of the pumps is possible (and is Mike's bet on the problem), Dave (Triple Edge Performance) also pointed out it could be a failed stock pressure regulator valve or boost valve.

Both of them agree that a complete teardown is needed at this point to go through it. So going to see if it'll be easier/cheaper to find a local shop we trust or arrange LTT shipping back to Dave.

Dave is still insisting that this is a late model 4T80, however the internals don't line up to that, nor does the wiring. Even the pigtail on this one was different than on the late model we got from the junkyard.

The TCU dealer sent us the wiring diagram for the late model, Mike is going to build another harness for that, and we're going to swap in the late model transmission and see how well that one runs for now.

This Saturday we'll clean up the garage (we thrashed it pretty bad the last few weeks trying to get stuff done), then move the late model in there to get ready for the swap.
Will JUL 23, 08:57 PM
Damn dude... sucks you're having those problems with what should be a bullet proof transmission.
Trinten JUL 23, 09:14 PM
Thanks Will. Things happen! I'm not going to let this discourage me, it's not unsolvable. It's just a matter of time (and money), and finding the right answers.

Dave has been great with emails and trying his best to help us out.

Mike pointed something out to me that I didn't consider. Our connector to the transmission was wired up by us, it only has the connectors in the positions to control a 94-99 4T80. Mike said that the wiring differences between the 94-99 and 00+ meant if it was a 00+, how he wired up the connector means the trans never would have worked at all.

I sent that info to Dave along with a comparison of how the two different pigtails would need to be wired.

I've also found some other 94-99 transmissions locally. One at an LKQ, and a few on Car-parts.com from places that pull it for you at comparable prices (especially after taking into account our time to pull the transmission in the junkyard).

LKQ offers something of a "warranty", where if the part doesn't work, I can return it for a refund, this is listed on their price list for Transmissions. I'm going to see if any of the car-parts places offer the same. If they do, then I'd rather get the transmission from one of the places that will pull it for us. So I'll be making some phone calls tomorrow. The plan right now is to acquire the next transmission on the weekend of August 5th.

Mike was also willing to build a whole new harness for the 00+ transmission I have, buuuuut the TCU dealer hasn't told me if the BIN file I have now will work (with or without changes), or sent me a new one. So I'd rather save Mike the time and plan on getting another 94-99 for now.

Fun times! lol
Trinten AUG 21, 06:42 PM
Things have been going a little slow this month. Now that the 40th is over, Mike and I didn't feel the need to thrash on this every weekend to try to get it done. Which works out for him too, he has other side projects for other people, plus his own stuff to work on.

A few weeks back we got ready to drop the cradle out. I took the opportunity to see if my modified A/C hose was going to work... not quite. The hose shop that had done it for me originally had the hoses twisted up, and when I asked them to fix it, they did it by cutting the big hose in the middle, then using the grommet things to stitch it back together. That section 'crimps' the hose after I route it now, and the smaller hose is a few inches short. I'm also not a fan of how close the bend comes back in towards the engine/fuel assembly on the compressor side. Here's a pic of that.





And frustratingly, I've lost the THIRD freaking Fiero-side AC hose uber-long bolt of doom that holds that fitting on there. THREE OF THEM. I hope it's in one of my plastic totes.

Mike suggested I buy the Vintage Air kit, and he'll just cut and weld on the ends for the Fiero and compressor. So I'll do that,

Once that was done, we dropped the cradle. A week or so later I picked up a "tested, working" 4T80e from Marsh salvage yard on the 10th. To be on the safe side I still ordered new shift solenoids, TCC solenoid, and PCR solenoid, along with new filters.

Yesterday I went ahead and started putting the new parts in, and we modded the 2-3 accumulator piston to give it a firmer shift. It was a good thing we did, we found a crank in the upper valve body cover (I didn't spot it when I got the transmission, and neither of us noticed it... until we turned the transmission in the stand to drain fluid and it started coming out of the crack.

We also found the main cushion spring behind the 2-3 accumulator piston was BROKEN. I guess for them "working/tested" means they started the car, put it in drive, and it moved forward a few feet at idle?

After we put the new parts in, we went about taking the engine off the cradle so we could remove the transmission. We then drained that the best we could, and swapped upper valve body covers.

The 'new' transmission is now married to the engine and it's back on the cradle. There's still some things we need to finish fastening/reconnecting there before the cradle goes back into the car, we just ran out of time.

