BUILD THREAD Project Olds Cool (Recognition!!)

[Rktpwrd]

Thanks for the replies gents. I was out for a bit so I missed them all.
So here goes...

I thought all the G bodies had the filter on the firewall, anyway I just looked at the instructions again and have you tried plugging the tach in the normal regular connection on the cap?

Yes, that’s where the tach is currently attached, and that’s where I tee’d the grey wire into. (I’ve since removed the grey wire from being tee’d in as I want the tach, and for the car not to die suddenly while I’m driving if it accidentally grounds out.)

The tach wire is the brown connector on the LH side of the distributor cap:

It has 47 reviews just on Summits site and 15 of them are poor (3stars and down)


To me that not good for the so called "leader" in automotive electronics.

The Davis module has 28 reviews all 5 star.

Gotcha. Thanks for the info. I agree, that’s not a very good rating for their product, but I always take those reviews with a grain of salt because you never know if they were installed correctly. I’m willing to bet 80% of customers problems with (any) products are probably due to improper installation.

I'm hoping that Donovan will be the 48th review giving it 5 stars

Not likely Steve. I’m sure theirs is a quality product, but due to the fact they aren’t available to me locally precludes me getting one anytime soon. Not to piss and moan about it, but we Canadians get ripped off enough on the price of commodities up here, I’ll be dammed if I’m gonna fork out an additional 35% more with the exchange rate to get something brought up from across the border. So unfortunately for me, I’m stuck with what I can get locally, or at least on this side of the border.

They all are mounted on the firewall (I'll exclude '86-'87 GN & the GNX since I know nothing on their set up.) Buy chance an earlier owner cut it off thinking there was an issue?

No dice. As I said earlier, the wiring on this car is all original and not hacked. The following picture is the tach wire (brown connector) directly from the distributor cap to the firewall grommet. All I did was loom the wire to make it look cleaner.

Pulling the grommet out and some of the slack in the tach wire from inside the car reveals no filter either. I can strip the loom off and show you the untampered-with wire if you’d like...

Donovan,

12" of vacuum seems pretty low. What are the cam specs? Did you post them already? If so, I apologize for the question. How do the power brakes feel? For grins, you might disconnect and plug the hose to the booster and see if you get a better reading on the vacuum gauge.

No apologies needed Jared. I did post the cam specs much earlier in this thread and more recently in the QuadraJet thread, but I don’t expect you to go digging through all those pages to find it.
Here they are again:

The power brakes have zero issues whatsoever. I actually had to make a couple of rapid stops during my cruise tonight, and was pretty impressed with just how well the brakes work on the car. Certainly no problems whatsoever with a lack of vacuum for them or anything like that.

The booster and the master cylinder both are fairly new, maybe a year on them since I replaced them last year, so I can’t see how they would be a consideration in the equation?

More than likely, I was probably using a fitting on the carb that was ported vacuum rather than absolute manifold vacuum. I’m not sure if that would have a negative effect on my readings or not. I’m gonna try tuning with the vacuum gauge on true manifold vacuum here in another day or so.

Sucks to hear about the new MSD HEI module. I really like the Ignitor 3 module, a rev limiter and almost multi spark. I have blown 2 of them, one was my fault. The other, I had an issue with the power wire, not putting out enough voltage and it died. I have it in my 88 Cutlass, right now. I would check how far the secondary air door is opening, betting it is serverly limited. Cliff's book shows how to measure and it has different recipes for different motors. Also probably your extremely lean secondary rods are limiting it. I can feel my secondaries open and feel the rush on my 70S.

I’ve actually got a spare MSD 6AL leftover from The Juggernaut that’s still good, but I’m pretty opposed to installing it in this car especially if just the module will do the trick. I’m trying to keep things stock appearing under the hood, so for me mounting a big red brick to the wheel well or firewall is a big no go. Not much room inside the car for it either, so I’m trying to avoid it altogether.

