tortuga

charlieRobinson wrote:

How's Turtle doing?

putting along still. I am waiting till it's actually nice before I go at it. not in any hurry.
My passenger side headlight switch side harness went out and I had to replace that yesterday (also noticed the terminal on the relay was kinda corroded too which also could have been the issue).
My driver door sensor must have gone out (a while ago) so I've since pulled the interior light fuse out so the lights aren't on all the time which is really annoying (so is not having them working at all).
My ABS/TCS pump just randomly decided to stay on forever not long ago so I pulled the fuse for that too and have a nice bright yellow spotlight coming from the dash at night now. I covered it up.
things seem to be going crappy faster than I can fix them  

here's my shopping list so far. I'll probably order stuff end of this month or early May.

"get cherry picker from pete or james if pete doesn't have it
arp lube & heavy duty teflon tape from james [lube $7.71 summit]

VictorReinz head gaskets [$40 rockauto]
dorman steel oil pan and oil pan gasket [$51+$30 rockauto]
1800radiator new radiator [$161] [acdelco $177 rockauto]
front cover gasket [$10 zzp]
valley seals [$10 zzp]
rear cover gasket *have to check if i have it
more header wrap
belt & tensioner assembly [$74 acd rockauto]
trans dipstick tube maybe
*check for extra coolant elbow
o2 senser [zzp?]
air filter [AEM 21-2059DK $55 summit]
black engine enamel

replacement rocker bolts [ARP 612-1750 $41.40 summit]
Make replacement bushing stands for new compcams 1.73 rockers
[4130/4140 chromoly hardened to ~48Rc]

Saw this in your list of things to do:

dorman steel oil pan and oil pan gasket [$51+$30 rockauto]

For what it's worth, I replaced my steel oil pan with a used 3800 aluminum one that I found on Ebay for $50.00 shipped.
It came with a new tube of GM Engine Sealant (no gasket required).
It is very solid and very flat sealant surface for a no leak finish. No longer have any seeps or leaks from the oil pan.
I think it's worth while to look for one as a replacement to a steel/stock oil pan.

Just my $0.02

Cody, you trying to make it to the 50th GS meet , Buick race day, in Norwalk OH end of May?

Sir Psycho and I will be there for sure. Scott will be at home and I dont know if AA or anyone else is going.

Cody, wondering what IDC% you are seeing with your current mods E85 with 80# injectors.

I've never had this thing perfect dialed in since the current build was put together but I have been all over with injector duty depending on stuff. When I was at the track in '13 logging all day, I had points when I'd have duty cycle up at 100% and change with the engine racing at 6800rpm but that was also usually running rich. At 5000rpm WOT I saw about 65%-78% slightly rich. I can't really say what happens while spraying because there was no more maf table available for it that day.
Now that I tuned my IFR to pretend to be smaller, what I see in my logs for IDC% is gonna be wrong too. I'll probably see a lot of 100%+ now in high rpm situations but that injectors are not actually maxing out. But yeah tuning this thing sucks; I may never have really good logs - I hate 97's.

I think I remember seeing a picture of your intake with the ZZP turn down..? But in your recent ford GT blower thread, I see you have relocated your MAF/IAT closer to fender. Also tapped the top of the plumbing for PCV vacuum?

I realized the issue this evening, how close the intake is to the coolant tank. Sir Pyscho luckily had a gran prix intake flexbow that worked perfectly for now.

IAT temps were much higher with LQ4 integration. But do you ever wonder if they are more accurate up there?

I never had the zzp turndown. From what I could tell in other peoples pictures it looks like it goes a little too far down and in to work nice on the riv with a FWI. The hose going from the intake pipe back to the blower is the PCV fresh air inlet. In your picture it looks like you went to the throttle body which is all the same. Actually If I'd realized it at the time, that's how I would have done it.
With the current intake piping setup, it just worked out to have the maf more near the fender; it wasn't because I necessarily wanted it closer or farther from the tb. My intake consists of two mildly angled pipes and maf connects them together. Any other way and I'd need more pieces or weld which I don't want to do.
The accuracy of the IAT is a debated thing. IAT is reported higher if it's being sampled nearer to the throttle body or lower (closer to actual ambient) when it's being sampled near the air filter. As a tuner, both are useful. Looking at the stock IAT-timing table, I don't think it's terribly critical what you do with it - it's more for your information. Some other tunes on other cars rely more heavily on that IAT but it doesn't seem that way on the L67.

nothing wrong with tha.. oh wait

Daaaaaaamn Codi...........

Dang man, that sucks.

cause of death?

charlieRobinson wrote:

cause of death?

Wasn't it when a spark plug broke while he was at the strip?

Yeah this was from the dragstrip last september or something. Although it did seem to kinda get worse lately. It was practically symptom-free through the winter. Then I noticed subtle things like the car starting to loose oil and the wideband always reading lean, misfiring when not warmed up yet. A few weeks ago, I think I got another piston chunk that broke away from fatigue or something because I found a smashed spark plug again. It must of been stuck in there because it was hard misfiring for a while and then it was fine. Guessing that the chunk was holding a valve open and then dislodged itsself later. I don't see any obvious damage to the heads/valvetrain yet thank the lord.