Here's a random pic I took when we were ready to pull off the 'old' transmission.





I'm not sure when we'll be working on it next. Each of us have different things going on in the upcoming weeks, so we're going to need to look at things week-by-week.

We are also chasing pinholes in the main/long coolant tubes that run under the car. I asked Mike if he wanted me to get Rodney Dickman's repair kit for it, instead of chasing pinholes to weld up, then putting in more distilled water to check for leaks, drain, repeat, etc.

As a ha-ha for the day, a few weeks ago I was playing Wasteland 3, and one of the quirks for your character is called Grease Monkey. Part of it says "Maybe one day you can retire and build that '86 Fiera you've always dreamed of." lol They likely couldn't use Fiero because of copyrights. The text is also really blue in the picture because apparently my TV is not calibrated right. It looks correct to the naked eye, but when taking a picture with my phone, it's like I have a blue filter over my screen.

Trinten SEP 10, 08:35 PM
I was out at Mike's two weeks ago, I didn't make a post about it because basically we were just finishing putting everything back on the cradle and putting it back in the car.
However at the end of the day, we left the transmission unplugged from the controller and did a quick "limp home" test, and it worked! So we were feeling pretty good overall.

Yesterday Mike finished closing up the pinhole leaks on the factory coolant tube, so today we finished topping off fluids and connected the transmission controller...

And the car wouldn't move. Discouraged we took a break and over lunch talked through it, and reached these conclusions:

1) This transmission shares no internal parts with the previous one. So it's a really wild coincidence that two transmissions have the same odd behavior.
2) Neither transmission has worked with the new controller (we bought the second controller about 10 days before the 40th Fiero Anniversary, wired it up, hooked it up, and saw no change in the odd transmission behavior).
3) We now had a mix of different vendor components involved (and FAST likes to use their own wiring schemas in places, including non-standard wiring colors. Thanks FAST.)

So this lead us down the road of tracing wires. We get back and start doing just that, ohming out each wire, going by the wiring diagram provided by the current TCU company. Sure enough, we start hitting some oddities.

I don't recall all of them, but three wires were not in the right place, including one of the 'Range' wires that goes to the internal pressure manifold switch. Well, this could be an issue.
So now Mike wants to make sure we have this rock solid, he gets a pad of graph paper, and starting at the first junction from the TCU in the bulkhead, he draws a little representation of the connector to mimic pin layout, and I rattle off what color and what purpose each wire there is supposed to have.
We then move to it's coupling side inside the cabin, same thing is done here. Then cabin to rear bulkhead, then the pigtail from the bulkhead to the transmission (the FAST pigtail). That was the only spot where things didn't line up.

So we noted that as well, and I took pictures so I can put them in a spreadsheet and print out a copy to have handy, just in case. Mike says "we can hook it up, but I don't think it's going to move. We might have damaged the pressure control solenoid, or the manifold." but it didn't't hurt to try. So we reconnect everything, I start up the car, put it in reverse, take my foot off the brake.... AND IT MOVED!

I look at Mike, he has the same surprised expression. He tells me to hold down the brake and give it a little gas, to see if it torque loads. It does. He has me test Drive, it works. Fantastic!

I shut it down, get out the tuning laptop, we button things up so we can go for a test drive, I hook up the laptop, bring up the software. I asked if he wanted me to log the test drive... I should have logged it.

As he backs up to give room to get around another car in his driveway, everything is showing correctly on the laptop (something it wasn't doing before with the old controller, it wouldn't always correctly report what gear was being requested and what gear it was in, often either reading "N/2" or "N/N". But in this case, it was showing it knew it was in "D" and said "1" for the gear. We ease down the street.... no VSS signal. We did not have this issue on the previous transmission. So we may have to double check the wiring for that again, as it goes off into another pigtail.

As we're creeping down the street, the laptop starts showing weird stuff, suddenly it says that "N" is being commanded, and it's in "N". Uh, no? I mention it to Mike, he fidgets the gear selector, and "D" shows back up... a little further down, it says "R" is being requested!! The car is still moving forward, but now is flipping between N and R. As we get back to the house, the car is slowing down with the same throttle/RPM input. We get to the parking spot. Rack through the gears... laptop sees no change. It's in "N".

