TimZ

Machinist's time decoder: Double the numeric part and go to the next higher unit. For example, Machinist's estimate.................Human time 1 hour.........................................2 days 1 day..........................................2 weeks 1 week........................................2 months 1 month.......................................2 years

From their website: I apologize for being a pain in the ass here, but this illustrates why I was saying to go with a lighter color. When they say that it dissipates heat quickly, the way that it's doing this is by more efficiently radiating it's heat away from the manifold, and into the components that are surrounding it (such as your intake manifold). This is kind of counter-intuitive. Generally speaking, darker colors radiate (transmit) heat, lighter colors reflect heat. In your engine bay, I think the better approach is to try to keep the hot exhaust manifold from transmitting its heat to the things that are around it.

Agreed - I have used the 2000 Blue on a previous manifold and found it to be very durable. Also agreed. Again - personally I'd do both - the more you can isolate the exhaust heat from the intake, the better. Actually, the stock heatshield looks pretty sharp once it's been CermaChrome coated.

It might vary from shop to shop, but I know that JetHot has more than one color rated for 2000degF: http://www.jet-hot.com/headercoatings.html My local shop had a white coating available, which is what I used. The 2000 degree coatings generally have a rough finish and are not shiny.

The turbo beanie should be very effective, but I guess I don't see why you couldn't remove the turbine housing for coating (outside only). Also, I still think that black is the wrong direction if you are trying to keep heat out of the engine bay.

BTW - I'd recommend not using the shiny coatings, unless you can find one rated for more than 1500 degF. For the exhaust manifold and turbine housings you are better off using the 2000 degree coatings. And especially if you want to ditch the heatshield, then stay with the lighter color coatings, like silver or white - they should radiate a bit less heat than the flat black coatings. Personally I wouldn't - I'd use both and coat the heatshield with the shiny stuff in addition.

I have done the center sections before, but it's kind of a pain with the newer ball bearing centers. On the turbine housing (or compressor housing for that matter), be sure to only do the exterior of the housing - you'll have clearance problems if you do the inside of the housings.

I'm assuming that you are looking for proper ends for aluminum fuel line? If so, the ends you listed will not work - those are for socketless hose, not aluminum lines. To do aluminum ends, look for "tube nuts" and "tube sleeves" - you will need both, plus a flaring tool. If this is for the low pressure side and you aren't planning on running E85, I think Russel's makes a compression fitting adapter (the compression ring is brass, which doesn't like alcohol)

That's pretty impressive -nice job! My car has already gone into storage, so for the most part I haven't worried too much about cold start in temps below ~40 degF. However this is still interesting to me - any wisdom you can impart? Did you have to tweak the timing as well as the fuel? Did you find you needed a large amount of enrichment at the lower temps?

Look again - the graph is in Newton-Meters, not lb-ft. 20Nm is about 14.7 lb-ft.

The Kameari piece is really more for those that plan to spend significant time above 7000rpm. Noting in your stated build points to this. As far as reliability goes, there is nothing particularly wrong with the stock setup - it has been used reliably for 100's of thousands of miles on millions of engines. You can do what you want -it's your car. It just seems like you could get better results with that ~$600 elsewhere. Back on topic, the Magnaflow or the Borla should be okay, and the Flowmaster should also be fine if you are not going to run a turbo. They'll probably be pretty loud.

If you are going to run a turbo then stay away from Flowmaster-style mufflers - too much backpressure. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they may still work for a naturally aspirated application where the pressure pulses still have some separation, but with a turbo they just don't work very well. Go with a straight-through muffler like a Dynomax instead. Sorry to go a bit off-topic, but did I read that correctly that you are planning a Kameari twin idler chain tensioner? That's a really nice piece, but you are wasting your money if you don't plan to spin higher than the stock redline, and a mild cam and 600cfm holley are not going to make power at high enough rpm to justify the cost of the Kameari tensioner. That money would be far better spent on any number of other things such as forged pistons, or headwork or brakes or suspension or...

The other thing that is significant here is that even though E85 has less energy per unit volume, the amount that you burn for max power rich more than makes up for it, and you should see ~5-10% power increase just from running the fuel at the proper mixtures. The added power mitigates the added fuel to some extent (i.e., less throttle is required).

Thanks for asking, Paul. I guess the second one is okay, but I did make the original post to specifically talk about how to address the apparent cooling imbalances in the head in the rearmost cylinders. If we change it to talk about detonation sensitivity in general, then we open the thread up to talk about any number of things, like combustion chamber shape, ceramic coatings, fuel/timing strategies, etc., which was not the original intent.

I'll bet you can't run 28psi on regular... Last I checked here is was either the same or slightly less per gallon

I think I've been hearing that California is gearing up for E85: http://www.geocities.com/sacramentoe85/stationlocator

The problem appears to have gone away completely since I found the vacuum leak in the cap. I'm running ~28psi.

Does the coolant literally blow out of the overflow tank, or does it seem to overflow fairly often? I had a similar problem last summer that seemed to be linked to running boost/high rpm. It turned out to be due to a vacuum leak at the radiator cap outer seal. if the outer seal leaks, then the system can't pull the overflow back in on cooldown and eventually it overflows and the coolant level in the engine goes down.

Methanol is highly corrosive. Ethanol is not nearly as corrosive. E85 doesn't like natural rubber (very few modern hoses use natural rubber anyway), bare aluminum, brass or terne plated tanks. I removed any brass fittings in my fuel system and anodized all of the aluminum bits. Also pulled the tank and had it internally coated with a methanol-resistant coating (if it holds up to methanol it should be fine with ethanol). So far so good, we'll see how it looks in the spring. This has been covered before - search on E85. I think I've gone over the difference between ethanol and methanol about a dozen times already.

You're almost there - the 5250 thing is a conversion specifically for torque in lb-ft and horsepower. If you convert both torque plots to lb-ft then you will find that they do have the same value for hp and torque (in lb-ft) at 5250.

This is exactly the setup that I'm using, too. If you want to run AC, then this is what you will have to do - the electromagnetic clutch for the AC compressor will interfere with the pickup in the "normal" tangential position. Ditto.

It used to be a much-referenced sheet of head/piston/rod combos for various L-series engine build options. For some reason, it appears that ZClub of Texas has removed this valuable piece of reference info from their site. I think "Mad Mike" Taylor is a member here, maybe he could shed some light on this...

Here's a link to a table with all of the stock cam grind specs: http://atlanticz.ca/zclub/techtips/cam/index.htm I have an "F" grind cam for sale on eBay right now - slightly less duration than your N47 cam, so it should give slightly better low end response...

As I recall, he already had the radiator pulled - hence my suggestion to just give up on keeping the chain blocked, since it's not that much more work just just pull the front cover and stop worrying about the chain. He's going to be waiting around for a while on the head work anyway...

Impact wrench. Then use a gear or pulley puller to get the pulley itself off.