Racin'Jacin wrote:TireSmoker, You may want to look into sending it back to MSD. Last I knew they would rebuild a box for something like 60 bucks. Seemed reasonable to me....
Yep, I did. They said anywhere from $23-88, depending on what's wrong. If over $88, they won't fix it. Turnaround time is supposed to be 7-10 days, and it arrived at their facility on Jan 22, so I'm hoping to have it back soon.
Just little bits of progress are being made this past week. I had to replace the plenum-to-base gaskets, as the previous ones were torn, causing the high-idle in the video I posted.
The car now starts consistently. Had a rough go of it initially when I found the timing to be way off. Didn't have the distributor tight enough and it moved on me, and then to get it to the right place, one of the plug wires was too short, so I had to pull it and move it a tooth. There's no slack in the #5 wire, so I might move it one more tooth.
I'm getting a lot of valvetrain noise out of the passenger side. This has been an on-going problem for a while, well before this current fiasco -- that side of the engine has always seemed noisy. It's to the point where I might swap out the 1.6's for the 1.5's to see if it is something in the rockers themselves. I'm gonna try tightening them first.
I changed out the transmission pan for a nice, shiny cast aluminum unit that I bought at Summit a while back. The old steel one had a few dents in it and seemed to be leaking a bit. New pan, new gasket, hopefully all will be well. I need to get more trans fluid, as the 2.5 quarts I had in inventory was not enough.
With the transmission pan replaced, I put the front of the car back on the ground. It's much easier to work on without climbing on milk crates. (insert other short jokes here) Back wheels are still in the air, and I'll leave it that way till all the trans fluid is in, when I can run it through all the gears. This trans was built back in '98 or '99 by Gardner and is still going strong.
Yeah, it's been a good day. VeeDub and I cooked up a bunch of wings and some other good stuff for the 500 tomorrow.
Later, we got the heater box re-installed with new gaskets, added more transmission fluid (6.5 qts so far), and even went so far as to put the hood back on.
I believe the requirement can be found on page '400', section 'Chevelle', paragraph 'Mega Squirt'... look for the line starting with "... when the coefficient of traction, is overcome by excessive horse power..."
-Mark
2012 Impala LT 3.6 VVTDI
300hp - a bit much for FWD!
After getting the heater box put back in last month, I was having a lot of trouble getting the control cables hooked up, especially for the defroster. VeeDub was over tonight, so we took the whole heater back out, verified all the flapper doors moved freely, but did find one small bent linkage that might've been causing a problem.
Upon re-assembly, I hooked up the control cables before mounting the box to the firewall. This worked out much better. The rest of it went back together pretty easily, including the inner-fender which was partially removed. I mean, hey, 3rd time's the charm, right?
With the heater and controls now fully functional, I even put the dash pad back in place. I really need to buy some of the clips that are used to hold the front edge in place. I'm missing 3 of the 6.
I also hooked up my new $9 wide-band O2 readout. I bought it on ebay. It's just a simple LED volt meter. The Innovate controller has two programmable outputs. One goes to Megasquirt, and the other now goes to this gauge, so I can have a constant readout of the Air-Fuel Ratio.
Valvetrain is still quite noisy. Gonna take one more stab at the adjusting the valves.
At that point, I just need to install the O2 sensor, calibrate it, and then this battlestation will be fully armed and operational.
"no, we're in range now." haha..
