[TheSilverBuick]

Since I'm on a holding pattern for the transmission I've decided to play around with making a sheet metal intake for the car. Playing with PipeMax, it looks like a 3rd harmonic runner should be about 10", depending on how many rpm the engine is going to be spinning, but 12" seemed like a good middle of the road number. Doing some math, from the throat behind the valve to the where the intake flange bolts to had a taper of 6º, so I just propagated that out 10" out from the flange, calculated out the area using the same height to width ratio of .875 so the ports at the end should be about the same dimension, just bigger.

So I started by making a wooden form of the port from a chunk of 4x4. I drew out the area on either end, lined across the sides for the taper then took progressively closer cuts with a sawzall. I was going to get it close and use my belt sander, but after wasting at least 2 hours looking for the damn sander I gave up and continued making closer cuts with the sawzall and then got the idea to stick a paint stripper disc on my 4.5" grinder and that did a pretty good job of removing material slowly and smoothing out the sawzall cuts. I made it a bit smaller than needed for wiggle room to account for the size of the metal.


I used a blue shop towel wrapped around the piece of wood and trimming it to size to make a pattern to cut the metal by since the taper wouldn't be a perfect rectangle.


Then using a series of C-Clamps and vice grips to hold the metal in place on block of wood while I used my work bench to wrap the metal around the block of wood. Some light massaging with a rubber hammer was involved and I managed to even get the seam to be on the bottom of the runner with a light overlap. I then gave it a quick tack weld to hold it together and knocked the wood out the end.


Some tapping and it slide right into the port.


Not overly fancy.


From the flange side.


And will it fit on the engine?? It's about an inch or so long here as the plenum end still needs to be cut and squared up. I'm contemplating ways to get a rounder bell shape on that end, but not 100% sure it's going to happen.



It's pretty thin gauge metal, so I intend to use small lengths of angle iron along the bottom of the runners to support the weight of the eventual plenum. I am going to get steel injector bungs and they will be tacked to the flange to hold them solidly in place.

[TheSilverBuick]

Runner 2 done. I think I have it down to about 15 to 20 minutes per runner. Maybe even less time.



Now onto making a curved entrance. Each sheet of steel I have will yield a scrap piece I can make a mini runner with, and if I practice on both ends that'll give me six practice/experimenting tries before having to attempt it on one of the runners. Hope I learn quick =P This was a combination of the anvil,a giant trailer ball hitch (2.5"?) and flattening/leveling the top with my workbench. I did take a sanding roll to it at one point, but then ended up beating on it some more. Anyone know any general rule of thumb for these sorts of things?**



Also, my transmission case plug, filter and gasket showed up today. I'm going to California next weekend so won't be able to install it until next week or later.

**The airflow guy says a 1/2" radius is as close to ideal as I'd have a chance in making. I'm not so sure I can stretch the metal that much, but I've got a couple ideas floating around in my head I want to try.

[TheSilverBuick]

Practice/experiment round two. Once again started with the trailer ball hitch (it is a 2-5/16") to round out the port, then it seems the easier thing to use is the anvil to start then finish up with a piece of round 3/4" pipe. My other ideas just weren't panning out. Go figure =P

Going for a 1/2" radius. IMO, not terrible terrible.


Another port made up.


And everybody likes a good mock up. The tube is a bit far forward, and up, compared to where I intend on placing it.


I was surprised my cell phone camera flash actually makes it to the end of the port.

[TheSilverBuick]

I finally signed up for Photobucket, and I see it can automatically take my Facebook albums. So I am hoping at some point to go back through the thread and fix all the photo links (again...) and hopefully they last at that point.

Today I made up the last two runners then trimmed them all to equal length. Now to start on the plenum details!

[TheSilverBuick]

I've just been driving the car to and from work for the last two weeks. Nothing really new, but the transmission is still shifting really soft since the loose TCC solenoid incident.

So right after Christmas I'm considering pulling the transmission out and apart and replacing all the clutches in it as I think I burned them up. Or rather I'll stick the old ones back in that looked practically new. If I find some other cause to the soft shifting I'll fix that as well. I'll be checking the pump, relieve valves, etc.

I'll probably swap out the rear axle for the 8.5" with 3.42 gears I have as well. The spool is getting tiresome, so an honest limited slip carrier will be nice. I'll see what kind of mpg's I'll get with the 3.42's, but I suspect I'll be wanting some 4-series gears again.

I also just ordered some brake rotor's for the front end, so I'm basically a proportioning valve away from doing the full disc brake conversion on the front end.

[TheSilverBuick]

Driving this afternoon. The weather cannot make up its mind.

[TheSilverBuick]

After work today or tomorrow I plan on putting the Firebird up on jackstands in the barn to begin the transmission pull to see what is going on inside of it. With that, right before Christmas two front rotors showed up, so I can possibly also switch out to disc brakes while it's up in the air along with swapping out the rear axle for the 8.5" with 3.42 gears and an honest limited slip rear end. While I have the front and rear brakes apart, I'm going to look at adding a hall sensor to read the back side of the wheel studs to use as a vehicle speed sensor. Should only require drilling a hole in the dust shield and adjusting a threaded sensor with two nuts holding it place...