Thanks for the heads up on the secondary air door tip, I haven’t got that far in Cliff’s book just yet so I’ll look into it. And I believe you’ve hit the nail right on the head, it feels a bit sluggish when the secondaries open, I’m betting it wants more fuel. Gotta wait until the special order parts show up to rectify that tho.

 

[Canon_Mutant]

Rewiring was required when I did the big block swap but was almost positive I did not reroute the distributor wires. Mine both run back into the wrap and back to the PS side. So, then looked in my [generally worthless] FSM and the figure is a tad unclear because they have a "buick" front distributor motor pic shown for the Cutlass 9 engine [typical] but it at least agrees that both distributor connectors are routed into the wire bundle away from the starter bundle. So no help there.

On the foot to the floor thing . . . if it sounds like the secondaries are opening more than it feels, they could be opening too quickly. I've had that happen. All adjustable of course as the fine tuning continues. Despite how great my 67 purrs from my QJ swap, I am still tweaking some with those kinds of tweaks. Just having it start properly, choke works, fast idle, normal idle and light throttle driving, not dumping fuel out the tailpipes anymore, etc. etc. . . . it's a wonderful thing . . .

 

[liquidh8]

Donovan, for what it's worth, I'm with Steve and pa grunt. Every g I've seen had the tach filter on the firewall, usually with it's own grommet and hole. Not run through the same hole as the speedo cable.

This is just what I've seen. Maybe run an aftermarket tack to set the Rev limiter, then hook up the oem tach?

 

[Texas82GP]

That is not a huge cam. I would expect the engine to have more than 12" of vacuum at idle. I was alluding to the possibility that the booster was leaking vacuum but if the brakes feel good that doesn't seem likely. Try connecting your vacuum gauge directly to the fitting on the manifold behind the carb so you are certain you are getting a true manifold vacuum signal. My guess is you will end up tweaking your idle mixture screws. Where is your initial timing at? 14°?

 

[Rktpwrd]

Donovan, for what it's worth, I'm with Steve and pa grunt. Every g I've seen had the tach filter on the firewall, usually with it's own grommet and hole. Not run through the same hole as the speedo cable.

This is just what I've seen. Maybe run an aftermarket tack to set the Rev limiter, then hook up the oem tach?

That’s not the speedo cable or grommet Jim. Look where it is, it’s near the center of the firewall. The speedo cable and grommet is over by the brake booster. The large black line you see in the middle in the pic is the vacuum hose going to the brake switch on the brake pedal for the 200R4 lockup interrupt.
Keep in mind this isn’t technically a G, it’s a late model A body and has slight differences from the G bodies you guys are all used to seeing. It not having an ECM as one of them.

I do like your idea of trying to hook up an aftermarket tach though I don’t think it’s the problem. Grounding the tach wire wouldn’t kill the car completely like it does, but it grounding out the coil somehow sure would...

That is not a huge cam. I would expect the engine to have more than 12" of vacuum at idle. I was alluding to the possibility that the booster was leaking vacuum but if the brakes feel good that doesn't seem likely. Try connecting your vacuum gauge directly to the fitting on the manifold behind the carb so you are certain you are getting a true manifold vacuum signal. My guess is you will end up tweaking your idle mixture screws. Where is your initial timing at? 14°?

No, it’s not a very big cam Jared, it was never supposed to be. An aggressive lumpy cam kinda kills the whole sleeper effect. At this point I really don’t think the vacuum to the brakes is a factor. Good thinking tho.

Like I said earlier, switching to a dedicated manifold vacuum port is the next step, and I’ve already been tweaking the mixture screws. That’s what I’ve been using to set the idle obviously.

I don’t recall offhand what the initial timing number was finally set at, I’d have to go back and check it again to see what it’s at. IIRCC, total timing was around 32 or 33 degrees, I’ve basically got as much aggressive timing into it as I can where it’ll still start easily and not ping on me.

