Wagonlicious

Tonight, I broke out the Crafstman soldering gun – which rocks – and did some more wiring on the remote start + alarm.  I didn’t get much more done, though I did get 4 more relays set up and almost all of the crimp connectors I had used for mock-up ripped out and replaced with solderd joints which are either heat-shrunk or taped off.  So, at least the joints should all be more reliable for the long-term.  Now if I an just find the remaning wires to pick up – there may be a factory service manual in my future….

So, I picked up a Clifford 50.7x a month or so back (I think I recently mentioned that), and I’m finally getting around to installing it.  The main power wires and door monitor are hooked up, but I still need to do the door locks, defroster, trunk release, horn + siren, and hood + trunk monitors.  And figure out what I’m gonna do with the three remaining channels (I’m thinking seat heaters, all windows up, and maybe all windows down). Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the system.  There’s a lot of flexibility, and the LCD feedback remote is top-notch.

I also found that the $16 soldering gun at O’Reilly Auto sucks.  It burned up in my hand the first time I used it – all the magic smoke came out at once, and it never did get hot enough to melt solder.  The Craftsman super-mega gun, however, can heat up two 10 gauge wires within a few seconds.  That’s neat. :)

So,  I’ve gotten some more done on the Grand Marquis.  The exhaust is “finished”.  It’s not really done, since I think it still needs an electric cutout – but I do have the cutout Y installed.  It looks pretty good, overall.  I’ll post up some pictures shortly.  After driving with it on for a week, I’m happy.  It’s quiet in the car at cruise speeds, and reasonably loud when you step on it.  The cutout will satisfy the need for serious noise eventually…  I’m also getting a little better than 27MPG with the cruise set on 63 MPH.  That’s not too bad for a full-sized car with a V8.

Also new this week is the tuner.  I got a good deal on a SCT Livewire (about 50% of the full price), which is a customizable tuner and real-time data logger.  So, I can do the boy racer “big thing stuck on the dash” as necessary.  The cool thing is that the transmission behaves better now.  The car winds up to a touch over 6 grand before shifting now (which sounds awesome, in context) and shifts down when I step on it.  Man, the downshifts annoyed me before.  The upshift points at part-throttle are a little annoying, though.  the car wants to stay in first too long.  It’d be good with lower gears – say something like a 3.55 or 3.73 – but the 2.5x or whatever are in there just don’t like this setup.  Since the programmer just scales a performance tune to whatever tire+gear combo I have and Im a fair distance from performance gears, this is understandable.

To fix the upshifts, we’re looking at either a custome tune (which can be loaded to the livewire) or lower gears.  It’d probably cost about the same to get a complete rear from a P71 (cop car) as it would to get a driveability tune and the gears will be more fun.  I’m not sure if they’ll be fun enough to trade off the mileage, though.  Have to do some research on how gears impact the mileage.  I know that the 3.42s in my Wagon were indistinguishable from the stock 2.56s, so maybe I’m worried about nothing…

The Clifford 50.7x remote start / alarm is next.  Hopefully within a week or so.  And I should really stop neglecting the Chevelle, since Beth‘s tailbone is healing and she’ll probably want to start driving her car again someday soon…

Last night, I replaced the plugs on the Grand Marquis.  With 80000 miles now it seemed time.  It had been misfiring on cylinder 5 (front passenger side on a Ford), so I replaced that coil.  As it turns out the gap on that plug had eroded to over 70 thousandths (should be 54), which was probably the source of the misfire – not the coil.  But since I had the coil, it went on too.  I cleaned the MAF as well.  The responsiveness, smoothness of idle, and fuel economy have all noticeably improved.  I’m gonna have to put the G-Tech meter in the car and see if there’s a quantitative improvement in performance as well.

It’ll be good to have a baseline against which I can compare the post-exhaust performance, too.  I expect a minor but measurable increase from the upcoming 3″ single exhaust update.  I ordered a handful of 3″ mandrel bends this evening (from Columbia River Mandrel Bending – great prices, great service), a stainless 2×2.25″ to 3″ merge collector, and a 3″ polished stainless tip (Magnaflow – from Summit).  It should be here in time for the weekend.  I’m excited. :)

BTW, the stock exhaust is 2.25″ from the manifolds through the cats and into the resonator, then it necks down to two inch after the resonators, finally coming together to a single 2 inch pipe – which is even less than 2″ in the compression bends.  I’m sure a single 2.5 or even 2.25 would be adequate, but the cross-sectional area of two 2.25 inch pipes is about that of a 3.4 ich pipe, so I figured 3 would be better.  Nevermind that I couldn’t find any smaller tips that I like, and I think it looks silly to have a small pipe feed into a larger tip.  So, 3 inch pipe to a 3 inch tip it is. :)