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.