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Took of head recently and noticed severe cam pitting. One lobe on the intake cam and 2 lobes on the exhaust side show pitting. The rest of the lobes look fine. Damaged intake lobe peak Intake lobe base Another angle of damaged intake lobe. You can see another lobe in this picture and it is perfectly fine like the rest of the intake lobes.
I have contacted ZZP as well as provided them with pictures because cam material defects seem to be the likely culprit. Both the intake and exhaust cam have the same time stamp. ZZP is currently evaluating my pictures and information to make a determination.
Steelies will not clear the LSJ brakes. I had to go to 17" wheels when I put the LSJ brakes on (Good news, 17's will clear Brembo's)
And yeah, I suppose having manual bias will help, never tried it with a drum car. I noticed a lot less lockups when i put the LSJ rears on and the LSJ proportioning valve.
Tripoding well. its super unpopular since its not "What John says to do" but I unhooked my front sway bar when I would AutoX and that helped remove most tripoding.
ZZP reached out to me after communicating and sending them a series of pictures. They instructed me to return them for analysis and exchange. It sounds like they are going to take care of the situation. Hopefully I don't run into any problems because I had to cut the end of the cam off to work with my L61 head. This time around I will be going back with an LSJ head modified by Trevor Jolley for a crank angle sensor that reads off the cam sprocket assembly for standalone ECU.
Yeah I just sent a message explaining the situation as I didn't want there to be any surprises. Hopefully they still honor the warranty as my modification didn't have anything to do with the actual failure mode. When I did the modification I never dreamed of having to make a warranty claim.
Im 99% sure something like a cam lobe wouldnt be repaired by zzp. Theyll probably throw them away once they see the damage and send out a new set. I would really doubt they care that you cut it.
Yeah hopefully not. I didn't have a choice on chopping the cam to use it in my head. I don't think they can really re-use the damaged cams so the only reason they would is if they just wanted to use it as an excuse to not warranty them. I think ZZP will do me right though. They've always gave me good customer service and I have spent a fair amount of money with them.
Does ZZP, or I guess it would be comp cams, do a hardening process on the lobes? Most of the lobes are perfectly fine but the 3 that aren't are pretty screwed up.
btw I am going to need lots of help going standalone because I have no idea what tf I'm doing and so far I haven't found a "Converting to Standalone ECU for Dummies". However there is no way I am going to go through the trouble of rebuilding this thing again and not have proper tuning support. I have to figure it out one way or another so any help identifying wires or whatever will be greatly appreciated. I will document the process here in as much detail as I can so if I am successful maybe it will be a useful resource to anyone else down the road who is stupid enough to modify a 2005-2006 base model.
the best advise i can give you on converting to stand alone is build a new engine harness, dont splice into your factory harness. i see too many installations that splice the factory harness, and while some work, when it comes to troubleshooting it makes life difficult. id also go as simple as you possibly can. while many stand alone computers can run anything you want (electronic throttle, mass air flow, traction control, etc) go as simple as you can get away with. id recommend converting to a mechanical throttle body, drive by wire adds a lot of hassle, and it can be difficult for a beginner to work through, especially while trying to work through everything else.
there are a couple things to think about while rebuilding your engine in regards to the computer system you choose. many systems dont work well with the gm 7x reluctor wheel in the pre 07 ecotecs (and other gm engines), you may want to use the opportunity to swap to a later crank that has a 58x trigger wheel. the 58x (or 60-2 as its known outside gm cars) is pretty standard for aftermarket computers. swapping cranks would alleviate the need to go with an external crank trigger if your chosen ecm doesnt support the 7x wheel. same thing goes with the cam sensor setup, if you choose to run one (most computers dont need a cam sensor to run, however you will be running batch fire/wasted spark without it). keep thing like this in mind during your engine rebuild.
getting the car to run with a stand alone isnt too much of an issue, its gettiung everything else in the car to work. if you want to maintain the cobalt gauge cluster you will likely need to keep the factory ecm in the car and at least feed it with its own coolant temp sensor, tach signal vehicle speed sensor signal and fuel level sensor. doing this would keep most things in the car happy, although the check engine light will be permanently on.
i did a megasquirt 2 on an l61 swap around 2006. same engine is now being run by an antiquated microtech ecm in my porsche. i just received my megasquirt 3x today thats going on the car for next year.
im glad. clearly trimming the cams didn't cause that to happen.
I agree and so did the tech. Said they've seen that many times before with other people making the cams work with their 2.2 and weren't worried about that. They could have been dicks about it though if they wanted but I am glad they weren't.
getting the car to run with a stand alone isnt too much of an issue, its gettiung everything else in the car to work. if you want to maintain the cobalt gauge cluster you will likely need to keep the factory ecm in the car and at least feed it with its own coolant temp sensor, tach signal vehicle speed sensor signal and fuel level sensor. doing this would keep most things in the car happy, although the check engine light will be permanently on.
Looking into this a little I had the same observation as JD, not a whole lot of information on how to execute this on a GM ecotec car. I imagine there would be many reasons for the car ECU to be pissed off and not crank, looking at the Haltech Elite 1500 wiring diagram, I don't see any starter relay output so I assume it will rely on the car to deal with this. I guess you could just do push button starter though with this example...
I have dropped the front cradle assembly and removed the transmission.
Once the transmission was off I also removed the pressure plate. Both the pressure plate and flywheel indicate there was a misalignment of some sort or something was warped. When I installed flywheel I torqued to spec. Pressure plate was installed in steps so as to not warp and was torqued spec once I worked the bolts in a turn at a time. Transmission was mated to engine and it appeared to be fitting tight all the way around so I don't think there was misalignment there.
Obvious uneven wear with a single hot spot. Flywheel indicates uneven wear as well. Hot spot on flywheel as well. This higher wear spot lines up with pressure plate high wear spot.
So what do y'all think I have going on here? Bad pressure plate? Is my flywheel fucked or salvageable? What can I and should I check/measure?
Just out of curiosity I tested my methanol system. Not very impressed with the spray pattern. I think the bore is too deep for the nozzles and is interfering with the cone of mist making the big drops form. I'm not sure what I am going to do to address this situation yet but I would prefer a much more uniform mist if I can achieve it.
for the water meth, the end of the nozzle should be flush or protruding, because of how wide a cone the nozzles produce if they are inset they will tend to puddle. also looks like your spraying a whole lot, what nozzles (volume and brand) do you have? if your running a high volume your pump might not be able to make the pressure needed for best atomization also adding to things.
something is definitely not flat in your clutch, either the flywheel isnt completely flat, or your pressure plate is no good.
12-13-2018, 05:56 PM
Good on them.