Once again, the car will not move under power when hooked up to the computer. We leave the engine running, transmission temp reports 108 degrees. We take the dipstick out, it's at the "Full" mark for the cold level, mike puts his finger on the fluid and confirms it's just warm. We shut it down for the day.

When I'm out there next (which may not be till the end of the month), he wants to do Key On, Engine Off testing, and manually jump the Range switches to see what the Laptop sees. Same with the Solenoids. We'll also do the pressure test that we did on the last one. Right now he thinks the wiring issue may have damaged that manifold... which of course is on the lower valve body, so requires taking the whole drivetrain back out, split them apart, drain the transmission, put it on the stand, flip it over, etc etc etc. Which is basically a two-to-three session job.

If it's just the Pressure Control Solenoid, that is on the 'upper' valve body, which with the design of Mike's cradle, we can get to by just removing up the removable frame rail on that side (and 'just' also means unhooking the control arm, brakes on that side, etc... still easier than taking everything back out). Still need to drain the fluid and such, but still a much easier part to replace.

He's annoyed with himself that we overlooked the problem from the pigtail, when we put the new TCU in, we checked everything from the TCU up to where the pigtail plugs in, but not through the pigtail itself.
fieroguru SEP 11, 10:00 PM
Vince, glad to see you and Mike are getting this issue narrowed down. It won't be long now!
Trinten SEP 16, 11:01 PM
I was back out there sooner than I expected. No complaints on that.

Sadly... today ended on a down note. We finished checking all the wiring today, this time going from the pigtail all the way to the TCU connector. Found we had the VSS on the opposite side of where it was supposed to be (and a ground was in it's place, so no harm there). We flipped those, started the car up, did a little back/forward in the driveway, all good. We hook up the pressure gauge and check it in the driveway, again doing just a little bit of motion, pressure is staying good!

I hop in, excited and thinking "This is it!" ... which over-rode my normal pragmatic approach to things and this time I failed to think to log the trip. Sigh.

So we start down the street, everything on the computer looks good. Seeing the right gear position and so on and the VSS is working, but waaaaay off. WAY off ( we were properly close to 20mph, and it said we were going 8mph). We saw this on the tune we tried to use before on the last TCU, and had messed with a field to get it closer to right. So we get to the end of the block and turn around, and as we head back, Mike says 'we're losing power' and he glances at the pressure gauges 'we're losing pressure, too'.

We get the car to crawl back to it's parking place and shut it down to "cool off" (fluid temp was at 110. Not even operating temp, if I recall right).

So I'm crestfallen. We let it sit for about an hour. During that time I also tried to remember where I found that setting in the computer to change the VSS calc on our original tune, I couldn't find it. Mike found a place he thought might be it. I changed the value from "2" to "8" (early in the year when I solved for this, I had done a bunch of digging on my phone and found some math equation to actually work it out, here I was just seeing if it's the right field).

I hook the laptop back up to do a log, and it was still doing the low pressure thing, so we just backed up/went forward in the driveway a little bit. VSS was either worse or not affected by the change.

So at this point, we are stuck. If it was electronic, why would the issue not present until it starts to warm up? And why would it fail to go into Limp Home mode until it 'cooled off'? And the same symptoms on two transmissions, with two different controllers, and two different tunes. There is nothing the same between the setups.

Is it possible I managed to get a second transmission with the same mechanical (unknown) flaw as the first? Sure... but come on, what are the chances?!

I'm going to ask Mike to ohm out the electronics in the first transmission for the sake of recording the values. I told him that without a real direction, there wasn't much sense in throwing spaghetti at the wall. So after he gets those values, he's going to get a pallet for me to put my first transmission on, and we're going to arrange to get it back to Triple Edge Performance to do a tear down, reassembly, and I'll ask him to put it in his 4T80 swapped car to put miles on -- hopefully he'll say yes once I say I'm more than happy to compensate him for the time of doing that swap (twice).

In the meantime, I'm going to try to dig into the kitbashed 4L60 file we had and try to find that VSS setting. I did find that the software has a way to compare two tunes to see if values change, I don't know how in-depth it is. I played with it a little today, and while it does show values, you can't double-click on it or anything to go to that menu, you have to know what it's talking about and where to drill down to get to it.

