A fact has been brought to my attention:  “Amazing that in the TR link, with all the hype about the engine, there is not a single pic of the engine in the car!”.  My bad.  Time to make amends; time to really document the engine in the car.  Some facts:

• The engine is a 2.4 litre VVT ECOTEC from a Pontiac Solstice
• The transmission is a five speed AISIN also from a Pontiac Solstice
• The wiring harness has been lifted from the Solstice and modified.  It has been vastly simplified.  How?  RTFM.  Seriously, all the info is available in the Factory Service Manuals – trick is finding it.  😉
• The ECM has been reflashed in order to disable VATS.
• This ECM is fully programmable – in this case we have HPTuners on a laptop.  Right now, we are running the stock configuration – hopefully soon we will spend some quality time on a dyno and then tweak the thing.
• The stock plastic intake has been replaced.  The intake you see in the pictures was all hand made from aluminium and welded to a flange in order to make the runners match the intake ports.  This is done for a reason:  the original plastic intake does not give enough room for the steering column in a TR4.
• The stock throttle body with its fly-by-wire controls has been retained.
• The exhaust manifold has been discarded.  Like the intake manifold, the header is all hand made from stainless.  This is also welded to a special flange in order to match the ports on the engine block.

As stated above, the throttle remains fly-by-wire.  There is nothing ‘weird’ about this.  Actually it is extremely fast and the throttle body reacts to small inputs as well as full throttle acceleration (done that many times).  Matter of fact, my wife’s HHR (it has a 2.4 Ecotec as well) has the same fly-by-wire setup and it is very responsive.  I have no problems running this furthermore this is the way more and more modern cars operate.

The intake and exhaust manifolds have been altered and this is done for a reason:  the body needed to remain intact.  There has been some work done to the tunnel though.  A new transmission cover has been made as well as the driveshaft cover between the seats.  I don’t have a way to show that since the TR4 is assembled now.  However when I put bowtie6 back together once his ECOTEC is in place, I’ll have better pictures to show of how that all fits.

If you have questions and/or comments, please make an entry here – I’ll try to answer back!  Keyword here is:  dialogue!  🙂