****


YES!


My god, it is so much better. SO much. My beater/dd '95 Legacy has better throttle control than my wife's Cayenne S, I'm with you also, that wicked tip in if fine w/me. It's fun, and it's totally manageable, IMO.

 

I drive with a light touch anyway and with a manual and clutch it's easy to control. I love that it's not linear either and you get pedal feedback. The 03 escalade is drive by wire but that is very responsive. Little bumps in the road that modulate your foot slightly actually cause jumps in rpm. That is about thebonly drive hy wire I liked. Otherwise you always feel torque management slowing the tip in of the blade. Like if I nail it off the line I want it wide effing open lol. This is how bad my old truck was with torque management. Around the 1 minute mark...

 

^^That is totally F'ed up! JUNK.

I believed that was what was happening w/my C6....due to the way that it drove. So I took this video and almost fell on the floor when I watched it. You can even hear my verbal reaction to seeing it move. Here is my wife, actuating the pedal:


And here is what I filmed at the other end of the system....


Still...that engine responded like a lazy dog.

 

@Tom400CFI Got a question for you. You said you used a boring bar for your throttle bodies. How'd you do it. I've been calling around and most places either won't touch or don't call back so I'm considering just giving it a whirl myself.

 

You just need to bolt the TB to a faceplate on a lathe and bore them using a boring bar as stated.
I did mine 15 years ago, first a set at 2", then another set at 2.2" which needed a sleeve.
Here's a pic of one on the faceplate about to be bored, next to one that's been opened up beyond 2.2" to accept a pressed in sleeve.
The second pic shows a stock butterfly sitting in the bore of a 2.2" sleeve for comparison of size.

 

Never thought about the lathe. I'd have to find someone with one that's big enough. I had originally thought my friend had a mill but it's actually just a massive drill press and idk if that's a precise enough tool to bore out those. I could justify buying a lathe however.

 

I used a boring bar for doing motorcycle cylinders. One of my best friends worked at a small engine shop and he was "into" it, so no "nay sayers" slowing me down. .

Mine pooched the walls at 2.03" (53mm IIRC) and I simply filled the holes with Epoxy, then hand/rough sanded the epoxy with sand paper, then finished it w/a three stone cylinder hone.

 

nice. I think I said earlier that im only going to 2 inches... I don't feel on my engine that any larger is necessarily needed. But all good info to know. My usual engine shop just didn't want to deal with it. They have big machines that run pretty state of the art crap and they said for the amount of work they do it just isn't worth their time. They however gave me the list of people they reccomend so good on them... just none of them really got back to me.

So... I may see if anyone at the university could sneak me in otherwise I may just abandon that aspect of this project for now. The lathe I was checking out on marketplace just sold so that kind of sucks. I could justify a nice used one in price however a new one is a little out of the budget considering I'm home shopping... well browsing... and about to (hopefully) start a new job.

I just want a nice clean dyno pull to see what I've got and then see how well I can port... I suspect not as well as I'm hoping lol. But we'll see. I got another drill extension. I think I'll do some more blending on the bends in the runner to help some more... we'll see.

 

Yep. I'm sure 2" is fine. I just went 2.03" b/c it was said, at the time, that was the biggest size you could go w/o holing the walls. So I went for it...and holed the **** out of my walls.

 

Might get creative... brave... and try it on the drill press lol. They were free throttle bodies so worst case I have to go larger... oh the horror lol.

 

Whoa! I drill press would be interesting.

 

So today's goal was to blend the runner to the port opening better... clean up what is the shorter radius. Below is a pair that are worked pretty close to what I'd like and then what I started with.


You can see it opens it up and smooths the turn by a lot.

Also, dad's been looking at an 82 and wants to steal this intake for it lol. He likes it a lot.

 

Yeah. I'm worried that the side loading on the chuck may or may not be safe and or result in parts flying... I don't feel it's an accurate enough machine tbh. Plus even if I center it, who knows if it'll stay centered. All the table has to do is move a smidgen for the whole thing to be foobar. Decisions. This is what sucks about being unemployed... I want to try stupid crap.

Edit: I'm assuming any carb throttle plate of the correct size would work too... who knows if that is a good assumption.

 

carb plates work. I bought mine from Holley.

 

Figured I would update this one too. Since I have the car fixed now, it is just a matter of waiting on the wheels to come back from getting refinished. Now I'd like some input. I'm going to try and use a hub dyno as that is what is closest to the house so that's a win. (I feel it's the most accurate too)

Now what all do you think I should do. Post the numbers as it sits when I pull in with my street tune. (as in the best I could get without being too reckless) then try and optimize that on the dyno and the best numbers I get are the baseline for the ported one?

Then I was thinking save that tune and modify that one to work for the ported intake but as a copy and compare the street modified one to the old best one. Then just for the hell of it try the old best tune on the ported intake and see how far off it is? Or just do an optimize on the dyno from the street tune and then that will be my before and after?

Just trying to get it straight. I'm shooting for similar weather conditions when I do go on so that the pulls are relatively comparable but with the new job I'm all over the place. It took 3 weeks to get enough time in the week to swap out the fuel lines from the Y block to the throttlebodies so the intake will probably be a month long ordeal lol.

 

I look at tunes like this; If you ran a carb'ed whatever; snowmobile, dirt bike, car, boat....
You wouldn't ever bolt on parts and then dyno it (or race it/run it). You'd check jetting and timing, optimize those things and THEN dyno it (or race it/run it). So why do people treat "tunes", like it's its own separate "mod"? (not saying you are doing that) It's NOT. A tune is simply adjusting "jets" and timing that are sub par or out of whack, to bring it all back "into whack".

To me, the optimized tune is part of the mod -just like jet runs were back in the day. It's not a separate, stand-alone "mod". It's not a "mod" at all.
I'd optimize the tune on the dyno and post those results.

 

Fair point. I'm just curious to see how close I was able to basically guess at it is all. It's fairly close and I don't think there's some magic gains... it'll probably be more just smoothing out AFR spikes and a couple numbers if that.

Guess we'll find out in a few weeks.

 

I also figured I'd add that I've abandoned the bored throttlebodies for now. Can't find anyone to do it and I tried some test pieces on a drill press... let's just say it was unsatisfactory... realistically the chuck setup can't deal with the side loading... it was all over the place. So unless someone knows anyone ( @Buccaneer @Tom400CFI ) I'm shelving that aspect for now. No one wants to touch the damn things and it's kind of annoying. Actually I shouldn't say that... no one returns calls when they don't answer.

 

How big do you want to go or are you just wanting 2"?

 

my math says 2 inches is more than enough for my goals. It would perform similarly to a 650 cfm carb.