But in its place is the 400 hp LS2 powered 2007 Corvette.
She has a 6 speed manual trans mission, Z51 suspension, leather and power everything, key-less entry and starting and a host of other cool stuff. I’ll go into more detail in the next post.
I thought I’d miss the ’84 more then I do, it will be going to a good home and hopefully will stay a Crossfire. The ’84 goes with twice as many miles on it then when I bought it, lots of new, original parts and some improved and a really awesome stereo, it’s a better car then when I got. It deserves to be a show car and not a daily driver/grocery getter/race car (drags and auto cross)/show car. But it did them all very well, with the trophies to prove it. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about that middle ground technology that was a huge advance from the older cars, a first of its kind in many ways and a stepping stone to technology that is in the replacement Vette.
I’ve heard from a lot of guys (pssstt…when I use the word “guys” I mean all genders….just wanted to be clear ) that really miss driving their older Vettes, there’s really nothing that can capture the rawness of that kind of driving. I’m bit luckier then those guys because I can still jump in to my ’70 Mustang (thanks to a very understanding better half) and get that feeling of old school nothing but metal and tires driving. I think that alone makes it easier to let the ’84 go.
Thanks to the guys up at Dynamic Crossfire Solutions in Chandler, Az (http://www.crossfireinjection.net/) and all the guys in my Corvette club – Arizona Corvette Enthusiasts (ACE) http://arizonavette.net/, they helped a ton with my learning curve…HEY GUESS WHAT GUYS….I’m going to have a bunch of new ‘stuff’ to learn.
So get ready loyal readers, (all three of you!!!!). I’m going to take my average skills, average tools, and now below average budget and take on new technology.
As you know the electrical system failure was the alternator and it was replaced.
A now the story continues……
I picked the car up and it started fine, even had power to flip the lights up (it could do that when I dropped it off) and I drive two miles home. It ran just horrible. No power at all. That was worrisome.
Now the ’84 Vette has a very simplistic computer that controls the fuel injectors and it does take a bit after a “power outage” for it to get the mixture correct. This should happen after a couple of miles. Well by the time I got home there was no change in the how utterly horrible it ran. So I took it for another spin and still no change.
So I disconnect the battery for a few minutes and then tried it again…still the Vette could barely keep idle and giving it gas made it shake and the idle dropped to 400, 500 rpm. So I thought ..ok..I’ll drive it to work in the morning and see if the 10 + miles will straighten it.
Next morning, a Volkswagen bus filled with 40 people could have passed me like I was up on blocks!!!!
Ok…at this point I’m getting a little bit…P.O.’ed…(that’s short for…oh..you know what it’s short for!!) I call up my guys and I explain my displeasure. My take was that they should have test driven the car and that they have had the damn (that’s short for @#$@#%%!!!!!) thing enough to know that it wasn’t running right. I expanded on my thoughts in person when I limped the car back there after work..which was not a great day…which might have contributed to my disposition. Sorry Sean, but you ya know noting but love…its all good dude….Sean later told me I hurt the only “feeling” he had…I told him to get over it. They had a new guy there and he was the one that test drove it after the electrical work.
This was the start of a 3 day, all hands on deck, WTH…(that’s short for “What The Heck” >wink?<…I didn’t want to push the envelope with the “bad words”, because I would have had to add “put the kids to bed ..I’m about to use some adult verbiage”) is wrong with this car!!!
I’m thinking it’s still electrical, computer was F ‘ed (short for “fried”) or there was a short somewhere. I ended up at the garage a couple of nights after work poking around a bit – Tim Sisk the guy that runs the places is good about that.
So here is what was happened.
It appears that the evap system that is supposed to take the fumes from the gas tank for emissions was filling up with fuel every now and then. This system is supposed to push the fumes through a canister filled with charcoal and remove some of the harmful particles. Of course it doesn’t stop there the “cleaner” fumes then are pass back into the intake manifold to be “re-burned” and sent out in the world through the Vettes exhaust system. This simple hose highway runs along the entire length of the car and isn’t designed to handle fuel.
The end result was fuel running through the hose design for only fumes, traveled the hose highway all the way to the front of the car, filling the charcoal canister – which wasn’t designed to hold gasoline. Once full the gas has not where to go but across the engine, just following Avenue Hose, and dumping fuel directly in to the intake. That’s the cause of the poor (understatement) idling and running. The car was drowning in fuel.
Canister - now rendered useless.
How does this happen? Well it occurs when too much pressure builds up in the fuel tank. The venting of the fumes is supposed to prevent that. Once the pressure builds, which doesn’t take long with a full fuel tank, the gas has to go somewhere, so it takes a trip up the evap hose.
Now, here is where a guy starts to wonder WTH (short for….) am I doing with a one off car???!!! Really the 84 Vette is a one off production year. There were not ’83 Corvettes sold and although it has the same basic engine as the ’82 Covertte crossfires, nothing else was the same, and the ’85 Vette was an entirely different animal. This leads to a fairly significant lack of printed knowledge on the system..this many years out. Why do I mention this? Because it’s tough to find the knowledge after this long and the newer repair books treat the ’84 systems as ..”oh yeah..it’s not the same as the ’85 or the “L83 (my engine) is similar.” Gee..thanks for that. But it is different and it’s not similar in many ways.
