July 4-9, 2006 - On the Ground and all is not Well

I was in Brazil from June 28 to July 4.  While I was gone Dad had time to button up a few open issues.  He re-routed the boost gauge vacuum source and he bought a grommet, made a hole in the intercooler to MAF pipe and insterted the IAT sensor.  He also installed a bracket we made to attach the oil cooler line to the car.

When I showed up on July 4 I was ready to put the car on the ground and take her for her maiden voyage, but first we had to put the front fascia on.

I jumped in and turned the key.  It fired right up and I let it idle for a few seconds.  The idle was a little rough but over all it sounded pretty good.  The first thing I noticed was that the car was garage-clearingly-rich.  I'm talking so rich that you feel it in your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.  We ended up putting a fan behind the car to blow the exhaust fumes out of the garage because we just couldn't take it.  After we checked the car over for leaks and to make sure it was in good working working order I put it in gear and let the clutch out full well expecting the car to burst into flames.  It didn't.  It did however roll forward under its own power, but it took a lot of clutch slippage and more throttle than I expected.  Ah well, who cares the damn thing finally moved and that was good enough for me.  It had been raining off and on that day so I only pulled it forward about 10 feet and then put it back in the garage.  One of the first things we noticed when we put it on the ground was the alignment.  It was so bad that when the passenger side wheel was straight, the driver side wheel was turned and vice versa.  The camber was also a few, ok more than a few, degrees off.  My plan was to let the suspension settle for a few days and then get it aligned at a local shop.

Something kept nagging at us though.  The drivetrain took a lot more pedal effort than we expected and the gear selector felt odd.  We attributed this to not having an adjustable clutch cable quadrant.  It seemed like a valid assumption and, what the hell, it was the 4th and we had burgers and brats to eat.

The weekend of July 7-9 was the NMRA race in Martin, MI.  I happened to get knocked out early and my uncle's place is on the way home so we stopped to try to get a good datalog of the car.  First I wanted to load the 20% leaner tune.  Adding the IAT sensor hadn't done anything to help lean the car out.  This left the MAF transfer function and I was hoping that the 20% leaner tune would get us to where we needed to be.  Without a good datalog though I had no idea how rich the car was at idle.  I just knew that if I started it up I had about 10 seconds before my eyes started watering and about 10 seconds after that I'd start coughing.  That's not exactly a scientific way of tuning a car.  Needless to say I put the wideband O2 in the driver side rear O2 bung, connected it to the LM-1 controller, connected the LM-1 to the Xcal 2 and connected the Xcal 2 to the PC via a USB cable.  With everything powered up I turned the key and brought the beast to life once again.  This time, by some stroke of luck, LiveLink and the Xcal 2 played well together and I was able to get a full 95 seconds of data.  In the picture below you'll notice that the car is pig rich at idle.  It's supposed to be 14.64:1 at idle and at 10.2:1 to 12.04:1 it's no where near that.  After the log was complete I slipped the tranny into first and rolled the car out of the garage.

I took a spin down the driveway and it just didn't feel right.  After I backed it up to the garage I let Dad get in and do the same.  When he was finished we put the car back in the garage and discussed the problem.  We both sat in the car and tried to run through the gears with the car off.  It seemed like something was wrong with the shifter.  I found what I thought was one and two but then it seemed like I could only find 5th and reverse.  We talked a little more and played with the shifter a little more, and then it hit us.  What I thought was 1st was actually 3rd.  I had actually broken the 1-2 shift plate and while he was putting the new shift plate in Dad must have done something wrong because the gear selector just wouldn't move over to the 1-2 position.  My heart sank.  Once again we'd have to put the car up on jack stands and undo about 60% of the install to get the trans out.

On the way home we talked about our options.  It just so happened that a friend of mine was selling his brand new, never installed D&D Viper Spec T56 transmission.  As manual street trannies go this one is king of the hill.  The price was right and I couldn't pass it up because I was expecting to install this very same tranny when I built the bottom end.  I pulled the trigger and we fell face first into what I now refer to as the Tranny Saga.