New toy showed up in the mail

vierte · Postby **vierte** » Fri Oct 05, 2012 9:14

Check what showed up in the mail today!

chickenwafer · Postby **chickenwafer** » Fri Oct 05, 2012 9:14

Looks clean man. When does the wrenching start?

chromal · Postby **chromal** » Fri Oct 05, 2012 9:14

Oooh, congrats! Pretty FD.

Rx7boy719 · Postby **Rx7boy719** » Fri Oct 05, 2012 9:14

WOOT WOOT! another FD!

speedjunkie · Postby **speedjunkie** » Fri Oct 05, 2012 9:14

Sweet! Fikses too!

erod550 · Postby **erod550** » Fri Oct 05, 2012 9:14

How do I get one of those to show up in the mail at my house?

boosted12a · Postby **boosted12a** » Sat Oct 06, 2012 9:14

nice!!! i been holding the urge to buy a FD and you guys aint helping!!!

vierte · Postby **vierte** » Sat Oct 06, 2012 9:14

Good eye speedjunkie. All it takes is about $7k and a little bit of luck to get one of these in the mail... has some pretty good parts on it too!

I giggled like a 12 year old school girl when I got the thing in my garage and finally got to set it in! I'm going to start pulling parts off it this week and hopefully build a rotary stand adapter.. if I can get an engine hoist here by this weekend I'll start the teardown on Saturday to see how bad a shape the engine is in. It got new rotor housings about 12k miles ago.. I'm really hoping it just has some really stuck seals. You're welcome to help chikenwafer... I can pull an FC engine blindfolded, but this will be my first FD build.

chickenwafer · Postby **chickenwafer** » Sat Oct 06, 2012 9:14

Engine removal is pretty easy, biggest difference between the FC and FD is the FD uses a pull type clutch that must be disengaged before you can separate the engine and transmission. This is done with a long flat head screwdriver through the inspection plate on the trans. Alternatively, you can yank the engine/transmission combo and do it later outside of the car, some prefer this method. I've always just pulled the motor alone.

When it comes to tear down, the front eccentric shaft bolt is torqued to 200ft-lbs (the FC is 95ft-lbs IIRC) so yeah, that's a BUNCH of fun. MAPP gas is a great idea.

I have an engine stand with a rotary adapter if you need to barrow it, I don't plan on needing it anytime soon (knocks on wood) and I also have all the special tools to get the engine apart and back together (flywheel stopper, breaker bars, feeler gauges, porting templates, etc). Only thing I don't think I have is the flywheel nut socket, IIRC is a 2 1/8" beefy guy.

Shoot me a PM with your number and I will give you a ring and see when we can hook up to do some work.

vierte · Postby **vierte** » Sun Oct 07, 2012 9:14

Thanks, I didn't even think about it having a pull type clutch. I have an engine stand but not an adapter, that would save me from driving a couple hours to weld one up. I also have the 2-1/8" socket, feelers and a dial indicator. Makes checking end play a breeze.

Who makes your porting template? I am shying away from pineapple, there templates are nice but seem a little conservative. I was going to order some from Defined Autoworks in the next day or 2. PM Sent.

speedjunkie · Postby **speedjunkie** » Sun Oct 07, 2012 9:14

We've gotten to where we can pull he engine in a few minutes, after disconnecting all the harness connections and hoses of course. Same with putting it back in, easy to reconnect the engine and tranny with a tranny jack and if you keep the engine mount pucks off until they're connected. We do that in about 5-10 minutes. It just takes a while doing all the wiring harness connections and hoses. It would be awesome to install a cannon plug on the firewall so you can disconnect it there. I hope to do this someday.

vierte · Postby **vierte** » Mon Oct 08, 2012 9:14

Nice. Well if you find yourself in with a spare 10 minutes in the Greeley/Fort Collins area, don't be shy! I'll most likely take lots and lots of pictures on the tear down so I can get all the lines and wires back to their original places. The car has a few extra electrical goodies too like LS1 coils so I'll need to document it to get things where they belong. It's always a pain working on modified electrical systems without any reference.

