Radiant

Well today was a mixed bag of events, a badly secured clip that held the IAT sensor in the intake came off and meant that the sensor dropped on the drive belt stripping a few cords off it and causing it to drop off. All this about 70 miles outside of London. I didnt have any tools so ended up with the recovery guy putting what was left of the belt back on.
I couldnt find the metal clip which had secured the IAT inside the air intake so thought Id just check where it went.. Yep, it was lodged at the back of the manifold near cylinders 7 & 8. The guy hooked it out with a magnet and all was well.

Suffice to say metal clips arnt going back in there. The rubber gromit the intake had come with was a bad fit so I need to sort something reliable out.

So that cancelled my trip as I didnt want to get stranded in Wales and have to leave my car there if I couldnt get a replacement belt, so back home I went. I managed to get a new belt and fitted that right away.

At this point things got better as I decided that I would then fit my new injectors and thermostat.

I didnt have a fuel rail removal tool, which is pretty essential to get them off so just followed some info on www.ls1howto.com, pulling the fuel pump relay cranking the engine to dump the line pressure then removing it. Suffice to say even though there was no pressure there is still a lot of fuel in there and you will get it everywhere, so make sure you have a rag.

Pulling the old injectors out of the manifold is easy, but they are well stuck in the fuel rail. All of them took a bit of effort to pull out and left their rubber seals in the rail. Once removed the new ones went in nicely with a little bit of petrolium jelly. Here is a pick from halfway though.

Note the IAT and MAF sensor connectors are now tied away with tape too after the earlier mornings troubles!

Next was the 160*F thermostat. All in, both jobs only took a couple of hours. I set the fans to come on around 80*C and the high speed fans around 87*C. To celebrate I also pushed timing up 3% across the board.

So a flash of the changes, including rescaling the injectors with RedHardSupra's injector table and I was away. Immediately I noticed VE was up to 10% out. Cool I thought, it did need more timing. I added around 5%, but then remembered some comments on Injector Offset. Basically the larger injectors are lazier at low duty so need more time to open etc. Joe who posts on efilive had posted some new tables which had worked well for him so I have used that as a starting point and will do some more logging and check to make sure that all that extra fuel is required. Hopefully it is and the consequence is more power. Knock is not appreciably increased over what it was before, that is, a tick now and again but no sustained knock under load. Only really there on throttle tip in.

So only exahust upgrade to go, some final tuning and off to the dyno. Also time for a few gtech runs I think.