Author Archives: bowtie6

bowtie6 Reassembly – With Pictures –

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Hi folks.  Sitting here tonight, with a about 2 finger’s worth of Maker’s Mark 46 in a jelly glass.  If you haven’t tried this, I highly recommend it.  At any rate, here are a few recent pics of bowtie6 finally coming together.

Today is special actually.  We put the wheels back on and dropped the car on the ground after doing the initial body tub fitment.  Since the car has been on jackstands for so long, I had forgotten how damn low to the ground this thing really is.  Take a look and you will see what I mean.

I’m sure you are wondering what type wheels/tyres are fitted.  Answer:

  • Wheels – Panasport sixteen by seven inchers.  These are the Triumph bolt pattern and yes, they are Panasport.  Not cheap, but these are the real deal.
  • Tyres – The rears are 215/55-16; the fronts are 205/55-16’s.  215’s are a bit too wide for the front.

I know the pictures of the engine might be a bit overkill.  After all, there are plenty plastered on my website.  However, these are different…

  • Check out the hand made aluminium intake.  The plenum has been made to fit a GM Performance Parts intake flange.  The flange has been made by the good folks at GM and it fits perfectly the intake runners on the head.  Of course, all you get is a high pressure water-cut flange, the rest is all magic my cousin Jim made.  You can see the electronic throttle body as well as the intake tube where the MAF and IAT sensors mount while on the bottom of the intake plenum is the MAP sensor.
  • The headers are also hand-made and also attached to a GMPP exhaust flange.  The flange actually is special because the size of the openings is much larger than the one on the stock exhaust.  You get the idea.
  • The Griffin aluminium radiator is fully bolted in and plumbed.  Ecotec’s are special regarding plumbing.  If you don’t get this dead nuts, the engine will overheat.
  • The fuse box holds the ECM, fuses, relays, and electric fan controller.  Yes it is a little crowded in there but there will be a cover for all this and when we get that bolted on, it will really look nice.
  • Yes, those are Euro spec front turn signal lenses.
  • Finally, the rear picture of bowtie6 shows the back fenders bolted back on.  At the bottom you can see the exhaust peeking through.  Those ends are not finished yet:  that is where the Supertrapp baffles are bolted on.  I am a big fan of Supertrapp mufflers and they not only give an awesome sound but are also very low restriction.  I’ll have a writeup on this later, when I get all that bolted on.

I’m sure the question will be brought up:  that engine is really pushed back towards the firewall.  Why push it back so far back?  Well the answer is simple:  weight distribution.  We don’t have numbers yet, but I’m hoping to have a near 50-50 distribution.  My cousin’s TR4 is actually fairly close to this – don’t believe me?  Then you need to check out my writeup on weight distribution.

So here are the pictures in no particular order:

bowtie6 Reassembly

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Labour day.  This summer has flown by.  Finally, the end of summer and heat.

A great deal of progress has been made and quite a bit is left to do.  However, today we decided to start putting body panels back together.  No pictures, there is nothing glamorous about bolting doors and fenders back on.  You get the idea.  Actually this is a major pain in the ass for many reasons:

  • Much attention has to be paid to avoid damaging expensive red paint.
  • A great deal of time has to be spent in order to get all body panels to line up properly (not easy to do on a British car).
  • Since we have a new frame, the body must be shimmed in order to make things line up properly.
  • Don’t scratch the painted body panels!!

This is especially hard work because we strive to get body panel gaps as close as possible.  This is not easy on a TR6.  These things are notorious for bad body gaps, especially the distance between the doors and the rear fenders.  This is where “purists” have a cow because in order to solve this problem shims must be placed under the body shell and this allows the gaps to be cleared.

Since we have a much more “true” frame to begin with, it will take some work to determine the appropriate shims and most important, where to place the shims to get the correction required to get the body gaps “just right”.

The plan is to get the bowtie6 back together so I can bring it back home.  Then  I will finish up all the wiring.  Once we get that done, new carpet can be installed (yes, new carpet) as well as many other small details.  I’ll have pictures soon.

Stay tuned…

The New ECOTEC is Alive!

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It has been quite some time since my last post.  The bowtie6 Ecotec project is alive and well:  this weekend we fired up the Ecotec for the first time!  Needless to say this was quite an awesome event!!

First, here is a quick recap:

  • The engine compartment has been fully wired up.  There is a new engine control fusebox containing circuit breakers, relays and the ECM.
  • Inside the car there is another small panel with relays and fuses controlling turn signals, park lights and main light circuits.  The dash is all back together along with all gauges.
  • In the trunk I have the battery mounted in a special enclosure.  Yet to be done is a separate set of relays and fuses to control the stop lights and fuel pump.

We hot-wired the fuel pump for this weekend’s engine start.  With the aid of my laptop and software, we disabled the VATS system by reflashing the ECM.  We removed the spark plugs, turned the engine a few times and sure enough after a few seconds we had oil pressure.  All good so far.

Next was fueling up and priming the pump.  After running the fuel pump for a few seconds it finally “primed” itself and started pumping fuel.  We attached a fuel pressure gauge and pressure looked very nice indeed.

The next step called for re-installing the spark plugs and re-installing the coilpacks.  Turned the key, and pushed the button.  It took a few tries but finally she fired up and ran.  I hooked up the laptop again, this time to check for DTC’s.  There were a few.  Not good.

Turns out we had a few “issues” with the wiring.  The 2.4 Ecotec has VVT on both the intake as well as the exhaust.  There are two cam sensors on the top of the engine and two more on the back of the engine.  The two on the back of the engine are identical to each other, and I had made the mistake of hooking up the wrong plug to the wrong sensor.  This is something very unusual for GM harnesses: all plugs are unique; in this case the camshaft sensors are identical and share the same plugs.  My bad.

