BUILD THREAD 86 GP 2+2~Blown 6.0

[81cutlass]

Hey you all can't call me lazy anymore! I did a project car thing for the first time in months! Lol!

Buying a house, moving, the wedding, and starting grad school has zapped my time. Plus it being cold hasn't made my motivation for doing anything super high. Thankfully, i have found bits and pieces of time to get the garage set up to be functional again. I have a ton of jerry rigged lights but now that the heater is working I can get back to it.

Set the heater on when I got home at 6 and let it run until 8:30. 53F, not warm but certainly better than the 20-25F it is outside! Good enough for thin gloves and a sweater for this northerner.

Project: get the pan swapped. I dropped the 6.0 in the Christmas break of 15-16 and always planned to put a real swap pan in it but I was just mocking the engine up so in 15 i thought no biggy. 4 years later it just lived in there fine and never had a need to swap it out. It is leaking pretty bad, and I would like to lower the front an inch this summer so its time to get it done.

You can swap a truck pan out in the car if you loosen the mounts and jack the engine up all the way, but you have to pull the pickup tube and the windage tray which is a be-otch. I kept removing parts one at a time hoping it would come out.

Given the knowledge I wouldn't drop a truck pan in a g body again without putting a swap pan in from day 1 BUT it got broke college student a running car so I can't say I made a bad decision. Took some effort getting the thing out but as long as the new pan goes in without a hitch i can't complain.

What! A part that didn't come out of a salvage yard or classified page? What kinda high dollar hootenany build is this!!!

 

[81cutlass]

Trimmed the windage tray down to the instructions and test fit the pan. Good news it went in WAY easier than the pickup pan came out. Its like its 3" shorter haha.

I am waiting on the dipstick and pan gasket from Pace perf. They were quite a bit cheaper than summit and rock auto didn't have a GM one in stock (only dorman) and I have nothing good to say about the dorman dipstick that I had with the pickup pan. Plus Pace is a small enough company apparently that they don't hit the cutoff for online tax so thats a 7% savings right there.

The gasket was pretty wooped on the stock pan anyways. Should be here mid next week. Also ordered a flex sensor so I will get it running on flex fuel this summer. Only issue is p01 ecm only has 1 Operating system that works with flex (02 tahoe/burban) and nothing with t56 trans data to swap over so I can't do flex p01 with stick functionality (reverse lockout solenoid).

Flex is more important than that solenoid to me, and I THINK I can use the Fan #1 output to trigger the lockout solenoid and move my fans to Fan #2 control since I run them on high and on 1 output. I need to do some testing with that this summer but worst case I can just put a button on the shifter stick for reverse if that doesn't work.

I need to run to the salvage yard and get another pcm with a flex tune on it from the factory. I need to spend another $100 on tuning credits anyways so I'd rather keep my 01 pcm thats in the car now for future use instead of licensing some 02 flex tune and then overwriting the pcm that already is unlocked.

I also realized i need to pull the waterpump and realign my timing cover. When i did the cam swap i wasn't paying attention and put the timing cover on first and tightened it up, and then the pan. Because of that the timing cover was pushing the pan down just a bit and I don't think the pan was sealing well enough. Not hard but a PITA and worth it to hopefully get all the leaks out of this thing. 4 of the 8 bolts are behind the water pump so I can't get to them with the pump on.

Kinda on hiatus until the parts show up.

 

[L92 OLDS]

The Holley piece is nice. Good choice!

 

[81cutlass]

Wow pace got the stuff out fast. Ordered Friday at 9am and they said they would ship Monday since they were out of stock of dipsticks and had to get more from the warehouse Monday.

I looked this morning and fedup actually had it in town Sunday and didn't attempt delivery since we got 6" of snow. Got home today and the stuff was on the porch.

I'll have to fire up the heater this week after work and get it put back in.

 

[81cutlass]

Pulled the waterpump off and realigned the front cover. Bolted the pan in and installed the dipstick.

I just need to buy a oil filter, drop the engine back on the mounts and refil the rad.

 

[81cutlass]

Engine is back home. There seems like acres of room between the pan and x member now. I thought about pulling my mounts out and cutting them down so the engine sits an inch lower (since I home built the mounts) but the long tubes are 4th gen ones since I built the car before cheap LS g body long tubes were available and I don't want to redo the front half of the exhaust system. If the engine goes lower the collectors will just be lower and the engine fits fine in the engine bay now.

I also test fit the flex sensor, I am using the stock feed line from the firewall back as the return and I have a hose clamped on the line to go AN to the FPR. The cat heat shield was in the way so I pulled it out and built a small bracket to mount the flex sensor. I am going to reuse some of the wires from the rear 02 sensors since I don't use them on this engine and repin the feed wire at the ECM.

I had the niagra falls of fuel dripping on my arms when I pulled the -6 to -6 splice I had between the braided line and the steel line jumper hose and I got 99% of it on my and in my arm pits. Fun.

Anyways If it doesn't get overly cold tomorrow I might try to wrap up the wiring and move on to getting my E-brake cable hooked up.

My heater is good for +30-35F from what it is outside. The garage usually stays about 32-36F since it is attached and finished but not insulated. If its 35 out like today the garage gets up to 60F decently but not any hotter. If its 20 out it gets to 50-55, but if its 10 out it struggles to get to 45. Below 45 it's not really that comfortable and it's supposed to be in the -10F overnight the next few days so heating doesn't do much.

I did manage to get my hood latch cable fixed on the rainier tonight also so at least I can plug it in again when it sits outside. Damn cable pulled out of the bracket under the kick panel last week when I tried to pop the hood so I could pull the cable out and plug it in since it was like -15F that night. It did start the next morning but was grumpy. Latch was froze shut. Yay winter!!

 

[Blake442]

That's about as warm as I can get my garage, but there's no room to work anyways...

 

[81cutlass]

Sometimes I get annoyed at my anaconda wiring harness that I never took apart and properly deleted the wires that I don't use....

But sometimes it REALLY helps.

Took a look at the diagram and there is already power and ground to the B2S2 connector. Also nice is that pin 56 on the blue PCM connector is what I need to pin in for flex and pins 25 and 65 used for the 02 so I just need to move one wire over a few slots. I already have power in the fuse panel for B1S1 and B2S1 so there should be power and ground already where I need it.

Cut the o2 connector off, solder the flex plug to the harness and all the car work is done. Just need to grab a PCM from the salvage yard and swap my tune over to it.

 

[motorheadmike]

Sometimes I get annoyed at my anaconda wiring harness that I never took apart and properly deleted the wires that I don't use....

But sometimes it REALLY helps.

Took a look at the diagram and there is already power and ground to the B2S2 connector. Also nice is that pin 56 on the blue PCM connector is what I need to pin in for flex and pins 25 and 65 used for the 02 so I just need to move one wire over a few slots. I already have power in the fuse panel for B1S1 and B2S1 so there should be power and ground already where I need it.

Cut the o2 connector off, solder the flex plug to the harness and all the car work is done. Just need to grab a PCM from the salvage yard and swap my tune over to it.

View attachment 136644

I kept a bunch of circuits just for this reason too.

 

[81cutlass]

Not much to report but I got the flex plug soldered in and pinned at the ecm.

Got an oil filter from Napa on the way home and filled it up with oil.

Battery was dead so it didn't have the juice to start, I'll try tomorrow after it sits on the charger over night.

I need to get the heat shield back in to insulate the flex sensor wire harness and this oil pan & flex project is done once I get a new pcm.