the new guy from newzealand

[delcowizzid]

thought i better follow protocol and say hi before im considered a spammer lol.
jumped over from delcohacking.net to follow the release of ant's LS1 flashtool and have a nosey round.
i also play with most forms of efi and all variety of engines from the humble weed wacker to bigblock chevs LOL.i also like to turbocharge anything i can just for shits and giggles.my main project that keeps evolving is my mates street car with 3800 buick engine and a 600hp capable chinese turbocharger which currently runs 11.1@120mph down the full 1/4 at 1500kg on 14psi.its just had an upgrade to a real compressor a holset H1E which will hopefully drop our E.T. over the chinese turbo

[EagleMark]

[Lextech]

Cool project. Post up some pics of the entire car. The cars you look at every day, most of us have never seen. Welcome to the forum.

Jeff

[delcowizzid]

here it is its old 1978-80's model holden commodore loosely based on an opel.

video of it in action its built to do skids and drag race but see's a fair bit of street driving

my drag car 80's kp starlet v6 buick turbo again LOL

[delcowizzid]

bigblock holden WB ute 454 twin tunnelram

70's holden torana 304 5L injected v8 and t700r4

all the boys from the local car club at the drags camping out

[EagleMark]

All that pluming under the hood sure is tough on tires!

Your drag car looks like our Chevy Chevette.

Under that blue canopy looks like a Chevy Nova? Then a Pontiac Lemans? Then the other two are like our Chevelle? Thanks for sharing! Way Cool to see cars from the other side of the pond...

[delcowizzid]

it is the little car that could.
The 1989 buick 3800 v6 (like a lesabre has over there) is a step up from a factory fitted 120hp straight 6 that it came with factory.and with the boost on top has been a good package.

The engine had done over 186411 miles then we turboed it in the shed with an el-cheapo gasless mig, some steam pipe and some factory manifold flanges and bits and peices we had lying around ,a 38mm wastegate and BOV that i scored cheap from a mate and a brandnew chinese T70 turbo of the interwebs.all up the conversion cost somewhere towards the tune of nz$2000 with new injectors and pump etc.We bought 42lb greentops to start with and had issues with running on 5 cylinders at cruise but it pulled like a train the minute you cracked the throttle, but we ran it like this for around 6 months with no issues.this got us into the 12's on the 1/4 with a T5 manual transmission but we were sustaining repeated breakages of T5's at an alarming rate.The bug had bitten and the owner wanted more so we pulled the engine for a cam swap custom turbo grind 222@0.050 0.495 lift reused the stock lifters and picked the best chain and sprockets out of our spares that we could find as well as doing a rear main seal .while we were there we flipped it upside down with the heads still on and lifted some bearing caps to see how it had been handling the work and were presently surprised to see bearings that didnt look any worse than expected for a high km engine.we unbolted the whole rotating assembly and slid in new main bearings with the crank in place and also the rod bearings and fitted a new upgraded neoprene 2 peice rear main seal as there was no rope left and it smoked oil off the crossover pipe the length of the strip half of the reason for pulling it out in the first place.we also got some adjustable roller rockers for a steal so these were fitted to.this got us down to 11.7 on the strip with some 60lb seimens injectors, but we were sick of blowing T5's the decission was made to go auto.
we had a supposidly rebuilt T350 sitting there that was an unknow box that was on the back of the blue ute above when my mate bought it.this along with a 2nd hand chev convertor for a boss hoss motorbike rated 2000-2500 rpm stall and a home made flexplate and an adaptor plate from http://www.speedwaymotors.com/Chevy-...ates,3280.html and we were in buisiness.in the end going auto didnt gain us any E.T. but it was holding up to some serious abuse.we were still doing 11.7 but our mph had dropped from the loss in hp up top from the auto swap.we had dynoed the engine when it was cammed and manual and max power was at 5400 rpm on the dyno 288rwkw 388 odd hp at the wheels yeehaw.at the strip we were pulling it to 6500rpm cause it still made ok power for a lot more revs.the cam specs should allow us to make max power up near 6000-6500 region and it was suggested when we got the cam ground that we would probably need to fit some valvesprings depending on how they were after thousands of km.so off we went and bought some 135Lb seat pressure dual springs.being that the stuck on head gaskets that had been there from factory were still doing a great job we opted to leave the heads on and swap springs with the engine in the car.we start at the front of the engine on the passenger side and things are going great untill we get to the rear pot and pressurise the cylinder to pop the collets off and we hear air escaping rapiddly .on inspection we found a valve spring retainer had split and one collet had been eaten by the retainer and valve stem and the collet slots were trashed.so off came the head after battling away to do 2 cylinders allready . a quip trip back to my house had a head off my dummy block on in the drag car on the ground to donate some collets and a valve and spring retainer.lapped the 1 valve reassembled the head and fitted with a new $13 headgasket and some 2nd hand headstuds we happened along.we fitted all the rest of the springs on the 2nd head incar and just left it bolted down,I will pull 1 bolt at a time sometime and fit the studs on the drivers side its not a nice job on that side LOL.off to the drags we go again no gain WTF still doing 11.7's.a month later the drags were on again so a week before we did some tweaking on the lifter preload as we thought we were loosing some lift from the increase of spring pressure and were still using the factory lifters.adding another 1/2 turn to the adjuster screws on the pushrod seats.we also did some stall tuning in realtime in the driveway increasing fueling till she came on song in every cell in the tune as we loaded it up this got us a torque gain on the brakes ready to launch.it was all it needed to wipe off over half a second to get us to a PB of 11.1@120mph.this is pretty much where it sits now all up we are in for around NZ$5000 US$3900 and could pull a 10.99 with the twist of the boost controller bolt .still using the china turbo too LOL.