 

[olds307 and 403]

As said, try it with another tach, these aftermarket parts can be b*tch to get working. I finally have the Mallory Breakerless distributor and Mallory 6AL working together, except the tach, using my timing light in cab for now since it has a tach built in. Adjust the air door when you get the new secondary rods, those two should really make a difference. Man do I miss a decent stall and gearing in a car.

 

[fleming442]

Well, if you pop the coil cover off the HEI, you'll see that the tach terminal is paralleled directly off the coil. Now, that being said, MSD boxes have a separate tach output. The picture TURNA posted awhile back shows a green wire hanging off the module; is that spoda be for the tach?

EDIT: I just went back to your post about how it's hooked up. If you want to tee the gray off the factory lead, you need to isolate the terminal from the coil. So, theoretically, the gray wire grounded by itself, independent of the tach lead to the gauge, should set the rev limiter as designed. Currently, the tach is hooked directly to the coil. I'm surprised it works with the MSD coil signal.
Oh, and if you want to keep it factory looking: pull the coil cover, cut the male tang off inside that goes to the tach terminal, and tee the gray wire back in like you had it. That way, the plug will snap back in, and just not be connected to the coil.
I also had another idea: once you get it straightened out, wire a momentary switch inside the car (one side to tach, other side to ground), so you can set it inside the car, looking at the tach.

 

[Rktpwrd]

Soooo....

Since the weather turned nice and cruising season began, forward momentum and progress on the body portion of things has slowed to a nearly indiscernible crawl. I’ve been concentrating on things more mechanical now that the rolling restoration has finally become more “rolling” and less “restoration”.

In short, I’ve been logging a lot of seat time and letting other things go unaddressed since the carb has been dialed in and the oil changed etc etc. I have this week off from work on a mini holiday, so in addition to doing some landscaping and various other things around the house, I’m going to start trying to get some forward progress happening again.

At the end of last week, I picked up a couple of under hood restoration decals from a local musclecar restoration place, so today I figured that’d be as good a place to start as any. The decals aren’t technically “correct” for my application, but I couldn’t care less. I’ve never EVER been a chalk mark and date code restoration guy, far from it, but I wanted something that looked somewhat OEM when folks are curious enough to have a peek under the hood.

This is what I picked up:

For those anal enough to actually read the fine print on the emissions decal, they’ll see that it’s really for a 1972 model year Cutlass. Again, I don’t really care. At least it says it’s for a 350 cubic inch engine.
Lol
These are officially licensed GM products (unlike the previous ones I had), so hopefully the quality of the adhesive is a little better and they won’t want to peel as easily.

Here’s the engine bay with no decals, looks ok but a bit lacking in the details that make it look authentic:

The previous air filter decal actually stuck pretty good, but where I had the biggest problem was with the emissions one. It’s location on the fan shroud directly above the radiator caused it to lift and bubble from the heat once things got warm. Then dirt would get under it, and then definitely no sticky-sticky.

To try and circumvent this problem with the new (and hopefully better quality adhesive) decal, I masked off the spot where the emissions decal was to go, and prepped it with Bulldog adhesion promoter first:

Decals applied:

And the end result:

It’s a small touch I know, but sometimes it’s the details that set things apart. With any luck, the better decals with the adhesion promoter should keep them stay put the way they’re supposed to.

With that baby step towards getting back into the swing of things, I’m going to work towards getting the quarter glass trim pieces prepped and painted so that I can finally install them and get the back windows installed and weather tight. (More on why they need to be painted later).

I’ve already started sanding on them, but they’ve got a couple of deep pits from stone chips and such, so those have gotta get fixed up first:

I’m tired of driving this thing around with no quarter glass windows in it, missing upper door weatherstrip, and the rear part of the interior missing, so I’m really gonna focus on that this week.

Wish me luck, updates on how I make out with it to follow.

Thanks guys,

D.

 

[old80cs]

The new decals look nice, still following along.

 

[SoFloG]

Ok I'm somewhat caught up with this modern legend of a thread! You never cease to satisfy bro