Yikes!!! Fortunately the piston chunks are relatively (!) soft and tend not to damage valves on their way out.

this again... (valve stem seals climbing away)
I guess that's at least some of my oil consumption etc. Problem is I have no idea how to fix this not to mention right now, unprepared for the issue. I'm half tempted to put some damn rtv around the bottom of them to glue them down or something. I don't know if that'd make it better or worse..

If it ain't one thing.....

What normally keeps a valve stem seal down? Are they shaped to climb in one direction? Can they be upside down?

Looks like some detonation chipped that piston land. Don't know what else would cause that.

AA wrote:

Looks like some detonation chipped that piston land. Don't know what else would cause that.

Nevermind the extreme amount of pressures that the piston normally undergoes inside turtles engine. It is plausible that the piston just got weak and broke. The over-rev(s) that he did that day could've just been the straw that broke its back.

Karma wrote:

What normally keeps a valve stem seal down? Are they shaped to climb in one direction? Can they be upside down?

There are little spring retainers around the seal itself. Actually more like spring bands. The top of the "hat" that it goes over is flared (sorta), and the seal snaps over top of it. Impossible to install upside down. They're like little cups.

I'd take it to Bill in Detroit and pay $1k for a brand new rebuild so clean you can eat off it.

lil bit farther of a drive for you but... just an idea..

disassembling and cleaning heads


this is cyl.1 exhaust where the most damage would be. After cleaning up the chamber area, you see whats really up. This is probably salvageable. As long as the valve will seat and seal, it should be fine.

Here's the other problem that I didn't know about that will pretty much put the nail in the coffin on destroying my plan of finishing this by this weekend.


spring fell off and the bottom mushroomed pretty good

you can see how the viton is all chewed up

The seals aren't just coming off. The exhaust ones are getting beat up by the retainer. Opel engineering didn't machine the top of the valve guides with enough clearance for my lift. I could have sworn I told them I needed .600". I'll go ahead and assume that is the entire reason they're coming off their seats this time. What really sucks is that fixing this would conventionally require me to take the heads back there or somewhere to get professionally re-machined for the clearance I need for the existing lift much less the increased lift I was planning on now with the 1.7 rockers. James suggested I just grind them down about .100 by hand which I may well do. I still need new seals and still have ton of work ahead of me cleaning these heads and everything else.

James and I are gonna try to figure out a way to fix this. Hopefully I can get him over here sunday. Thing is since it's all exhaust seals that are coming up off the guides and getting beat up, my first thought was the clearance is inadequate since the ones with the higher valve lift are the problematic ones. All the intakes are fine. So I took my digital caliper and checked the actual distance from the lowest point of the valvespring retainer set on the stem with the keepers in place and the guide (without the spring). The distance there with the valve closed is about 1.040" which is more than enough even when you add the thickness of any kind of valve stem seal. So now we're kinda thinkin that the seals just aren't staying on and then when they come off they are getting damaged by being slammed up and down and whatnot instead of the other way around. The question is why aren't they staying on? why only the exhausts? Why am I the first person I know about to have this problem when plenty of heads are built with smooth bronze guides and standard fitment seals. James suggested the really smooth OD bronze guides compared to the rough-machined stock guides which we can address by manually barbing/grooving the OD of the guides to bite and hold onto the seals. It's not even totally crazy to add a little tiny ring of rtv there either. That's all well and fine as long as that's the only trouble.
I should have called Opel before the weekend but I wanted to get the heads all disassembled first so I can see everything and have the whole picture to tell them.

new radiator - at least something is getting put in the car now - a step in the right direction


flushing the heater core out because I'm switching to green coolant


lots of tiny chunks of this came out of it - i'm pretty sure it's the disintegrated restrictor valve thing that's inserted in the heater elbow coming out of the tensioner assembly. I'd bet money almost everyone with some miles on their riv has some of that in their heater core.


heads taking a bath?


Cleaning those damn valves took me like all day between two days because my hands hurt so much.
That was not really part of the original plan. I was gonna swap over the 150# springs, the 1.7 roller rockers and the 3/8 pushrods and leave the heads as is otherwise. Although they were dirty enough that I would have been dying to clean them still.


The seals, by the way, are just a little bit larger on my opel-rebuilt heads ~.529" instead of ~.506" for the stock guide OD. They made the new guides and therefore picked the size for that and correspondingly, the seals. So I can't use the metal-shelled 3800 seals on these heads basically. The seal design in the middle (although its technically sized the same as the other stock size 3800 seal) of the pic can be forced on without exuberant effort but I assume that's not a good idea. I dunno.

I'm still working on cleaning the heads. That pneumatic die grinder with the little stainless wirebrush on it is worthless on all the hard carbon deposits. All it does is polish the carbon up smooth. I can get like 85-90% of it inside all the ports with that tougher wire wheel on the electric drill but it's work. Thing that really sucks is it'll just be caked with carbon again in a couple thousand miles.



Some of the more subtle mods
James modified the windage tray gasket back when we built the L26 motor for better oil management. This time around we did that again and also did his weld-in plate around the oil pickup tube. I'll try not to dent in the oil pan again. lol


got the IS3 cam and timing set transferred to the new motor, anti-vaj rumbler shaft deleted, ready to have the covers put on and then heads once I get those all sorted out.
In the meantime, pray for good riding weather this week for me please!

Well Cody, I sure hope your skies aren't covered in blackness like ours are right now. We're gonna get hammered in about 20 minutes....nvm. Right now lol. The skies are alive and BOOMING