metaruss

On the road again.  New intermediate shaft, new seals.  Thanks to Dave for the crankshaft seal housing (had to strip the orange paint…sorry :).  I still have a rattle coming from the tranny in neutral.  I noticed that it doesn’t rattle if I release the clutch slowly, so perhaps it has something to do with this 6-puck HD clutch disc.  Nice to have A/C again.

I was doing some post-convention maintenance such as retorquing the head studs (which it didn’t need, BTW), when I had a slight problem.  While trying to track down a fuel leak I dropped one of the fuel rail bolts on the head, which of course went straight down the center oil return passage and into the oil pan.  Grrr.  While pulling the pan, I cracked the front crank seal housing.  Grrr.  I then noticed that the new intermediate shaft seal housing is also leaking.  Grrr.

Well, another year, another convention.  SDAC-14 was a blast as usual.  I went home each night, which made it hard to get up at 5am for the car show and the driving school.  The car show was pretty cool, as we were right along side the classic Mopars from the Chicago Mopar Connection.  My dad had a good time checking out all the classic Mopars.  I didn’t bother showing the CSX because it was…well just ugly.

The performance driving school was awesome.  I liked it even more than SDAC-10 (even though that one had the NASCAR oval).  Blackhawk Farms is a really fun track and the weather was beautiful.  I got a total of 6 sessions in and my instructor was with me the whole time.  He really helped me a lot.  The car was running a little lean at the top end.  Some 100 octane stopped the pinging, but it still broke up on the straights after a couple of laps.  I think I cured it the next day by raising the pumping effeciency table up a bit in the upper RPM range.  Guess I’m flowing a bit better than stock…probably the ported exhaust manifold/bigger exhaust.  By the end my rear brakes were toast.  They sounded horrible, so I just put a new set of pads on since I couldn’t find rotors that night.

The drags were fun, but a little quieter than usual in terms of participation.  There was some scheduling confusion and the bracket races happened while everyone was eating lunch.  I didn’t realize until the end that time trials were still running between events.  I would have run more if I had known.  One thing on the Shelby that I have not been able to fix: the car won’t boost past about 14-15psi, even with the wastegate unplugged.  I made a new BOV flange, swapped Talon BOVs, replaced the ribbed, upper hose, etc.  Nothing helped.  It’s either a boost leak in the intercooler or somewhere that I can’t see or the wastegate actuator is toast.  The turbo is getting rather sloppy on the compressor side and there seems to be some oil in the IC now when there wasn’t before the headgasket change.  I have a feeling that it’s on the way out.  Grrr.

In the staging lanes at Da Grove.  Thanks to Kevin Schellenberg for the pictures.

My best run was the first of the day: 14.737sec @ 96.35mph:

Well, on my way to Dave’s house for the SDAC-14 early bird BBQ, the car completely died about 3 miles from his place.  I managed to roll it into a gas station.  I thought it was the HEP, as I got fuel pressure when I turn the ignition on, but upon further inspection, I noticed that the distributer rotor had about 180 degrees of slop.

Luckily, JT had his truck and trailer up at Dave’s and was able to drive down and haul the beast back up to Dave’s garage.  A bit of disassembly confirmed that the intermediate shaft and oil pump gears were toast.  The teeth were simply worn away to oblivion.  I’m alittle unclear what causes this failure.  It looks like a lack of lubrication to me.

Dave and Kate, being the cool people that they are, put me up for night and then Dave took me to the parts store in the morning.  Dave had a selection of used intermediate shafts from various motors and I bought a new Melling oil pump from Autozone.  After getting it all back together, the car ran like a champ.  All the idle problems, pinging weirdness, and revving problems were gone.  She pulls hard to 6k.  Thanks guys!

Well, the car is back together.  While I had it apart, I swapped in the A520 that I had just rebuilt before getting rid of the Shadow.  It has the chrome moly bearing plate too, so it should hold up to this motor.  The taller overall gear ratio will be welcome.  Since it had the A568 in it before, I had to swap the shifter, cables, etc.  I also replaced the middle rear freeze plug with a rubber one, as it was starting to seep.  It was rusted through from the inside, just like the one behind the starter was.  I also replaced that first one as the rubber was looking cracked and shabby.

I couldn’t see where the headgasket had blown into a coolant jacket, but it did blow between cylinders 3 and 4.  The gasket was still there, but it was burned between the gasket and the head.  That area of the head is still flat and intact, so it should be fine.  Unfortunately, I drove it to and from work and it still runs like crap except now it won’t rev past 4500.  Grrr.

I fiddled with it some more, but now I am seeing that the coolant system is being pressurized with gas after driving it around the block.  Coolant is being pushed out out of the radiator.  Looks like my aggressive cal blew the headgasket.   I took it around the block again and it got even worse.  Perhaps this is why it is running bad.

I added a little spark to the cal and now the motor is not running well at all. The idle is very rough and it pings a lot.  I backed out the change, but the problems continue.  I then went back to the cal I was running during the winter, but it still didn’t help.  I swapped the coil, wires, cap, rotor plugs.  No dice.  Next I decided to look at the timing it looked OK, but when I took off the belt cover, I noticed that the idler side of the belt was very loose.  I figured this was making the timing jump around, but even after fixing it and triple-checking the timing again, it still idles bad, pings in boost, and won’t rev past 5k.

Driving the car again in the nice weather.  Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do some work on the Daytona.  Tweaked a few things in the cal to fix some summertime “cold” start quirkiness and hopefully addressed a low boost stumble.

The original fuel pump croaked a couple of weeks ago.  Since this is my only running car, I had to fix it ASAP.  I ordered a new Walbro 190lbs/hr fuel pump from FWD Performance, but couldn’t afford to wait for it to show up.  So, I dropped the tank and yanked the pump from the Daytona (same 190 unit, only 1 year old) and put it in the CSX.  Seems to be working fine.  I replaced the shifter cable bushings with the polyurethane “Booger Bushings”, since the originals under the hood were long gone.  I also changed the oil, which was way overdue, swapped out the air filter, and gave everything a good looking over.  There are coolant leaks from just about everywhere one can have a coolant leak.  They are all slow, but add up to a quart or two of coolant every couple of weeks.  The freeze plug next to the one that blew before is starting to seep.  I REALLY need to swap this motor out soon.  It is on borrowed time.  The new cal is rocking along and gets better mileage than the ND unit did.  It’s still lower than my Shadow was, but the CSX has smaller series tires and the short gears on the tranny.

Well, I spent much of the summer working on house and yard related things, so the Daytona sat for a long time.  As such, the CSX has been my daily driver all summer and probably will be all fall.  On the upside, some of that work included running 60A service out to my garage, which allows me to power my recently aquired compressor and stick welder.  Hopefully I can get the Daytona back together in time to get the CSX back in the garage before winter.

On a whole, the CSX has held up well.  There seems to be a coolant leak coming from the radiator.  The radiator has desperately needed recoring since I got the car.  I have also been using a custom calibration in place of the ND Performance cal I had before.  It is much improved, though still has idle issues.  The ND cal would always die two or three times at cold startup, but would eventually get going.  It also would break up real bad around 5000rpm and had a part throttle lean spot around 10psi of boost that would cause the engine to cut-out.  Aside from the idle problem (which may be mechanical), the new cal has none of these problems.  It seems that I have the mixture setup right, but we shall see how my gas mileage is.  See my Automotive Electronics pages for more info.