patgizz
Corvette updates:
bye bye EFI Aug 19, 2009
so as it is there comes a point in a C4 owner’s life that you either have to do some maintenance or take it to a shop for it because of the extreme underhood heat.
as it goes, i don’t go to shops for anything, because i a: do not trust them and b: it would immediately double the $1800 initial buy in. so i started messing around. that’s when things got ugly. i removed the valve covers to put on new gaskets. this gave me a better view of the main engine harness behind them. it was ugly. heat cracking on wire insulation, brittle loom, etc… i went to pull apart the passenger side chunk to inspect wires and got some sparking. i found the culprit(one among hundreds that looked just a little worse than the rest) and taped it up. put the car back together with the complete awesomeness that is the accel superram intake, and started tuning. then i realized the superram runner puts the TV cable in an impossibly bad position and makes it bind - which as we all know kills 700r4’s right quick. then the injectors began ticking, finally the car quit running.
diagnosed no injector pulse. fine, whatever. it came down to it being me against the car. and i was not to lose this war even if i lost the battle. i pulled and sold the stuporram intake(must be nice to have a 6 speed so you don’t have a TV cable).
the rundown is the harness is toast, it fried the ECM, and i couldnt afford to replace all that if i had the ambition to, which i do not. so i turned to my stash of parts, which turned up a $40 edelbrock intake and a $20 holley carb(both of which could pass for coming right out of the box). i snagged a $20 HEI off the shelf, and with the help of some very expensive fuel fittings, some nice braided hose, and a return style pressure regulator i had the car running again. then the module in the unknown $20 “it worked when i pulled it” HEI burned out - or so i thought. swapped module - not it, so i’ve got to replace the pickup coil - in which case i just ordered a new proform distributor instead.
since the ECM is fried i lost lockup converter control(solved with a painless wiring lockup kit from my buddy who got back into fords and sold all his GM stuff) and i lost cooling fan control so i have installed a hayden adjustable cooling fan controller in place of the OEM relays. and i can adjust it later when my new distributor arrives. once i get that crap figured out i can buy the proper TV cable for a carbed 700r4 application since the TPI one is too long, and get to the lockup kit install and trans filter/fluid swap, which in 115k miles has never been done before.
i swear if a 6 speed swap setup didnt cost ~2 grand because it’s corvette parts i’d do it in a heartbeat.