They have exactly what I want. I wish I had discovered before I bought one. Good advice thanks!

 

Ya they make good stuff, I'll try to also post a picture of the shifter **** leather, it just arrived this evening but I haven't had a chance to grab a picture of it yet.

 

As promised here's the picture of the C5 Z06 shifter ****, you'll note that it has the correct shifter pattern on the **** for my T56 Magnum. The C4 ZF6 shift **** has the wrong shift pattern.


I need to machine up a thread adapter and instert it into ****. Then I need to remove the leather or vinyl that's on the know now and replace it with this leather shifter cover from redline good.

 

Hey Guys, just wanted to give you all a little update:

The work on the A/C is all complete, lines are routed and the system is all charged and functional.







The lines were custom made by a mobile A/C guy that came to my friend's shop and did all the work on site. I'm told everything functions perfectly.

Apprently, he took the car out today and did some driveability tuning and said its running really nicely. Although he wants to take it out once more and do some WOT and higher speed (highway) tuning.

So at this point, there are only three things remaining before I get the car back:

1.) One more on road tuning session

2.) The speedometer is not reading correctly, we are using the Dakota digital box, but still not getting the correct reading, maybe its not setup correctly yet? IDK

3.) We have to set the ride height, the car is sitting a good inch higher than before, (likely due to reduced weight) so we have to adjust the front coilovers and rear spring bolts to get the ride height back to where it was pre swap.

 

Wow one heck of an A/C setup.

 

Looks good. How much clearance between the hoses and belt? I'm still waiting for my cnc brackets from work.

 

Maybe an inch. I'm thinking i'm going to ask my friend to make a little 'belt guard' to make sure the lines never come in contact with the belt.

 

Hey Guys so a small and a big update to report today.

Yesterday I machined up a thread adapter to allow the use of a C5 Z06 Shift ****. Using the Mill and lathe it was pretty simple.


I also decided to try my hand at installing the new leather wrap and white accent stitching on the shift **** (to match the shift boot).




I'm certainly not a 'master' at upholstery but I think it turned out ok for my first time ever doing upholstery work...

Anyway that's the small update...

The more exciting news was that I went out to the shop today and helped the guys get my car ready to come home as its about done and they need the space for the next customers project that's coming in. So we spent the day tidying off loose ends.

We got the ride height set and got the speedometer working, put some trime pieces back on etc... We took the car out for a 30min test drive and got the Speedometer calibrated prefectly (according to GPS), the car performed perfectly on the test drive, including testing the brakes with a few panic stops.

Any so I thanked the guys and headed home (30min drive) of course with my luck, the steering coupler tried to unscrew itself on the way home and a found I was getting an intermittent high idle. Anyway, brought it back they tightened up the steering coupler (fixed that issue) and of course the car idled normally back at the shop. Anyway aside from the intermittent high idle the car did great on the way home and was a lot of fun to drive I got about 50km of back road driving on it before the weather started to get bad. My friend did a little digging while I was driving and tells me he thinks he has the solution to the high idle, he asked me to try backing the idle screw off a half turn as he thinks the blade is open to far and its putting the IAC into some sort of limp mode. I'll give that a shot, if it doesn't work he says he'll come by my place to trouble shoot it.

So i'm pretty thrilled to get my car back, it was really dusty from being in thier shop for a year so I didn't take any pictures of it outside/driving but i'll get those soon as its washed.

Once we get a stretch of good weather i'm going to take it back to my friend for an alignment and we'll do the road tuning, then take it for dyno tuning.

Here's one engine shot from today:

 

Hey Guys, so now that the car is back home and the main part of the swap is done I can start plowing through my to do list.

First thing I did was to go get a smart charger, because my optima yellow top is a bit weak from sitting around for over a year. Hoping the charger brings it back to reasonable health, otherwise i'll have to replace it.

My friend smartly put some charging terminals in spot where the battery originally was for easy charging/jump access since the battery is located behind the passengers seat.



Next I replaced the hood and hatch struts with the new ones I bought at little while ago. I learned that you actually don't want 2 small struts at the front of the hood as it makes for a hood that is hard to close and will open all the way up when you pull the hood pop lever. Just one small strut and the one big one it the way to go Not really sure why GM put mounting points for 2, maybe they just wanted to confuse every one into thinking they were missing a strut?

I also replaced a few bolts with more stock looking ones.

I backed off the idle adjustment screw off a half turn as my friend suggested, so far so good with the idle, but I guess we'll see next time I drive it if that fixes the intermittent high idle or not.

Once that was done I took on the job of getting enough clearence for the air intake to not rub on the hood. My friend didn't want to take this job on and I now know why...
I tried to just remove a little fiberglass from the support structure, but I ended up needing to remove the whole thing! Sanding fiberglass, everyone's favorite job!

