Feeler: camaro z28

[The Dread Pirate Fisher]

Re: Feeler: camaro z28

I'm a huge thirdgen person too, had 4 myself. An 86, 88, 2 92's. The last one I had was the "Grail" of thirdgen's, the B4C/1LE factory car. B4C being the police interceptor, 1LE being the striped down, upgraded brakes, coolers, no A/C no radio, better bushings, bigger sway bars, hardtop racer. 350 TPI.

A lot of thirdgen guys are now going after the more desire able hard tops because of better ridgidity that the weak t-top version. They get stress cracks in the upper rear pillars, leaky weather seals.

I did a cammed LT1 conversion on mine after the 350 died, and the T56 trans, sold it for 7k 3 years ago.

 

[blue83z]

Re: Feeler: camaro z28

Just my $.02, may be worthwhile doing the "grid" taillights and 91/92 16" wheels. Would add some value. The taillights are super cheap. I've seen them as cheap as $20. I've seen wheels for around $100, more with good tires.

 

[blue83z]

Re: Feeler: camaro z28

I'm a huge thirdgen person too, had 4 myself. An 86, 88, 2 92's. The last one I had was the "Grail" of thirdgen's, the B4C/1LE factory car. B4C being the police interceptor, 1LE being the striped down, upgraded brakes, coolers, no A/C no radio, better bushings, bigger sway bars, hardtop racer. 350 TPI.

A lot of thirdgen guys are now going after the more desire able hard tops because of better ridgidity that the weak t-top version. They get stress cracks in the upper rear pillars, leaky weather seals.

I did a cammed LT1 conversion on mine after the 350 died, and the T56 trans, sold it for 7k 3 years ago.

B4C and 1LE together? Ive seen b4c, and a friend owns a 1le, haven't seen one with both.

 

[pearl91chevy]

Re: Feeler: camaro z28

Just my $.02, may be worthwhile doing the "grid" taillights and 91/92 16" wheels. Would add some value. The taillights are super cheap. I've seen them as cheap as $20. I've seen wheels for around $100, more with good tires.

I actually have a friend that might be selling me some z06 wheels with brand new tires.. I'm gonna check out the grid lights right now

 

[pearl91chevy]

Re: Feeler: camaro z28

Just a update on this, I recently decided to buy my first truck back that I learned so much on, which means the camaro is going back to storage. Going back to a barn 3min away from my house to be parked with a cover on it again. If someone is really interested, I'll take a cash offer otherwise it will just sit till I get a hair up my ass to take it back out again someday.

 

[pearl91chevy]

Re: Feeler: camaro z28

Bump.. Would love to fund the new project a little quicker, mayb buy the lady a ring to.. 4,000 obo.

 

[dgoodhue]

Re: Feeler: camaro z28

That says it was originally a crossfire LU5 305. It had twin tbi's on it from the factory. 175hp/250tq according to Google. Kinda neat, to bad they are no longer there. It was a good system in theory, but everything I have read said it just didn't work very well. Hence its short existence.

The intake manifold to head had a huge port mismatch. It puzzles me why GM didn't just cast a new intake for their Halo car engine's & top of the line f-body motor.

 

[DaveP]

Re: Feeler: camaro z28

The intake manifold to head had a huge port mismatch. It puzzles me why GM didn't just cast a new intake for their Halo car engine's & top of the line f-body motor.

They DID "cast a new intake for their Halo car." The as-produced Crossfire Injection manifold under discussion here was first-available on the new for 82 3rd Gen F-car. The system was also released on the 1982 5.7 engine used in Y-car. Intentional port mismatch affects reversion back into the intake under certain flow characteristics, so I suspect it was intentional. The crossfire manifold was produced to fit existing heads, so that mismatch has to be intentional. They would have made it fit the ports better, if there were benefits to doing so. If "GM" didn't want it there, or felt it would be detrimental to sales to the intended purchaser of that option / engine / car, it wouldn't be there.

Emissions, drivability, durability, CAFE, EPA "window numbers", cost, buildability, Fed regulations, and other factors have much greater weight to GM on a production car that is produced in the 10's of thousands, than over what "looks good" to an internet-educated individual for his personal car, and GM spends 10's of Millions of dollars getting the compromise as close as possible, for the least cost, prior to release. While matched ports are the accepted goal for "performance", port mismatches can be used to fine-tune certain characteristics of the induction system. Research the Edlebrock "Tarantula" X-plane manifold that was released in the early 70's for example.

If you had one of these Crossfire engines in 1982, you had an interesting, fairly rare car, and more performance than the majority of other cars available in that model year. The engine option did well in the market place as a stop-gap solution for more induction capacity with long runners (torque) than any other induction that was ready and compliant for MY1982, until the TPI system that was introduced a few years later provided. And that's the ONLY thing that matters to GM:

That purchasers buy it, and that GM makes a profit by selling it.

 

[dgoodhue]

Re: Feeler: camaro z28

DaveP is right on this one. I guess that is what I get for writing about a topic that only half remember and didnt really care about. Here is some information from Hib Halverson who often wrote article's for the corvette publications and I consider to be trusted journalist.

why are the L83's intake ports so darn small?

In the mid/late-70s, with the new Corvette's powertrain under development, the state-of-art at the time was throttle body injection, however, Delco-Rochester did not have a throttle body assembly which flowed enough air to use on a Corvette engine. So someone thought, "Why not use two of them?"

Rather than use two on an in-line intake manifold and create a hood clearance problem, deep inside Chevrolet Engineering, some genius remembered that back in the late 1960s, the Camaro's '67-'69 302cuin had a factory dual-four-barrel, low cross-ram that Chevy homologated for the SCCA Trans-Am series. They took that idea and figured since it worked great on a race track, the same type of intake manifold would work great on a Corvette street use if fitted with two Rochester throttle body injectors.

Bad idea.

As the system proceeded from design to development, Chevrolet soon found that while the system made pretty good high rpm power, it had terrible throttle response and awful low-speed driveability...so bad that not only was the engine off-idle and low-speed response very poor but it's exhaust emissions were lousy too.

What these wizards had forgotten is that the long runners, the huge plenum volume and the throttle body injectors so far from the intake valves, had fuel condensing out of the air stream and puddling on the runner floors when the velocity of the charge air dropped as the throttles were opened quickly.

What GM should have done was either stick with the QuadraJet 4ME for another two years or use a time machine to bring TPI from the future. But, most likely, for political, marketing and perhaps cost reasons, Chevrolet continued to try and put lipstick on a pig.

The development of CFI was long and difficult. I interviewed a GM Engineer back in the late 80s who told me he knew personally two powertrain engineers who paid for new homes with the overtime it took to get the CrossFire Injection to run well in the 82 Vette with an automatic trans and tall gearing.

The biggest problem was low port velocity at tip in. The eventual solution was to drastically decrease the port volume so that, when the driver whacked the throttle open at low rpm, port velocities remained high enough such that the air/fuel mix remained a vapor and little or no fuel condensed out of the air flow onto the port floors.

 

[pearl91chevy]

Re: Feeler: camaro z28

Bump on this, I'm more open to trades now.. Would prefer a v8 and must be auto.. I been glancing at a few 98ish trans am's with the ls1 auto and t tops, but the chance of finding one that isn't beat around here is gonna be a task. I have money to throw in for right deal