Yeah, I'm sorta worried about that. The internal ports are fairly small. Thinking it over this morning, I think my next step will be to port out the internal wastegates. There's room there to open them up by 8-10mm which aught to help. If that doesn't solve it, externals it is.

 

Dropped the pan and pulled the plugs this morning. Everything looks totally fine. No cap walk that I can see, no detonation on the plugs. Just a normal happy motor... So good!

I also took a look at my wastegate actuators while I was under the hood and realized that they were adjusted a bit tighter than they aught to be, which is probably contributing to my boost going higher than I want. I re-adjusted them but its currently raining out and I have enough traction issues without wet ground. So no test runs until that clears up...

 

Made a little bit of forward movement this week when the weather wasn't holding me back.

Took a long run out to the area's Cars and Coffee meet where I got a chuckle out of the repeated exclamations along the lines of "Ohh DA**!" when they saw my ratball ride then peeked under the hood. It made quite the impression!

The knock sensor seems to be working as designed, on the long run out to C&C it activated just a minor amount on a few hard pulls right off the line. Pulled a couple degrees of timing down low on the ride back and no activations at all.

Used the one other dry day this week for some rust repair. The car started life as a vinyl top car but the vinyl is long gone, leaving just a rusty roof underneath. Took the time to clean that up and get it primered. Still needs a little cleanup but that'll stop the forward march of rust for a while yet. Of course it rained the next day...

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I also played just a tiny bit with the 2 step launch control that my Megasquirt has available, mostly just to see if it worked. It does. Its loud as hell, and with my pipes currently exiting into my fenderwells I'm worried I'll burn the car down with it.... So I'm shelving that for the time being while I move forward on finishing the exhaust system.

 

I use a WOT box as my launch control, sounds so badass sitting still at full boost but if you leave it there for more than a few seconds the fuel build up from intermittent random non combustion in the hot side will explode and it’s loud af, so I try to avoid that moment. I’m pretty sure the 2-step does the same thing!

 

Yep, a 2 step does the same thing, I got about 1 second of just RPM stutter, then BANG! BANG! BANG! and fire from the excess fuel. It also pulls down the timing so its dumping fuel out the exhaust for that reason as well. To be fair its DESIGNED to do that to spool the turbos quickly but man its noisy! It'll be pretty impressive looking when I finish the exhaust and get it out the fenders like I'm planning but right now it just aims at the ground behind the front tires inside the fenders. So most of that fire is still in the fender well, which didn't seem like the smartest idea.

Honestly I don't need to worry about launch control at all right now until I can get all the power to the ground properly. Mostly its just spinning the tires right now. But it was only grounding 1 wire to try it out, so I figured it was fun to play with.

 

It is very most impressive, I don’t use it for launch control though unless the car is already rolling, any time I apply pressure to the clutch past my set rpm it WOT’s so I loose no boost in between shifts and it allows less stress when banging gears. I’m have been interested in a button control 2-step. Just don’t use it with chambered mufflers IMO or something will be more likely to break during possible exhaust fuel exploding from pressure unable to easily escape.

 

Well....

My project has hit a wall. And I mean that literally.

Yesterday I was headed out to our local Cars And Coffee meet and I hit some black ice.
Went to change lanes on the freeway onramp and the car just kept going. Fought with it but in the end
it went into the median. I broke my collarbone, a wrist, and broke the driver's side window with my face.
I'm ok, but we'll have to see if the car is savable. The engine survived so at least that will live on.

Hopefully this isn't it's last chapter....


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OMG that's awful! I'm so sorry dude. Shit broken collar bone and wrist holy crap. What's the prognosis? What awful luck!

 

For real. I'm bummed.
The suspension on that corner is toast as is most of that corner's sheet metal. Very likely frame damage. If its JUST front frame I can likely front clip it and bring it back. If it torqed the unibody it'll be toast.

I wasnt really in any shape to crawl under and look, i'll likely know soon when it gets to the estimate shop.

 

Well when you're better you're welcome to buy my 67 as a donor

 

Tempting where are you located?

 

Georgia. No black ice down here!

 

Long way to ship to Portland but not impossible. I'll keep in touch after I heal up enough to evaluate how it is.

 

Ohh they're plenty common enough man. I'm sure you can find something nice closer. Mine has some perks you might like but still that's an expensive haul.

 

I've got my eye on a surprisingly cheap '67 GTX project if the Bel is actually dead. I also found that frame rails aren't hugely expensive if I go that way too.

 

Th

These are unibody construction cars no frame rails.

If it was me, I'd use it as an opportunity to get a front subframe with rack and pinion/coilover setup. You'll spend less on that than a donor car and you'll lose a big chunk of front end weight in the process.

 

Man that sucks glad you're ok

 

They have frame rails in the front subframe, just not full frame. I've been looking at fancy subframe options for it, we'll see which way I go.

 

Bummer on the car and the broken bones and bruises. Glad you were able to walk away.

 

A good frame shop can pull it out and get it straight for you so you can replace sheetmetal at a reasonable cost. I had a fox mustang that was crumpled, pushed the entire front end over to the passenger side, but the frame shop got it all square. I replaced fenders, hood, bumper and it looked great.
Hope you heal up quickly, it could have been a lot worse. My cars never leave the driveway if temps are anywhere below 40 overnight, for the very reason you experienced. I've had that happen and these cars are too rare to chance.