Engine covered and about to begin: notice the 2 small rub marks on the hood from the CAI...


Hood carnage:

I sanded it all down and smoothed all the edges, so I think once its painted you'd never really know it didn't come that way.


Anyway this car had not been washed since Dec of 2019 and cuting and sanding the fiberglass hood didn't help matters so I pulled the car out side and gave it a much needed wash, including the engine bay.







Its real nice to finally have the car back!

 

Looks fantastic, must be exciting having it sitting there ready to go!

 

Time for some running vids. I know it's taboo to ask how much all of this cost but how much if you care to say?

 

Thanks Felix, Yes, I'm Super happy/excited to finally have the car back after over a year. Couldn't be happier.

Yes, I agree tommy fox, I need to get some driving time and some driving video's with the car. Sadly march and April are typically very rainy months here and of course good weather has to line up with when I have time to drive it also, so please be patient with me. But I plan to try hard to get the break-in 500-1,000Km of driving done as soon as possible, as well as get an alignment done soon. Once that's done then its heading to the dyno to get a dyno tune. So I plan to do some driving video's and a dyno video. Can't wait until the break in and dyno tune are done so I can try some WOT runs!

As far as cost...way too much, lol.

So the cost is $7K in labor (including the tuning yet to be done) and roughly $18K in parts/shipping/taxes, so $25K total. This is in Canadian Dollars ($0.77CAD =$1 USD), and of course it also includes a fair bit of shipping costs and 12%import taxes. So its not been a cheap swap by any means and I still have to get the rest of the car painted and some interior work done. I'm sure it will very easily exceed $30K CAD before its 'done'..

 

I manged to find a couple min to do a few small items on the car this morning.

I picked up some underhood LED bulbs which are only 1W. I doubt they will drain the battery much even if on for quite a while.

So the driver's side seems to work nice, passenger's side never worked and still doesn't. I'll have to order a new mercury switch and see if that fixes it.


I also wanted to try to fill some holes in the firewall where wiring used to go through and no longer does. I got a couple plastic sheet metal plugs and put some RTV sealant on them and used a mallet to pop them in place. I worked out really nicely...

I need to figure out some way to get the large hole at the bottom sealed up. It used to be cramed full of wires and now only has a few. I might make a little plate for it with a slot for the wires to fit in, or perhaps a rubber stopper with a slot for the wires...

 

Make sure you reset the tps to have between 2-10 value as per holleys setting instructions. I had to make small adjustments and reset the tps several times to get the idle where i want it. Theres also a setting for the tps itself called the "IAC hold
position" where it will hold itself open above a tps position greater than 0%. Mine kept getting stuck open and would hold the idle fairly high so I had to tweak my setting there as well.

 

That's a great tip about reseting the TPS, the IAC holding open sounds like exactly what was happening to me and intermittently causing a high idle (1600-1800rpm). Thanks!

 

Great post! I just did a quick read. Now I have to go back and fo a deep read. I am doing a 93. My engine is a LQ4 with a Camaro T56.

LS swap target.

 

Thanks for reading, I know this thread has gotten pretty long. Great looking car you have. Do you have a build thread? i'd be interested to read it if you do....

 

What a great thread. Just read the whole thing. What I really liked was the lighter clutch action. I gave up Corvette's and anything with a clutch a while ago due to a neurological disease making it hard for me to use it. I am really wanting to get another C4 and do a swap like this if the clutch action is manageable.

Thanks!

 

Thanks Shock96 That's nice of you to say!

Yes, the super light clutch has been one of the nice suprises of the swap. The monster LT1-S said it has lower than stock pedal pressure and they weren't kidding. Its proabbly 75% lighter than the clutch in the car before. The T56 magnum is also a wonderful transmission it shifts beautifully and has very short shifts compared to any other transmissiom i've used.

Interestingly using the C6 power steering pump also reduced steering effort by about 25%, and that's with my car having 315 tires up front!

I also noticed that using the C6 Z06 brakes reduced the brake pedal effort required by about 30% although it, did increase the pedal travel about 25%.

Interestingly, the car still sounds close to the same as the old motor under 3000RPM, and like and LS powered car over 3000 RPM which was suprising to me.

I think the car also lost some weight as we had to lower it by almost an inch after the swap to get it back to the pre-swap ride height.

The one thing that is driving me nuts is the IAC is really noisy compared to the one on the SBC, I'll have to see if there is some way to quiet it down.

Lots of little differences I noticed when driving it, its kind of like a new car, but still feels familar at the same time.

If you do an LS swap on a C4 I think you will really like it!

 

The IACs are noisy on LS stuff from my experience. Mine is really noisy at cold start up for sure.