To shift gears a bit, I got a Raspberry Pi mini computer for Christmas and am going to attempt to make a digital display in the Firebird similar to what I have in the Skylark but not yet go to the extreme of replacing the dash cluster. This will be a round one so to speak. If it works out well then I will try to eventually expand to replacing the cluster with a digital display. The primary hangup is my inability to use Linux But, figure it's only a matter of time before I figure it out enough.



Goal one is to simply get it to start up and run Tuner Studio, from there I can expand on the idea.

What I am thinking of doing after I get it operational is getting a 7" touchscreen for it (they seem to be less than $75!?!?) and replacing the generic panel with the Arrowhead on it with a touchscreen displaying various engine vitals. Interestingly enough, when I requested quick keys to change the display layout in TunerStudio for the Skylark, the programmer also added screen swiping at that time to change display layouts when using touch screens. So "in theory" I can have various gauges on there, but simply reach over and swipe left or right to have different data show up, or gauges with different warning light thresholds, etc. And being rectangular, means a different layout than I am using in the Skylark


The panel is 2.5" by 4.5", but I don't see any issues with fitting a 7" screen back there, which I believe the dimensions are 3.9"x6.2". That would make the screen stick out approximately 3/4" a side in width and just over 3/4" top and bottom. Plenty of wiggle room. Mounting it firmly may require some creative work though.


So much to do!

[TheSilverBuick]

Oh, for reference, this is what is in my Skylark if you haven't seen it. Looking to make something like this, but match the rectangular shape of the trim.

[TheSilverBuick]

First project of the new years, pulling the transmission in the Firebird and going through it. I got the room closed up and a load of wood in the wood stove ready to heat the place up in the morning. It was 19ºF in there when I took the picture, burrr.....

​

[TheSilverBuick]

Pulled the transmission out and yanked it apart today. As I suspected the friction plates were toast. I haven't seen anything else out of place. I put most the trans back together using the friction plates and steels I pulled out of the transmission when I first rebuilt it back in February or so. I haven't put the valve body back on it yet, as I want to make sure it's cleaned out for sure.



The plates I pulled out of it on the left and the "old" ones I'm re-installing on the right. In another stack the friction plates looked cooked and the steels had hot spots. I believe this to be the result from when my TCC solenoid came loose and about fell out. I'm guessing hydraulic pressure dropped dramatically.

[TheSilverBuick]

I made sure the valve body was definitely cleaned out. I found some directions online from a shift kit that talked about removing a spring from an upshift valve (said some transmissions have it, some do not..), so I removed the spring from mine. I took the opportunity to open up two holes in the valve body plate to the next size up while I had it apart. Now it's just a filter and gasket away from ready to go back in.

Since the transmission is on hold, I pulled the 8.2" axle with 4.56 gears on a spool, for an 8.5" with 3.42 gears and a standard limited slip carrier. Haven't done anything more from this picture though. One of the metal brake lines twisted and broke on removal, so I'll replace both on the axle. I forgot to get some gear oil, so I need to go to the parts store anyways.


I spent the rest of the time looking at relocating the TV cable from the throttle body to the firewall and directly off the gas pedal. Once I heard of some folks doing this I was interested because I'm using a universal cable and its maxed out on length and will only get worse with the intake I'm building. Putting it on the Firewall takes that worry out. I measured the pull of the cable on the transmission, and found the points on the firewall to gas pedal that give the same distance. It's just a notch below where the throttle cable goes.

[TheSilverBuick]

FINALLY got the Raspberry Pi to bring up Tuner Studio. Its still a bit slow, but I think there is plenty of room for optimizing the startup of the Pi for smoother function. I'm going to poke around with optimizing the startup and system resources then work on getting it to remote desktop over to a netbook I have to test it out in the Firebird.

[jmt455]

I love this thread!
Thanks for keeping it going.

[TheSilverBuick]

Thanks!

I forgot to post up that last weekend I got the 8.5" installed. I'm going out to the barn here in a bit to put the transmission back in as well as swap the front brakes over to discs since I have to bleed the rear brakes anyways, may as well bleed the whole system.

[TheSilverBuick]

I got the transmission back in the Firebird yesterday, but it didn't go as smoothly as planned when my transmission jack decided it wanted to bleed off now so became useless. I went around town seeing if any of the stores had a transmission jack adapter for a standard floor jack, but no luck. So I attempted to weld up some simple brackets, but really didn't have enough scrap metal on hand to make a good transmission holder and had one failed attempt to install the transmission with the modified jack cradle. Then I resorted to the simple board of wood on a floor jack like I had done before having a transmission jack and it worked like a charm. Making me wish I hadn't wasted 3 hours for an alternative solution when the simple one worked so well =/




The other thing I worked on was moving the TV cable from the throttle linkage to the gas pedal. I found a spot on the gas pedal where it moved the 1.5" from closed throttle to WOT, and mounted a bracket there. It actually required a bit of final adjusting down from my marked spot, but I checked it with the transmission pan off and am happy with the settings now.