Here is one.
The fuel tank on ’85 Vette has what is called a check valve with allows vapor to travel through it, but if fluid enters it, a small ball is pushed by the denser liquid to a point where it will block the hole. There is a diagram of that in many of the new repair books. But there are none for the ’84, and no, upon actually view the parts, you aren’t going to see anything that looks like the ’85 check valve.
Ok..armed with is knowledge, I showed up at the garage and share the info. This left us all scratching our heads. There seemed not logical reason for pressure to build up. There is only the fuel pump down there (that we tested in a bucket of fuel and worked as it should) there was only one other fuel delivery system was the “limp home” system which use the oil sending unit to push just enough, when the tank was low or fuel pump failed, to get you home or a repair shop.
This lead into the third day, at which point the fuel module was removed from the tank again and it was discovered that there was indeed a check valve.
There is a check valve built-in to the fuel module, it had a piece something (appeared to be plastic or maybe rubber) lodged in it large enough to keep the ball in a position where the it increased the pressure so much that sent it shooting fuel out up the vacuum line. It was incorporated into the system in a way that was not conducive to separate replacement. It was cleaned and that solved the problem..well most of it.
The canister should be replaced find one it not easy. Right now we replaced the PVC valve with a right-angled and the canister is no longer in the flow.
For my 84 that’s not a problem since there is no sensor that checks that and the car is running great. I’m not sure but I think she’d even pass emission, unless they were to visually see that it wasn’t connected.
Of course I’m a big tree hugger and (you can tell because the Mustang gets 4 gallons to the mile ..hey that’s what dead dinosaurs are for!!!!) so I’ll eventual get it replaced. If I can find one. In the mean time I’ve re-routed the hose to protrude under neigth the engine so the fumes don’t fill the engine bay.
Some pics:
Hose Highway with Canister
End of the hose that is supposed to travel on to the Intake, now routed under the car, temporarily.
So there you have. Good thing there wasn’t a car crusher in towing distance….nah…I love that car.
Before we start, I’d like the readers to know that these segments will not be an all-encompassing reference effort. But I will have details that might not be well-known and some long forgotten. Hopefully, it will be fun to read and informative. The first few segments will be engines I’m familiar with. I’ve owed a lot of cars and at least one of the Big 3 (Chevy, Ford, Chrysler) and all with different engines (and one with two). First engine I am going to tackle is the 318. I owned a Dodge Dart in the mid to last of 1970’s and it did have the 318 manual transmissions and at this very moment I can’t recall the other specs, but I’ll find them in this research. It that a great engine and simple to work on.
I’ve heard it mentioned that the 318 was Chryslers’ 350 (referring to GM’s 350, that’s been in existence for… just about forever…no it hasn’t but that’s another segment). Of course the 318 didn’t have near the run that the 350 has, but it’s got some pretty interesting history of its own.
Let’s start with when the first 318 was used in a MOPAR car and what followed that up. We’ll also look at some specs and some configurations it came in, you know carbs, cams and the like.
In the 1958 Plymouth the 230 c.i.d Powerflow Six was used as the standard engine, same as the previous year. Chrysler did have V8s that were a possible option in 1957 and 1958, namely 301 and 277 cid. However, it’s believed that the 318 was to replace the 277 c.i.d and the 301 V8s as the car maker moved toward try to capture a larger market. The 318 had 9.25 to 1 compression ratio with 225 horses, it became the standard V8 used in the Plaza, Savoy, and Belvedere. Perhaps the most powerful configuration you could get at the time was called the 318 Dual Fury (Sport Fury) V8 aka the Super-Pack rated at 290 horsepower; the dual was for the two 4 barrel carbs. The rest of the configuration included solid lifters, high performance cam, dual point distributor and dual exhausts.
The drive specs for the 1958 (which was a great looking car)
’58 Fury
shows that the standard block of for the Fury was the 318. You could add the sport fury to it and go from 225 horses to displacing 350 cid and producing 305 hp, with 2 Carter, 4bbl carbs. The nickname for the engine was the “Golden Commando” and it was paired up with TorqueFlite auto trans.
Oh, by the way 1958 Ply Fury was the star of the Stephen King book entitled “Christine” and later the movie.
There is a lot of talk, even today about the Hemi, “Yo..dat got ah Hemi?” It was a great design. But we won’t talk about the Hemi in this article, but we will mention the polyspheric cylinder head. What is a ployspheric cylinder head? That was a question asked by one of my frequent readers and this was my reply.
Poly is short for Polyspherical head. Some say it was a forerunner to the Hemi (Hemispherical head). Basically it was based on a theory that you could get more combustion or volume by angling the intake and exhaust valves then if you had them parallel. From Hemmings Motor News book of Chrysler Performance Cars…”The ploy’s exhaust valve is located parallel to, but offset from, the cylinder axis.”