We tried again.  This time the engine ran fine but the scanner on the laptop read we were having fuel delivery issues.  We tapped the throttle a few times.  Coolant temps started to normally go up and we let the engine run for a few more minutes.  Then things started to settle down.  The fuel delivery issue went away and the engine started running better.  We have encountered this issue before when re-starting an engine that has been sitting for a while and this can be attributed to an injector sticking.  Once it has fresh fuel flowing, it loosens up any gummed up fuel and all is good.

We let the engine cool down and this is where things got interesting.  On cold re-start the Ecotec sputtered and coughed.  We noticed we had quite a few more DTC’s.  This type of behaviour is to be expected.  Suffice to say, that after many hours of debugging, changing a few parts around and a lot of tracing of the wiring harness all checked out.  There is no issue with the ECM – we swapped the one in my cousin Jim’s TR4 and the engine behaved in the same way.  So we ruled out wiring, ECM and sensors.  We started looking closer…

As it turns out, the new fabricated intake had an issue.  No, not a leak!  We re-used the rubber intake from the donor Solstice.  However, the housing for the MAF sensor is all home-made in order to allow the low restriction air cleaner element to be mounted.  The size of the housing was the culprit.  This was giving some false readings and this caused the ECM to make erroneous calculations regarding the air flow into the engine.  After correcting the offending intake tube we fired the engine back up, and now it runs smooth as silk.

Next will be to start plugging in new values for engine run-time parameters.  We’ve done some of this on my cousin’s TR4 and this along with some other tweaks will enable my TR6 to finally be back on the road.

So what is next?  Now that the engine is fully operational, we are going to start hanging fenders and doors on the body shell.  We anticipate having to make some special shims for the body since the frame is all new.  However, the frame is perfectly level so we are hoping not to have to shim it too much!

I have some final wiring to do and once that is all complete the next step would be the maiden trip down the road.  Still a few weeks away from that, but the engine runs and this has been a great weekend!

Stay tuned…

Wiring Up the Gauges…

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Moving along on the wiring, albeit slow.  Today, I spent 6 hours working on wiring up the instruments.  I was able to re-use some of the looms I made up the firs time, but had to make plenty of alterations along the way.  This is what it looks like from the backside:

The gauges are VDO Vision.  The have been great and are all electronic, compatible with the ECOTEC.  The speedo is programmable, so it is 100% dead nuts accurate.  The backing plate is aluminium and the front is made from quilted maple (I’ll have pics of the front in a later installment, once the dash is in place).

I realize this looks perhaps, unimpressive – but a huge amount of work has gone into making this up.  Every single connector has been soldered and shrink wrapped.  Since I wanted to make this so it can be removed easily, every circuit is connected to a “Weatherpack” connector.  This is why it has taken so long to make.

The following picture shows the dash area in bowtie6 before the dash goes in.

So…  What do we have here?

  • The heater has been replaced with an aftermarket unit.  The “original” heater unit I used to have developed a leak.  A little research found the unit pictured above which was a) cheaper and b) more efficient.  Plus it is able to withstand higher pressure.  This is desirable since it allows a high PSI cap on the radiator.
  • The transmission tunnel has been made from scratch to match the ECOTEC’s AISIN 5 speed gearbox.  It will be covered soon in Dynamat Extreme, just like the rest of bowtie6 has.
  • Finally, the piece de resistance:  If you look close, you can see the steering column is now fully adjustable.  Yes, a special mechanism has been made by my cousin Jim that allows the column to tilt with the flick of an adjustment bar.  I’ll have more on this later, once I get it all bolted back together.  Trick, huh?

This wiring effort has been very time consuming, but the end result will be fantastic.  There is a huge satisfaction from wiring up a car from scratch.  Not many people can do this type of work – it takes patience, but it sure is a lot of fun.

 

bowtie6 Wiring – Part II –

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Engine wiring is progressing right along,  albeit slow.  This part of building a car takes time!

So far the engine harness is complete.  All wires to the ECM have been accounted for and the main looms have been covered with crinkle tubing.  This tubing protects all wires and keeps things looking neat and professional.

Another engine bay picture showing the fuse box on the left, the coolant overflow tank, coolant lines and brake master cylinder and hydraulic clutch reservoir.  The coolant expansion tank is all hand made aluminium.  Missing from the coolant expansion tank is a small rubber hose going to an overflow tank behind the radiator; also hand made aluminium.  And yes, all the rubber coolant hoses are missing their clamps.  Just haven’t had a chance to get there yet!

Below, is a close up of the new fusebox.  On the bottom left, you see the new fuse box.  This is where all the relays, circuit breakers and fuses that control the engine compartment reside.  This is what it looks like:

So what do we have here?

Starting from the bottom:  below the box, hidden from view is a post that goes through the firewall.  This post is insulated with a Bakelite insulator.  From this post, wires feed battery power to the circuit breakers.  There are a total of seven circuit breakers; one for each relay.

Above the circuit breakers there are seven relays.  They are used as follows:

  1. Horn relay
  2. Electric Fan relay
  3. Headlight “on” relay
  4. Headlight high/low relay
  5. Starter relay
  6. Ignition relay
  7. Start button relay

Finally above all this are two banks of fuses.  To the left of the fuses is the electric fan controller and below that, the engine’s ECM.

Why so many relays?  The idea here is to use a relay for each device that requires high current, for example the electric engine fan.  The idea is to let the switches run low current controlling the electromagnet in each relay.

I know what you are going to say:  where are the turn signals and parking lights?  Yes, they have been left out.  Not by mistake, but by design.  Underneath the dash will be a smaller fuse box, containing fuses and four relays.  This is the part I’m working on now, and will be featured in the next installment…  Stay tuned.