gemellocattivo.com

wait, wait wait.....one cam cover with ribs , as cam coveres should be made, and 1 without? That simply won't do!


Looking good (otherwise)!

and where did you get loctite that thick? The stuff I have is liquid????

I wanted to make sure the job was done! The bolts need to be sealed or else I'll have an oil leak. I was just making sure. That's 8 bolts pulled to 85 ftlbs, so I don't think there's much in the interface... except paint at this point.



The front cam cover is the visible one in the Caddy engine bay, so it's silver and pretty. The rear cam cover is the hidden one and it has bosses to mount the coil pack... which I'll be using later. I'm just happy they're die cast magnesium. I have another set that I'm modifying to put the oil fill in an accessible location, which I want to have painted metallic blue.

The gel Loctite is a bottle my dad has. I'll snag a photo this weekend.

I get my twist gel loctite from my Winzer rep. Here is a link to Advance Auto that has it. I have blue and red. I love it.

https://shop.advanceautoparts.com/p/per ... lsrc=aw.ds

Years ago when I was building race engines we had issues with flywheel & bolts. It ended up being the loctite in the hole hydraulicing in blind holes and causing issues. We switched to gun drilled bolts and problem solved. I don't remember all of the issue. I have slept since then.

_________________
Wade Williams
Master Ferrari Tech
Restoration Tech
Engine Machinist
Fabricator
Racecar Driver

The Northstar has through-holes in the crank flange, which open to the cavity into which the #5 main bearing oil drains. Thus the bolts have to be sealed, but there's no worry that they'll hydrolock. I have 11x1.5mm x 0.880" bolts because that's what ARP makes. A 25mm bolt would be ideal, as the end face of the bolt would end up exactly halfway between the inside face of the crank flange and the main bulkhead, but I have more than 1d thread engagement as-is, so it's ok.

I played in the less sexy side of hot-rodding last weekend... pulling old dirty components out of old high mileage cars in order to clean them up.

This is why we do those things, though; Factory epoxy coating had failed in a couple of spots, hidden by foam insulation:



These are the '85-'86 heater tubes that I installed in my '87 car because they work better with the Northstar than the '87-'88 heater tubes.
For '87 & '88, GM T'd the heater return back into the right side coolant pipe from the radiator back to the waterpump. This works fine in older systems which have a restrictive thermostat and the heater circuit acts as a bypass of the thermostat, ensuring coolant circulation as the engine warms up. HOWEVER, in more modern engines with recirculating thermostats, it means there's no circulation through the heater core until the thermostat opens. As implemented in the Caddy, the heater circuit has constant circulation, but the radiator circuit does NOT. Merging the heater circuit and the radiator circuit means that the heater circuit is restricted when the radiator circuit is restricted. I switched back to the earlier style heater and right-side coolant tubes to plumb my car more like the Caddy was plumbed. When driving in the cold, the heater starts to give heat in about 1/3 the time with the '85-'86 plumbing as it did with the '87-'88 style plumbing.



All four heater & A/C tubes:
I've been using a rattle can epoxy paint on the A/C tubes. While it's very resistant chemically, it chips easily. That's not really good for something that's going under a car, so I'm going to strip/blast the epoxy off and do clear POR-15 on all four.
I'd *LOVE* to anodize them, but I don't think it's practical.



Here are the '87-'88 fuel tank expansion volume vent tubes... I pulled them out to sand and paint as well. The bottom one is from the fuel tank to the expansion tank. The top one is from the expansion tank back across the engine bay to the charcoal canister. Ackshully... Once I remove the battery tray and switch to a compact battery, I can move the charcoal canister over to the right side of the engine bay and save the weight of these lines reaching from the right side of the car to the left just to deliver VOCs for combustion. Weight reduction is a game of ounces, not pounds.

The Fiero fuel tank is under the center console, between the seats. That's basically the perfect position to keep weight distribution constant at changing fuel level.
The '84-'86 Fiero tank holds 10.something gallons. The '87-'88 holds 11.something gallons. Although the tanks are different, the 1 gallon increase didn't come from making a new tank that filled the space more completely. It came from moving the thermal expansion volume required for any liquid tank up into a separate enclosure stuffed in between the body metal and the plastic rear clip just above and forward of the right rear wheel. This volume is then vented to the charcoal canister for evaporative emissions control.

How do I go about having bent tubes digitized? It would be fun to have these reproduced in stainless for a little deep engine bay bling.



And here's the expansion tank... Looking up in front of the right rear wheel house, with the plastic wheel well liner on the right



I also spent a couple of minutes with the last ICM baseplate in GM's inventory:

Coil mounting plate, right position (unlikely):



Coil mounting plate, left position (likely):



Now I need to get the correct LS coils and figure out how to mount them. If feasible, I want to reuse the Northstar coil harnesses... I *think* the car versions of the LS coils use the same connectors, but I need to spend time with photos to make sure.
There are six pairs of holes at the top/bottom edges of the plate visible. The middle pair in each trio is a simple pierced hole that's flat on the back. the other four pairs are pushed through--not sure what the correct terminology is for this process--to thicken the material around the hole, making it suitable to tapping or threading a screw into. These are the mounting holes for the original waste spark coils. I'll probably use them for LS coils once I figure out what kind of additional bracketry I'll need to package things elegantly.

