LS4 / F40 swap - fieroguru (Page 80/216)
Rickady88GT MAY 07, 08:04 PM
Thanks.
aaronkoch MAY 08, 01:37 PM

quote
Originally posted by fieroguru:

Later this week, some Gunmetal Grey Plasti-dip will arrive and I will use it to cover the yellow painted surfaces. So the car will still have the wide stripe (not really a fan of it either), but at least it will be in a more subtle color and when it is time to paint, the plasti-dip will just peel off.




Don't know if you saw my build thread, it's not even in the same league as yours, but I just plasti-dipped my car and it's fun stuff! Cheap, easy, and different, just like me.

Just do the whole car in dip, as it's removable when you're sick of it, and it's easier to mask the openings than tape out the stripe..

Good luck!

My Plasti Dip experiment is on the last page of my build thread in my sig.

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Build thread for my 88 + 3800NA swap

fieroguru MAY 08, 06:55 PM

quote
Originally posted by aaronkoch:
Don't know if you saw my build thread, it's not even in the same league as yours, but I just plasti-dipped my car and it's fun stuff! Cheap, easy, and different, just like me.

Just do the whole car in dip, as it's removable when you're sick of it, and it's easier to mask the openings than tape out the stripe..



Yeah, I saw your thread and dipping the whole car and yours looks pretty good. I assume you used the sprayer, but I am using rattle cans, and so far I am not very impressed. The cans have a fan tip, but it doesn't transfer anything close to a uniform pattern in the fan pattern (not even heaviest in the center). Result are a bunch of heavy and light areas even when I overlap 50% from pass to pass.

The grey is better than the yellow (color-wise), but the coverage isn't very consistent. I might just peel it back off, scuff the yellow and just repaint the striped portion with my paint gun.


[This message has been edited by fieroguru (edited 05-08-2013).]

diabloroadster MAY 11, 10:01 PM
Hey guru- I was wondering if you have reweighed your car since the LS4 swap? I reweighed mine this past week at the same place I had mine done when I had the iron headed sbc/Fiero 5 speed. Back then it was 3160lbs with 1/2 tank of gas, now with the LS4 its 3240 with 1/2 tank of gas so it gained 80lbs. I was hoping to loose some but considering I added some metal bracing, the 4t653hd is no light wieght and I added a bigger battery along with some more stuff.

Also took it to the dyno this past thursday, I was hoping the tuner would be able to tweek my tune on the dyno but he had never done any tuning with Tunerstudio but he said my tables looked really good. I had done about 100 miles worth off street tuning and they seem to be dailed in pretty good. We did 5 pulls with the best being on the 3rd pull putting down 272hp/288tq. The first 2 pulls I had some dipps on my VE table but the 3rd and 4th pull were almost the same and the 5th was down from heat soak I guess but only about 7hp/7tq. Not too bad considering its still has the stock cam and a truck intake with a boarded throttlebody.

So overall Im pretty happy with it, the car will roast the huge rear Diablo tires with a semi agressive throttle mash from a dead stop and get the rear a little loose from a roll. Having the paddleshift trans is night and day difference with the crappy Fiero 5 speed, it feels so wierd starting from 1st and it making power all through the gears. I never really realized just how crappy 1st gear was with the fiero 5 speed and sbc until now, I knew it sucked but didnt how much it suck until I streched the LS4's legs some.

Im already prepping for a repaint now, and this fall do the cam swap and few other upgrades to the LS4.
So thanks again for all the help along the way, I couldnt have done it with out you and Kemp3.....
fieroguru MAY 12, 08:41 AM
I haven't been able to get mine weighed yet, but my old GT clone with SBC/Getrag swap was 2960 lbs and I am hoping the coupe with LS4/F40 will weigh in at 2850. The old setup had all the GT panels, power accessories, trailer hitch and the SBC swap with iron heads, cast exhaust manifolds and a 30 lb flywheel. The LS4/F40 car is pretty bare bones coupe (no PW, PL or PM), is hitch free (30lb savings), the flywheel is 18 lbs less, the LS4 is lighter as well, but the F40 adds about 30 lbs vs. the getrag and the 13" brake kit adds about 13 lbs to the car vs. the 12" setup the old car had.

Your dyno #'s are pretty good for a mostly stock combo with the intake/TB swap and a lower restriction exhaust. Most stock LS4 setups put about 240ish hp to the wheels, so you are up nearly 30hp for your mods so far.

I have been busy swapping the roof panel (no more sunroof). When I started the roof panel swap, the carpet was wet from sitting outside during the rain, so I pulled all the carpet back out. I have the new top panel sanded down and ready to primer/paint before it is installed on the car.

