PontiacBonnevilleClub.com

So as some of you know I spent a lot of time during the Michigan meet trying to find the cause of the issue and eventually came up with nothing.

Looking through some of the scans though it had been clear for a while that there was something going on with the RPM's that the PCM was seeing. Also sometimes it would run great after the car would warm up but go right back to normal on the next restart. I went through a lot of the wiring looking for an issue and found a few things that looked like they might have been part of the problem, but none of those solved the issue.

Today I went and decided to replace the new crank sensor with the old one, and lo and behold this thing runs perfect now! This is the first time that this car has ever run properly since I have owned it and I'm so glad it finally works. And boy does it work!



I'm going to work on tuning it properly now and it will be out for the w-body/3800 meet this year!

That's gotta feel great. Grats on getting that sorted.

Dude that's awesome! Maybe same issue on Matts?

smskeeter23 wrote:Dude that's awesome! Maybe same issue on Matts?

I suppose anything's possible, but his car seems to be doing something completely different. He is able to rev up just fine under most conditions and has a pretty consistent misfire. I've taken a scan of his car but it looks like there's more to sort out there still.

That looks awesome! Although I am curious why the tach was pointing straight down at one point...

The original tach was reading much higher than what the engine actually runs at. I threw a cheapo aftermarket tach into it to get around that for now.

So I took this car to the 3800 gathering out here in Mt Clemens last weekend and took home an award for the car.

I haven't driven the car much at all yet and there's so much more I want to do to clean things up and make it better so it felt great to have an award despite all of that.

To prep it for this I did some things to the tune and ziptied a few more things down it to make sure nothing goes wrong. Here it is getting ready for a set of front tires:



Ready for its long day of driving:






First alignment for this car in more than 10 years. No idea when it was last aligned but apparently everything was way out



Filling up on corn to make sure everything is safe:



At the gathering:



It took home a second place award for 3800 swapped cars at the meet this year:



and it also shredded a plastic pulley. Thankfully the guy next to me had a spare while I was there and I was able to change it quickly!





For fun, some night shots of the car:








Finally, a few glory shots of the car in daylight:









The car still has a long way to go before I'll be completely satisfied with it. For now though, I'm going to stop putting money into it and enjoy driving it!

Grats on the award. Looks good!

That one picture is at the place where I was practicing hole shots the other day.

Went through and fixed a lot of the broken pictures here from photobucket. Also 10,000 views now!

95naSTA wrote:Grats on the award. Looks good!

Thanks again!

haro1225 wrote:That one picture is at the place where I was practicing hole shots the other day.

I may need to steal your idea before I take this thing to the drag strip! lol

I'm thinking of taking it to the strip either this weekend or next. I might rent a trailer and haul it with the truck to be safe or wait for next wednesday or something. I'm hoping for low 13's out of the car for now and maybe high 12's once everything's dialed in. It'll all depend on how well I can shift this thing out of the hole though with the 2.41 gears that are in it.

I noticed that the car had been losing some coolant lately but had only had to top it off once sometime yesterday. I took it up to woodward though and noticed that it had lost quite a bit of coolant. The radiator was about half-filled though so I just topped it off again and filled the reservoir too.

On the way home though the clutch pedal went hard as a rock while I was on the freeway. With some creative driving I was able to get it back to the garage. Once I got there and popped the hood there was tons of steam under the hood, probably from the leak in the radiator. The coolant temp gauge doesn't work too well and my laptop turned off while I was driving so I'm hoping it didn't get too hot there during that debacle.

So today I took a look at the car to see what the damage is. Looks like the cause for the leak was that the radiator fan had been rubbing on the radiator for a while due to loose mounts and an even looser bearing on the fan.

So I have a new radiator for it. The new one is so much bigger than what it had in there. It's an all aluminum unit for a 3rd gen f-body and it's supposed to be a 2-row equivalent. Should do a lot better at keeping this thing cool because the old radiator was not cutting it at all.



I'm still working on the mounts for the new radiator. I've decided to ditch the top mount that I made for the old one and wanted something that looked simpler. I'm going to use a different fan I have too and make sure that it is mounted in strongly.

I also had to massage and redo some of the charge pipe plumbing to make the new radiator fit. I think the driver side of the plumbing looks a lot better now though so I'm cool with it. There is less than an inch of wiggle room now around the radiator.

Old:



New:





Yes I realize it is crooked in the pics.

I'll still need to finalize all of the mounts and clean them up, then I'll need to find a different upper coolant hose and replace the apparently leaking thermostat housing gasket.


For the clutch issue, I found that the hydraulic line somehow came disconnected from the slave cylinder. The slave cylinder is new and seems to be locking properly, but there looks like there could be some wear on the hydraulic line that would let it come loose. I stuffed it back in for now and it seems to be okay, but it looks like I might have to replace that line or the master.


It's only money right? lol


Also, I finally have two front seats in it!



They're from an 05 Monte Carlo. The passenger seat is manual, but the driver seat has all of the controls that the original seat did and then some. They fold down properly and believe it or not, I think they're more comfortable for longer trips than the factory pillow tops.
I have a matching rear seat for it too, but that one will probably take a lot of work to get it in properly since the seats fold down.

I might end up getting something different some day for seats. I think these are an upgrade to what was in the car but they're not in perfect shape and the fitment is not as good as what I would have liked. The important part though is that it finally has two front seats now!

Finalized the radiator/fan mount and painted it.





I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out, it looks simple and it's a lot stronger than the previous one. This fan is a lot better all around as well. I'd like to make it even cleaner with aluminum someday but that would require more time and tools that I don't have to put into it right now.