I cut the TV bracket off the throttle bracket and welded a strip of medal to the bottom of it to make it angle down towards the gas pedal like the throttle cable does. Then used a simple self tapping screw to hold it in place. So the cable clips in just like it would at the throttle body/carb.


I welded a simple screw to the top of a cable clamp and clamped it to the gas pedal. By sliding it up and down the pedal as well as adjusting the cable tension, I got the adjustment where I am happy with it. The TV cable clip snaps nicely onto the screw head, and loosely pivots on it quite nicely. I greased it just to keep wear down. Hope it works....


Today I'll finish up the small stuff and then pull the front brakes off for a disc brake swap. Hopefully that goes smoothly.....

[TheSilverBuick]

Yesterday I took it out for a test drive and it appeared my transmission work was in vain as it shifted the same. It seems to be good with the 3.42 gears (speedo might actually be accurate...), but the engine also had a mis-fire. So I needed to trouble shoot that before any more testing could be done.

Made this nifty modification to the top bolts so they are easier to install and remove.


I was going to start on the disc brake swap, but I'm far less prepared than I thought I was. Missing basic things like brake hoses and caliper pins =P So that is on hold for at least another week while I gather the last few parts.

Working on the car today I fixed the miss-fire as well as made some improvements to the transmission. The miss was simple enough, I put the timing light on each plug wire and they were doing their job, got the laser temp gun out and cylinders 1 through 5 had around 200ºF exhaust manifold temps and number six was at 60ºF. Turned out the injector plug came loose. Soon as I pushed on it the engine smoothed right out. Probably came loose from messing with the TV cable near the firewall.

The transmission, I decided to hook up a pressure gauge to see how the hydraulic pressure of the system was doing as well as what the pressure rise was with throttle. I had measured 1.5" of travel on the throttle valve, but doing some internet reading last night it sounds like the best setups have around 1" of travel, referenced off WOT. So I slid the bracket down the pedal linkage and adjusted the cable accordingly. The pressures however are essentially mediocre. Despite the modifications to the transmission it just meets OE spec's for pressure, BUT in driving it, the shifts are snappy, the transmission downshifts nicely with throttle input, and the upshifts have no hesitation anymore! :thumbs: The speedometer now runs a tad slower than I'm actually going (was way faster), if I put 26" tires back on it, it might be spot on.

The lingering issues, is I would have expected more pressure out of the pump, but it caps out around 175-180psi, which if fine for stock, but I expected more. What really bothers me is going into reverse it doesn't hit into gear as fast and firmly as it had before. The hydraulic pressure is actually decent compared to the book spec, while at the same time pressure in L1 is a tad low which I think might have some shared hydraulic flow paths, which I'm going to look into. I got apparently too aggressive with the 3rd gear shift. It was a bit softer than the 1-2 shift before I had problems, so I upped the hole size and now it's pretty harsh regardless of throttle input. Oh well. With the 3.42 gears its waiting longer than necessary to shift into 3rd gear, and its likely from the modifications I made to the governor to make it shift later with the 4.56 gears. If I drop the pan again, I think I can stick a spring back in the governor and it might fix that. Otherwise, I think I can be happy with it for quite a while.

I'm actually quite surprised how much I am liking the 3.42 gears. I was thinking after the 4.56's that the car would drive like a dog, but its not bad at all. It doesn't quite pick the front end up as responsively as the 4.56 gears did, but it drives quite nice. It is ALSO quite nice not having the spool in the rear anymore! It should be interesting to see if my fuel economy goes up. I was getting right around 20mpg with the 4.56's.

[Grokk]

Did you check the Diaphragm spring for Hair line cracks when you had the transmission out? Just a thought. I took Auto Tech at a Technical College and couple guys working on a Transmission were having problems with the shifting, They ended up pulling the transmission 3 times and taking apart, I finally went over and looked over the parts, and found hair line cracks in the Diaphragm spring you could barley see them, I didn't see anything else that was wrong , so they replaced that part, put the transmission back in, that was the problem the whole time.

[TheSilverBuick]

Diaphragm spring? Which spring are your talking about? The only diaphragm spring for a transmission that I am aware of are for manual transmission pressure plates (which if cracked would cause shifting issues...), and I'm not having any luck with google coming up with one for the 200-4r either. I'm no automatic transmission expert, so if there is a different name or part of an assembly I could have easily missed it.


http://www.makcotransmissionparts.co...pdf/200-4R.pdf

[Grokk]

after looking up the parts on this Transmission, The only spring I see is this one"D54977A Spring, 200 / 200-4R / 325 series, Low / Reverse"]

http://www.makcotransmissionparts.co...97710f19d7648&
search for Diaphragm spring that's what they look like, I can't get the link to work.




















.

[TheSilverBuick]

977 in the diagram? 126 is also slightly waved. Nothing stood out to me about 977 (not my picture below), but I didn't look exceptionally close at it. I did look closely at 126 because it's only slightly wavy and at first I thought I had something broken, but turned out it is supposed to be like that.