Also, there's another build thread here with a guy using a 3800 with a 4T80e in his swap, and the Terminator Max ECU/TCU. He seems to be making better progress than us. If he gets his setup to run properly using that, I'll politely beg him for a copy of his .bin. Then check with the TCU dealer to see if he can "read" a Terminator tune to duplicate it to this my TCU, or ... yes, I might just sell all this FAST and PCS stuff and buy the Terminator max and mod the aforementioned .bin to play nice with my engine, since the transmission will be solved for.

We are both hoping this is something simple and easy and Dave (Triple Edge) goes "found it!" then we can do the same in the one we have here.

I really don't want to go back to a manual, and have no interest in the 4T65. They couldn't hold up to the stock LS4 in the GXP for very long, I can't imagine it living long in my car with the abuse we have planned for it.

Trinten OCT 02, 12:00 PM
Progress, slow but sure.

Still trying to iron everything out with the transmission, but we saw some improvements this past Saturday.
I reached out to the manufacturer of my TCU and asked if there were any training or detailed Help materials on their software - they said no and I could just ask them. I find it tough to believe as they (seemingly) are using off-the-shelf software that they license and brand. I just haven't been able to figure out who that B2B company is, yet.

The email chain with them was a little painful, but they have to assume the customer is asking a simple thing in the wrong way. So when trying to find out details on where to change VSS Input (transmission to TCU) settings, they reply back with where I can change the PPM for the Speedometer. So a few more emails and screenshots later, they guided me to where I needed to be. I had found this setting when playing with the software for the FAST/TCI unit, but that was nearly a year ago, so I couldn't remember. Hence the questions.

While we were doing testing/fixing with the engine, I took a few videos, including one of the transmission pressure going bonkers while the car was just sitting at idle. If there are no settings for the Pressure Control Regulator solenoid in the TCU, then we will probably replace it. It's really inconsistent. Sometimes it'll sit rock solid (for a little while) at 120 or so... other times, it'll wave wildly.

Besides a little good news on the transmission, we started cleaning up some wiring. I discovered that Rodney's window motor kit instructions didn't blatantly point out that you need to flip wire colors (blue does not go to blue). So Up and Down on my window controls was reversed. Easy enough fix -- and it means I need to update that in my instructions I send out, and update it in my thread on that in the Mall.

We also wired up the aftermarket power door lock actuators that I installed a long time back, They work so beautifully.

Mike prepped the replacement steering rack to go in, when we swap that, I found a company that rebuilds C5 Vette steering racks, they have all the right pieces to stop them from leaking, so it'll be going to them.

Last thing Mike did was work on the cold start tune. Right now when you crank it, you have to give it a little bit of throttle and hold it there for about 30 seconds, or the engine will die off. So Mike added a little bit of fuel to one of the tables a few times, doing some repeated shut-down/start-ups, until he figured the engine was too warm to properly test it further. More of that next time.

I still need to reconnect my power mirrors. But the connector fell someplace down in the door, and I've just not bothered to take the mirror back off to try to fish the connector up with mechanical fingers.

Though at the 40th I did see a Fiero where the owner very cleanly modded his mirrors to install the turn-signal flasher -- I stopped by a few times but never met the owner. If anyone knows who owns this Fiero or who did this Mod, please let me know!



Here's some other pics of that same car, if anyone knows who it is. Also the person crouching in the one picture said it was not his. I thought maybe the trailer would help identify the owner, though some of the other little touches pictured below are semi-unique.








Things left to do:
1. Get the transmission to behave.
2. Build a new harness for Danyel's twin 60mm headlight buckets, with the changes we made to the frunk the harness I got from him won't work (it'll be going up for sale in the mall eventually!)
3. Run hose and mount pump for intercooler.
4. Misc. wiring (side mirrors, cleaning up wiring up front once all this ECU/TCU nonsense is settled, etc).
5. Idle tune, street tune.
6. Reconnect with a guy I met at the 40th who did successfully swapped in the Turbo Sunbird cluster, and said he'd be glad to help me out (yes!)
7. Dyno tune.

[This message has been edited by Trinten (edited 10-02-2023).]

Trinten OCT 11, 02:17 PM
I finally bothered to move the videos I took a few weeks back off my phone to my Google Drive. Here is the one that makes us think the Pressure Control Regulator solenoid might be bad or dying in my second transmission. This was taken at idle, everything cold. It didn't do this every time, just sometimes. It also did it sometimes while moving, other times it was rock-steady.

https://drive.google.com/fi.../view?usp=drive_link