I also found out that somehow I re-installed the original 195* thermostat in it instead of the 180* that I bought for it. So because of that the fan was always running for no reason since I had tuned it for a 180* thermostat. This whole time I thought the radiator was just struggling that badly to keep up.

Latest update:

I've been feeling like the wheels don't really fit the car that much since I got them. They don't look bad, but they sort of seem out of place because of the colors. So I took off the wheels to take the paint off of the flat surface and polish them.

Here they are, the one on the right sanded down to 320 grit, the one on the left scuffed with 200:



One on the right is sanded down to 2000 grit and polished. the left one is just sanded to 320:



All of them finished:



That was about 8 hours of sanding and I feel like there's more sanding I could have done to make them even better.

They don't really pop as much on the car where it's at, but I think they'll look really good in motion:



I might end up painting the recessed surfaces black or the same color as the lower section of the body at some point in the future too.

After that was done, I reattached the hydraulic line for the clutch into the slave and bled it, annnnd it promptly popped right back out. I did this twice before looking into the issue more.

It seems like the replacement master cylinder's clip for the line was causing it to wear out at the fitting. The stock slave grabs the fitting around the whole circumference but the new slave only grabs about half of it.





I talked to a few others who have these things and apparently I'm not the only one who's had an issue with the replacement slaves. I was going to replace the factory hydraulic line with another replacement but the local shops wanted $160 for the line and it was going for $60 online.

The problem I had with going that route was that it seems like the slave fitting just isn't working as well and would probably chew through the new hose too. I'm sure the stage 3+ clutch I have in here isn't helping either.

I did some more digging and found that there are aftermarket fittings that adapt GM clutch fittings to AN lines. So this is the route I went. It costed me under $30 for the 24" -3AN hose and the fittings to make it work! Usually AN stuff is super expensive so I'm thrilled that I was able to upgrade the line at a lower cost!
A lot of guys drill out the factory hose too and this new line has an even bigger inner diameter than the 1/8" bits they drill with. There was so much win in going with this route that I didn't even care that I had to drop the tranny again to install it.

New vs Old



installed onto slave:



In the car:



It seems to be working pretty well right now. I had to go through a little more effort to bleed the line this time for whatever reason. I'm hoping to take the car on a longer drive back to the other side of the state this weekend so that should be a pretty good test of it.

I haven't updated this in a while. The car was great for a couple weeks after the pervious fix. One night I drove the car out to Woodward after adding some timing to it and on the way there I did a pull in 3rd, let off and heard a pretty loud shuttering noise. Afterwards something was rattling as long as I had the clutch let out.

I stopped the car and had it towed back to my apartment and from there I rented a trailer and had it towed the rest of the way to the brother's place where I could work on it. I let it sit for a while though because I had been so tired of working on it.





I figured it was something broken in the clutch rattling around in there so I assumed it would just be a clutch swap. I still had the original clutch so I figured I'd throw it in there to get the car around for now.


Here it is ready to go under wrench:





I dropped the tranny this weekend thinking it would be a quick clutch swap. Well Murphy's law struck.




The T5 is history.

The local pick and pull has been having a deal where you can get a tranny out the door for under $70 so that's what I did.







So that is a 4l60e instead of a T5 going in there. I grabbed everything from the donor car to make it work including the flywheel, wiring harness, and floor shifter.

Welded the junkyard's hole in the pan and added my own drain plug:



bye bye flywheel



Hello Flexplate:



All bolted in:



Driveshaft clearance is excellent:



Then I was left to sort out this mess:



boiled down to this:



My baby has a trans dipstick now..


I feel pretty bad about it... lol

But I was happily surprised to see that the tranny works pretty good! It has all of its gears and shifts great. The only issue with it is that the PCM is throwing a code for a stuck torque converter. It barely lets the engine rev off the line with the 2.41 gears in it, it won't even spin the tires right now.
It'll need a rebuild down the line for the TCC issue but it'll get the works when that happens. For now though, I only have ~$110 in this trans including fluids and a new filter and I'm going to try and enjoy it while it lasts.

As far as the switch from the manual to the automatic goes though, I've been thinking about this for a while now. The T5 can't take the power I want out of it so I would need to either spend $3,000 on a tko600 that could take 600ft-lbs of torque, or find a T56 for $2,000 at the cheapest, and have to sort out adapter plates, clutch issues, cutting the driveshaft, and probably be well over $3,000 when finished with that.
I already have over $600 in the manual setup i have and it's just not cutting it.

The manual is a ton of fun, but it just can't take the power I want for the price I'm willing to put into the car.

The auto will be better for the dragstrip anyway though with the turbo and I want to be able to put down some good times with this car in the future.

Does it use the same TCC that the old 700-r4 did? I ended up saving that one, it's in my garage somewhere.

No I think they would be a lot different at least for the lockup function since the newer transmissions use a PWM signal vs a straight 12v signal to trigger lockup.

If it just needs a solenoid then that would be an easy cheap fix. Hopefully it doesn't need valve body work or a new TCC.

Based on what I've read so far and what I saw in the pan when I got it there's a good chance that there's some debris in the valve for the tcc causing it to stick.

Maybe I'll get lucky and the fluid change will clear it up, but I'm sure it will need a rebuild down the road.

I was going to suggest a new TCC, based on the condition of that fluid you showed me, PRNDL sells them for $80 or so.

You might need to do a few pan drops and toss some extra magnets in it.

Throw some seafoam TransTune in there. If it can be fixed by fluid, that will fix it.

this is awesome. i would love to do something like this to my care on day but i have a lot to learn. did you start with a stock n/a 3800 and what did u have to replace/upgrade to get the power and boost u wanted? do you know how much power the car makes now?