we just bolted on my holset H1E turbo for my drag car and did some testing to see if it was upto the task on the v6 and to see if the more efficient wheels were better than the unknowns from the china turbo. both having the same size wheels front and rear and the same turbine housing off the china T70 fitted to the holset chra should give us a good comparison .so far its been tested on low boost only due to it blowing the hose off the compressor outlet of the turbo(this is now fixed ready for high boost test :D).
turbo comes on a whole 1000rpm earlier and was lean coming on boost from being in areas of the map that have never been run in.we can now load up on the convertor to 3000rpm and begin to make some boost 4-5psi before spinning the tyres instead of getting to 0 boost 4000rpm and just breaking loose.i also just got a 2step limiter that drives 6 ls1 coils from the standard dis module and gives 2 spark cut rev limiters instead of using the factory fuel cut.that was made by vl400 over on our forum pcmhacking.net and should help us to launch even further on boost.we have never been able to launch on boost and at one stage the wastegate didnt open till we were 60 foot out from the start line the auto helped there and also the launch tuneing of the tune helped a lot we are now hitting max boost by the start tree.i see the car being 10 second capable right now on the same boost.

as soon as we do a 10 we are going to be required to fit a cage.so we probably only have 1 more drag meeting before the next mission fitting a cage and more HP to make up for it.ported heads will most likely be the only upgrade unless i make some nice manifolds to replace the log style one.a good set of heads should gain us around 30% more hp and torque if we ditched the log manifold

that was a big ramble anyone reading this far down thanks for taking the time and battling through my long badly punctuated essay LOL i tried

[Lextech]

Way Cool! I like the little drag car. It does look like a Chevy Chevette.

Jeff

[delcowizzid]

its hopefully going to hookup with 4 link rear

[EagleMark]

Looking good!

Will even go straight with a Pan Hard bar?

[delcowizzid]

im undecided on weather im going to use an adjustable diagonal bar between the lower arm rod-ends or a real watts linkage seems the diagonal bar works great and is the easiest one to make.

[Vintage tin]

Cool rides

[delcowizzid]

been out tuning the blue torana with worked 5.0L v8 and t700 last week took it for a 300km drive to a swap meet and tuned as we drove.its running OSE $12p off our website pcmhacking.net. no closed loop but tuned to cruise at 14.7 at 34 degrees of timing which with a bit of fun cruising with the club resulted in 11L/100km around 21mpg if online calculator is correct .at 110kmh 10% TPS we are using a displayed 6-7L/100km its just great on fuel.when we got home we pulled some plugs and found one side of the engine is richer than the side with the wideband in it.so in the coming week we are fitting a balance pipe between the twin 2.5" exhausts to see if that improves cylinder balance.we are guessing one of our mufflers is slightly collapsed or or rotted out.they are a matching pair but one is older than the other and we think its flowing more out one side.a muffler upgrade is on the cards anyway.wide open throttle it is an animal for smaller displacement v8.
heres a vid of us running in the cam at just over 2000rpm with a busted map sensor input to the ecu she was lumpy

low tps takeoff

dead solid idle never mind the noise at the front its a flapping gilmer belt LOL

[delcowizzid]

8 hours work and $80 later the vb has been transformed .sporting its new tough GM flat black paintjob LOL .a quick block back with 400 tomorow and a final coat and we will be unwrapping all the chrome woot

[Lextech]

Nice. I do have one question though. I have noticed that a lot of the "Down Under" cars that are hotrodded are 4 dr cars. Why is that? There are very few hotrodded 4 drs in the States.

Jeff