Someone posted this in another forum:



The D580 and D581 look workable in this application. The Holley would allow me to re-use my current plug wires, but having the low voltage connector and high voltage connector on opposite ends of the unit makes packaging in this situation difficult.

I'm also still interested in coil-on-plug/pencil coil possibilities, as using one of those cleans up my installation a good bit. I'm not sure how to go about finding one that will work, though. I can take measurements off my plug boots to figure out what the critical dimensions need to be.

Choices.....the D585 are the hottest I believe which is why I picked those for my car. The holleys have heatsinks too so I'm guessing they are also moving some power.

Lots of COP options out there...as you say, get dimensions and go from there.

Remind me, what ecu?

LS engines make a lotta power on the stock ignitions, so I don't think any of these would be a problem for any naturally aspirated combo. Don't I have higher compression than you anyway?

The D581's I could probably squeeze in all "flat" because of their footprint.
The D580's I think I'd have to turn up on edge to get 8 of them on the baseplate.

I'll be using some 58x GM ECU. It'll most likely be the stock Caddy computer, as it already has all the tables that will run this engine. However, it does NOT have discrete inputs for VSS, AC Request, cruise control, clutch pedal switch. I'm pretty sure it can do discrete wired outputs for speedo and tach, but I need to discuss that with the tuner. It may also have the ability to select a manual transmission, even though GM never offered one with this engine. For basic I/O, I can use a CANBus gateway card to sense all the switches and send the appropriate bus messages.

Do you have a recommendation for a bus gateway? I have a recommendation for one, but more recommendations are better.

The opening in the <'99 intake manifold is 78mm. The older throttle is NOT DBW. The '06+ DBW throttle is 87mm. That's not going to work on the older manifold. I may end up getting a bored throttle for the 3.6 V6 and using that... LOL... after building a mean V8, I have to use a V6 throttle on it.

Is there a "gizmo" that senses when I pull on one side of it with a throttle cable, sends that to the ECM like a pedal sensor, then pulls on a second cable to operate a cable throttle? That would be super handy for this.

Compression is not really the indicator, its BMEP or and easier way to thing about it is specific torque. I'm expecting a BMEP in the 16-17bar range and specific torque around 100ft-lbs/liter. A typical naturally aspirated US V8 does 1ft-lb/ci so about 61ft/liter and to get to 100 they need 12-15psi of boost. So that is way given the choice I bought the hotter coils but I'm not sure where you are planning to be so no idea what you'll need.


I asked about ECU only because not all ignitors need the same signal so that is something you need to thing about with a factory ECU. The LS coils use a dumb ignitor which is the most common, this is where the ECU is controlling dwell so most of the COP options will be fine ECU wise.




Honestly, this is the first I've heard that term so I'm probably not any help. I have 2 user configurable CAN channels that can be setup to talk to most any CAN device directly as well as a couple dozen each inputs and outputs so I had to work pretty hard to finally need to get the CANbus running.



and that is why we don't give you nice things! it also means lower than optimal BMEP



That sounds just like a TPS? I think there are stand a lone DBW modules or you could rig something up....or spend the money you save not doing that to buy a proper ecu

Yeah, I know. It's about charge density not just compression. Your numbers for what a "US V8" does are getting stale LS7 was 71 ftlbs/liter and current LT2 is over 76 ftlbs/liter. The emissions constraints on the valve events of those engines mean that a cam swap can gain 30-40 ftlbs or more, giving another 5-8 ftlbs/liter... BEFORE head work and a full build. 5.7 LS engines can top 500 RWHP with full bolt-ons over a stock short block. That's real close to 100 HP/liter.

Also, stock LS ignition is good for ~26 psi of boost and 4 digit horsepressures.
https://www.motortrend.com/how-to/hrdp- ... ng-theory/



An advantage of a factory ECU is that it works with factory coils.



CANBus is something I should add to my skill set anyway. I've seen a couple of little boards that translate between bus messages and discrete I/O, and the GMLan definition is "available" so it's probably the best course of action.



Ackshully, it looks like the LS4 throttle is the right size, although it will probably still need an adapter plate. GM put 76-77mm throttles and an intake with 78mm opening on a 300 HP engine, so they can't be too bad I think the 87mm throttle was used on the later Northstars just to standardize it with other products in the portfolio.



There are DBW controllers like DBWX2; I've seen remote pedal position sensors operated by throttle cables; and some OEMs had electro-mechanical cruise control servos that pulled on the throttle cable, although they were probably not suitable for operating the throttle in normal service.
Seems like it wouldn't he difficult to integrate a pedal position sensor into the same housing as a fast-acting servo that could pull on a throttle cable. That would facilitate retrofitting DBW to cable-throttle cars... although the servo would still need some type of TPS from the throttle itself.

I have a fixed cam timing V8... I don't need any exotic engine management functions; just normal daily driver & vehicle integration functions, which is where the race ECUs fall short