Thats a pretty decent idea.. just did a quick search and found DIYAutotune has a 22pin weather pack connector too. Not sure how many wires are in the harness yet.

http://www.diyautotune.com/catalog/weather-pack-22-position-bulkhead-connector-kit-p-364.html

chickenwafer · Postby **chickenwafer** » Mon Oct 08, 2012 9:14

vierte wrote:Thanks, I didn't even think about it having a pull type clutch. I have an engine stand but not an adapter, that would save me from driving a couple hours to weld one up. I also have the 2-1/8" socket, feelers and a dial indicator. Makes checking end play a breeze.

Who makes your porting template? I am shying away from pineapple, there templates are nice but seem a little conservative. I was going to order some from Defined Autoworks in the next day or 2. PM Sent.

I got your PM, I will call you in a few.

As far as porting templates, I actually founds the Pineapple templates to be even a little overly aggressive, especially on the primary. I was shocked how much larger they had the primary ports. Secondary is always going to be conservative or you will end up cutting into the side seal track and it will fall in/catch when the seal scissors across the port. A Bridgeport is really the only safe way to open up the secondaries a ton.

I mostly just enlarged the secondaries slightly from the Pineapple template then put a nice 45* bevel on the edge to avoid any side seal snagging. I ran a spare side seal across the port and is glided smoothly so I was confident it wouldn't be an issue. Regardless, I have the Pineapple templates and you're more than welcome to borrow them to try out.

vierte wrote:The car has a few extra electrical goodies too like LS1 coils so I'll need to document it to get things where they belong. It's always a pain working on modified electrical systems without any reference.

Thats a pretty decent idea.. just did a quick search and found DIYAutotune has a 22pin weather pack connector too. Not sure how many wires are in the harness yet.

http://www.diyautotune.com/catalog/weather-pack-22-position-bulkhead-connector-kit-p-364.html

A few things- I would avoid LS1 coils. They are stout but a lot of respectable tuners have echoed that they can be problematic, paramount among these issues is a tendency to self discharge aka fire at random when they're not supposed to, which would cause erratic ignition timing and potentially massive pre-ignition or detonation. I would personally avoid them.

The AEM Smart Coils have proven to be a viable and reliable solution, they are essentially re-badged Mercury Marine inductive coils and can pump out some serious power. They also have a built-in ignitor so the external ignitor on the FD can be removed. Chris Ludwig on the 7club forum sells a nearly PnP harness for these coils on the FD for $100 bucks. The AEM coils are also roughly the same price as LS1 coils and cheaper than LS2 coils without any of the issues associated with them.

That surface-mount connector you found looks good, I can't remember how many wires are in the factory harness but it's a lot. I'm assuming you'll be "weeding" the stock harness to remove all the emissions and sequential turbo control wires, yes? That will drastically cut down the wires coming out the engine harness. On my harness, I only kept:

Idle Speed Control (ISC)
All 4 fuel injectors (duh)
The two CAS sensors (duh again)
Knock
Factory 02 (not sure why, it's not hooked up)
IAT
Water temp
Thermo switch

I deleted the OMP, EGR, APV, and all sequential turbo stuff. It removed a crap ton of wire.

vierte · Postby **vierte** » Tue Oct 09, 2012 9:14

Cool, give me a shout whenever.

Great info btw. I looked into the LS1 coil issue a little and it seems to be a potentially troubling problem. It sounds like it could be related to over dwell/primary overcurrent protection on LS coils when dwelled longer than 5ms. I've used truck coils in the past and they were problematic but it wasn't really related to self discharging.. The AEM Coils look great but unfortunately there's not enough in the budget for new coils just yet. I have to have this thing running by mid November and still got a lot of things to purchase.

That connector isn't bad but a little more research turned up a company called RyWire. They produce some very high quality harnesses using military spec connectors, wire, and loom. If and when the car gets a new harness I think I will be built similar to what RyWire builds and will have a quick disconnect at the firewall but won't be a weather pack. I'm not exactly sure what all has been chopped out of the harness already but I'm fairly confident it still has all the emissions control nonsense which will be leaving immediately!

alpha · Postby **alpha** » Wed Oct 10, 2012 9:14

Nice grab Will!! I've got a hoist I can lend to the cause...

New toy showed up in the mail

New toy showed up in the mail

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