Spent several days waiting on the needed pigtail to make the adapter harness so I can run the LS4 MAP sensor (and working on my 4cyl Fiero and the wife's 99 Maxima), but the pigtail came in yesterday so I should be able to get the car started once more. Once it runs again, I will evacuate the A/C system and charge it with 134A.

Then once the roof panel is back on I can start the tuning process again to dial in the LS7 MAF. Maybe in 2-3 weeks I will get it on a dyno to see what kind of numbers is puts down.

[This message has been edited by fieroguru (edited 05-12-2013).]

fieroguru MAY 18, 04:31 PM
The roof panel swap is now complete. It came off a white car, so I wanted to get it painted black to atleast match the current paint on the car (I would like to get the whole car painted voodoo blue eventually, but black works for now). I really hate painting... this panel is far from perfect but it will work till I get the car painted professionally.


I also finished up plasti-dip coating the yellow stripe on the spoiler, so now there is no longer any yellow showing on the car:


My floor mats from boostdreamer showed up and look good!




I am hoping to have the car ready to drive again on Sunday and get the LS7 MAF dialed in.
ericjon262 MAY 18, 07:53 PM

quote
Originally posted by fieroguru:

While letting the tube dry, it was time to swap out the connector end since they were different. The good news is it literally is just swapping out the connector end. Here are the two connector ends (LS2 on the left, LS7 on the right). Each one was opened up, the terminals released and pulled out of the housing:






thanks for posting the pics of the connectors apart, I had to do something similar working on my swap today and it was helpful!

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we're in desperate need of a little more religion to nurse your god-like point of view...

Built not bought... Because bolt-ons don't.

http://www.fiero.nl/forum/Forum2/HTML/119122.html

[This message has been edited by ericjon262 (edited 05-19-2013).]

fieroguru MAY 19, 10:29 PM
Back to driving the car... I really like this car!

The LS4 MAP conversion was a step in the right direction so now the VE airflow is making sense vs. the MAF air flow. Since I tuned the MAF before ever adjusting the VE side (stock equation coefficients) the MAF airflow should have been significantly higher than the VE airflow above 5K, but it wasn't. Now with the LS4 MAF back installed, the MAF airflow is substantially higher than the VE airflow north of 5K. This is also why the delivered torque being calculated in the ECM wasn't matching up either. The LS4 MAP is calibrated differently than the LS2 one. HP tuners allows entering the MAP values for scaling in the diagnostic side, but not for the normal operation side. So word of advice is to not swap MAP sensors from the ecm calibration you are using.

The LS7 MAF upgrade didn't solve my vacuum issues at WOT... just going to have to live with it until I decide to upgrade manifolds and go with a larger TB. I did misread the pin out conversion and didn't notice they flipped the location of B & C pins. So I had to flip them at the connector.

I plan to drive the car most of this week finishing up the MAF tuning and then go back and revisit the VE tuning. Then continue to work on all the small things.
fieroguru MAY 22, 07:57 PM
Dragged home a quasi-twin to my daily driver. Its an 86 GT/auto with painted ground effects and my DD is an 88 GT clone with 2.5/125C. The wife imposed a 2 Fiero limit 7 years ago when we moved to KY, but occasionally I go over it for a while and live to tell about it. It will be used for R&D purposes as an 84-87 example.



The LS4/F40 car decided is was being ganged up on by the red cars, so it retreated to the garage for some wiring mods for data collection of the CAN signals between the ECM and TCM.



These decals came today. They are for the smooth fastback style sail panels I have yet to install and the rear decklid where it used to say Fiero in yellow. I would have much preferred decals like my avatar, but these will work for now. They are Silver to contrast with the black and go with the grey that is now covering the yellow.
fieroguru MAY 24, 10:19 AM
A couple weeks ago, I did the LS7 MAF upgrade on my LS4 and immediately noticed that the intake air temp being scanned jumped quite a bit. In my install, the exhaust does not pass under the air intake, so it doesn't see much higher temps than ambient under most situations. However, when I was logging with the LS7 MAF (and its IAT sensor), I was reading 111 degrees on a mid 80 degree day while driving at highway speeds. On a first start of the day when it was 65ish degrees out, it was showing 95 degress before the car was started and 85 once air was moving through the tube.

The real issue with this is the temps it was reading was pulling 5-6 degrees of timing and hurting performance.

When I compared the IAT tables between the E67 LS4 and the LS7, the entered values were exactly the same, but the scale (ohms) for each row was significantly different. So I put both tables in excel and found the proper values for the LS4 e67 scale to read the appropriate temps with the LS7 MAF. Below is a picture with the stock LS4 values for both E40 and E67 versions, the LS7 values and the modified tables for both the E40 and E67's. You will notice that even the two stock LS4 tables are different.

This might come in handy if any other LS4 swap wants to run the LS7 MAF.