A chronological history of my:

Jade Green / Grey 1992 Trans Am Convertible

Page 10

So tuning day finally comes. I load the car on the trailer (with the wench) and proceed to head about an hour and a half down to the tuning meet. Here's a repost of how the day went:

We get the car unloaded and start the tuning process about 9:30 in the morning. Everything looks good and we get about two no-load pulls on it when the oil pressure gauge drops to zero. We determine that I broke the sensor while installing the supercharger, so Todd and I run up to the Yune to pick one up and try to find an assortment of tools to replace it. I can't get the socket over it due to a fuel line and decide to remove the rear belt to get better access to it. It seems I can get a lot more torque on those rear bolts when it's sitting on a bench then when it's crammed in the car. After about 30 minutes of struggling and with burned arms I finally got the belt off. It looked like I could remove the sensor with a crows foot, but no parts store had a 1 1/16" crows foot. Hoot dug an old 1" one he had and Tommy opened it up for me. I was able to get the crows foot on the sensor, but no room to actually turn it. Todd was saying tune it without the sensor working, but couldn't advise me to do that for liability reasons. We should have just tuned it...

I was just about to remove the rear fuel line when I noticed the new valley cover plate wouldn't allow me to get a socket all the way down on the sensor even if I did have access to it. So around noon I started pulling the supercharger off.

That wasn't too bad, but I did notice I had chaffed one of the IAT wires going into the intake and decided it would be best to replace it and get rid of all the butt connectors. After some new wire and solder, I think I had everything back in place by 5:00PM. That's when the day starting getting bad.

The first turn of the key was followed by screaming to turn the car off. I was spraying fuel all out of the engine side of the fuel line. Instead of fighting the quick disconnect fitting, I had just remove the SAE side of the adapter. In my haste, I must have tightened it back too much as I now had a cracked 45 flare in the hose. I pulled the hose and ran back up to Picayune. First stop was Home Depot to see if any stand SAE fittings would work. I met an interesting character working there who got rather upset at himself because he couldn't help me. I then hit the trio of Autozone, O'reilleys, and Advanced, with none having anything close to what I needed. The guy at Autozone took one look at it and said they wouldn't have anything like it. While in Advanced I came up with the idea of getting a stock LS1 fuel line and a stock 92 TPI fuel line and just making my own hose. Advanced didn't have anything like that, so I went back to Autozone.
 


The same guy was there and I started explaining how I was going to piece together a fuel line. He didn't think it was a good idea, but I told him it was just temporary so I could get my supercharger tuned. That's when his eyes opened wide and he pulled up his shirt to reveal a tattoo of a Turbonetics turbo-charger. He is madly in love with forced induction and is now willing to find whatever I need. We proceed to get an assortment of pieces and I head back over to Hoot's.

We get the old/new line spliced together and now the body side of the hose is leaking. Ugh... Clayton finds me some 3/8" heater hose and another coupler and we just make a frankenstein hose that should get us by enough to tune. So right around 9:00PM Todd gets back in the car and we proceed. The numbers and changes are not making sense and everything he does doesn't seem to change anything. We struggle with that for about an hour or so before Todd decides we should just bring it out on the road and see what happens.

The numbers get a little better during normal driving and we decide to get into the boost a little bit. As soon as the boost hits the car sputters, spits, and falls on it's face. We try a few different things before Todd asks what kind of plugs I'm running. I tell him I think some NGK's, but not the TR6's he thinks I need. He then asks what they are gapped at, and I tell him I guess whatever stock is. We decide the boost might be blowing the spark out and we pull back into Hoot's around 11:00. I pull the first plug and realize I must have put NGK's in the TPI as these were cheap stock AC Delcos gapped around 60, no where near the 32 Todd thinks I should be running.

So.... Around midnight I've re-gapped all the plugs and we're back on the street. Thanks to Hoot for letting me use his favorite spark plug socket, as trying to do that on a hot engine with a regular one might not have been possible. Thanks to God for not breaking any ceramic off the plugs as I managed to drop each one at least 2 times.

Regular driving showed remarkable improvement to the A/F ratio, and the first time we hit boost was when I had my holy crap moment. We made about 5 runs or so dialing it in under boost and at WOT and were heading back to put my O2 with a final test run. Todd tells me to have some fun on the way back in. While doing some spirited runs from 40-90 in third Todd says it feels like my clutch is slipping. I do it again and he feels it again. That's about the time we both smelled it. So we decide we're good enough and pull back in to a patiently waiting Hoot around 1:00AM. By 1:30 the car is on the trailer and I'm heading out. I finally make it to the house about 3:00AM.

After a few days to recover, I ordered a new fuel line and some LS9 AC Delco spark plugs (properly gapped). I also got a 1" shorter belt, hoping the 'clutch' problem was just belt slip.

Well as you can see from the previous picture, it wasn't belt slip. I had one good fun run before the clutch was hard to drive into the shop. After some good experiences by some friends, I decided to go with a new Monster Clutch. I went with the stage 3 setup with a new slave cylinder. It's good for 700HP/TQ, so I should be good for a while.

A side benefit is I could finally paint the last of the under body with the transmission out of the way.

I didn't get any more pictures of the actual clutch going in, but after the 500 mile break-in period, I've got to say I have a smile from ear-to-ear everything I drive.

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