This increased the efficiency. The hemi was constructed and designed to increase the efficiency with a more angled system. The shape that the valves make are semi-circular with the Poly being a little flatter than the Hemi. I did the below image in Paint.
Poly-Hemi
This image is from Hot Rod and Hemis.com and shows the Hemi, Poly and the regular A series engine chambers.
www.hotrodandhemis.com Compare Hemi, Poly, Series A
Plymouth was not the top of the brand at Chrysler so back in 1956 it didn’t get a Hemi. It did get was called the A series engine which came in 4 different displacement (277, 301, 303 and the 318).
YEAH!!!! I know!! Where have these been…right? Sorry, but I think I’m back on track.
My Mustang has an old school 4 barrel Holley and although it starts pretty quick after a few pumps of pedal to get the mechanical fuel pump to push gas where it needs to be. But if your old school muscle car or race rod sits for a while or you swap carbs often, you can spend some considerable time cranking on the engine. This might seem like no biggie, but it can cause lobe failure on a flat-tappet cam.
For my Holley there’s a better way.
You need to locate your float-level sight plugs.
Holley - image not from my mustang
A different configuration
Take a plastic squeeze bottle…. (Do you really need a pic of a squeeze bottle?) Well just in case…
Bottle Pic you don't need!!!
this type works the best…. and fill the float bowls with fuel until it trickles…(very little trickle…no fires…please.)
Float Bowls
This should be enough fuel to allow the fuel line to fill from the tank. According to the specs a Holley can run 45- 60 seconds on full bowls.
Steve Sears is one of the readers of this blog and owner of a 1982 Mercury Cougar Station Wagon (again..I love this car).
But that’s not all, Steve does a lot of his own work, including this unique paint job on his 1992 Ranger.
Here is his recent project.
The before:
1992 Ford Ranger XLT
Tim,
I completed my project last week and thought you’d like to see it.I painted my Ranger with a roller.I only did six coats of each color, usually 8 – 10 coats are required.I like to call the color Haze gray underway and white.I spent 26 years in the Navy so I thought the gray was appropriate for me. Ha Ha.It’s painted with rustoleum mixed with mineral spirits in a 1:1 ratio thus the many coats required.The body prep is the same as any other type paint job except that a primer is not used over the whole truck.I only spot primed the bare metal and over the bondo used to fix parking lot dings.It took a full 8 days to complete the project including the paint on the topper.I have to wait a few weeks before buffing out for a full gloss.For that I’ll just remove the mirrors and the bug shield on the front.The process is well documented on the web over the last 10 years or so so I won’t repeat the process.
I thought your readers would be interested. Finally I have the truck looking like new again.It’s a 1992 Ranger XLT that I had bought new on April 24, 1992.It has the 2.3 liter four and a five speed tranny.The picture labeled 019.JPG is the before shot is attached.
And the after photos:
After Pic 1
After Pic 2
After Pic 3
Thanks very much for sharing it Steve. (A roller? Wow!!!!)
I attended the Bowling Green Assembly Plant tour today. It was really!!!!! awesome!!!!!
Corvette Assembly Plant Bowling Green, KY
The walk from the parking lot to the plant was filled with the smell of new car. They must pour it out of every chimney and window.
They were building the Z06’s, ZR1 and Grand Sports…a lot of Grand Sports!!! (that is a damn nice car!!!) Amazing!!!! Sorry no pictures were allowed.
Seeing all the parts everywhere and the hanging panels and frames…was a sight to be hold.
The tour was pretty quick..well maybe an hour…but I could have hung there all day!!! I lagged behind the tour group and spoke with a couple of the workers.
At one stop, where they fill the newly married body, chassy and engine with fluid, the tour guide was going blah, blah, blah and I was looking over the cars and one of the guys walked over asked me if I had one picked out yet. He said they seemed to be selling a lot of GS’s. I asked him about the fender stripes and he said they normally just get tossed in the back and the dealership installs them. He asked me if I liked the wider body and I said what’s not to like!!!!
We watched them marry up a Zo6’s mufflers, while another guy stuck in the tail lights and then on to the chassy. Tire position was at a stop.
Actually got to watch a new Grand Sport come off the line and run over the ‘suspension’ activation section (floor) and then into the section where they align the headlights.
We got to see a Z06 enter the final test chamber where they run 200 + tests in two minutes. This one passed.
It was MOST EXCELLENT!!!! (Wayne’s World).
The NCM was good, but the plant tour overshadowed it…by far. I’ll post up pics from the NCM in the next post.
Brooklyn bridge opened for traffic on 5/24 1883 and the Golden opened 5/27 in 1937.
Race car driver Mauri Rose was born 5/26/1906 currently in the racing hall of fame, placed second in the 1927 Indy 500. Actually won the Indy in 1941, but that was a tough victory, spanning two Maserati-powered Elgin Piston Pin Specials cars, after the first one had mechanical issues. He tossed a fit and the car owners pulled one of the other drivers on the time from the race and give Rose that car.
The Pin
Elgin Pin
What powered that thing?
Power Plant
The first Kaiser-Frazer was produced 5/28/1946 – cars weren’t sold until 1947.
