Frankendart Lives!

-
jomoper said:
Great looking and sounding Dart! Your doing an awesome job.Will there be a video of it ripping down the road next?
Click to expand...

Lol, maybe, depends on if I can get my brother to give me a hand with the camera. The TTI rep I bought my headers from actually asked me to write him a story detailing the swap to publish in the newsletter they put out. Part one of it came out in the last one a few months back. He was asking for an action (burnout in his exact words, lol) pic now that the car's running, so I'll have to come up with something.
 
MARTIN said:
SaaaWeeeet! Sounds really good. You are using a stock cam aren't you? How does it run with the ModMan?

Good Job!
Click to expand...

Yep, stock cam for now. Down the road I really want to toss in an Inertia SRT Max rumbler cam. I saw the video on their website with the Charger that has one and I'm hooked, I have to have that lump for my car, lol. I'm still tracking down issues with the tuning, but it's been getting better.

So far I've found three things that all caused the same symptom. I had a bog and stutter at full throttle hits for a while now. First I figured the restrictive little air filter I had because of hood clearance was the issue, and it did run better without it, but still off. Next I borrowed the MAP sensor from my parents 5.7 Ram and that helped out too. Just the other day I cranked the car up and the fuel line was spraying all over the intake. Luckily it was still cold, but I found out one of my fuel lines had gotten rock hard and cracked, so now with that replaced the car runs better still. I think it had been cracked for a while now and leaking air or something because it threw off the idle mixture screws when I put the new hose on. It takes full throttle in first with no problems now, but still just a little hesitation in the other gears. Found a shop in town with a chassis dyno that does tuning per hour charge, so I'll probably drop by there for an hour or so when I get some extra money and see if I can't track it down.

It's a blast to drive around town and has plenty of power on the highway, but I still feel like it's leaving something on the table. I would have thought a 3200 pound car with 350-400 hp would be harder on the tires, but so far they've been hooking up pretty good. The butt dyno says the car likes 3/4 throttle more than full, so I think the tuning is probably off or I can dump some more timing in it since the advance doesn't pull all the way off at partial throttle.
 
Update! I think I've finally sorted out the bogging issues. The engine has been cutting out some at higher rpms and never seemed to pull quite as hard or high as I thought it should. Knowing that my parents 5.7 Ram would pull to 6k hard made me wonder why mine seemed to give up around 5k, especially with the long tube headers and shorter runners of the Indy intake. I figured with the high rpm cut that the fuel pump might not have been putting out enough since it was just a little part store carb pump. Ordered a Carter 72 gph pump and threw it in today and it runs much better with pretty much no issues under full throttle stabs once it's warm. Now I just need to get it tuned up since I think I'm leaving a fair deal on the table as it sits now.
 
Lol, yeah, though I think I'm to the point where I wouldn't mind taking it to the strip for some time slips. I think I'd still be a little disappointed by the numbers, but at least I think the engine would run smoothly for the whole pull as opposed to cutting out like it was before.

Right now I'm playing around with the knock sensors and trying to see if I can make a little circuit that will light an LED whenever the knock sensors pass a certain threshold. I've found some circuits online that should do it, but the Dodge knock sensors are like no other ones apparently. They don't measure any resistance across any pins or to ground like others are supposed to (I measured what I assume are good ones in my grandparents 5.7 truck that doesn't have any codes showing and still got nothing), and the wiring makes even less sense. Both wires to the driver's side sensor showed 2.6 volts or so on my grandparents truck and the passenger side both had 0 volts. From what I can guess they are resonant sensors that require a certain frequency before they really put out any output. It seems like the carb cars really like timing from what I've seen on the forum and experienced myself, and I think that would account for some of my missing power, but I don't want to push it too far with stock pistons, so a knock LED would be a nice addition, however crude it might be.

The other thing would be to tie into the stock O2 sensors with a meter or something and see where the carb appears to be tuned. I'll probably take the car to a dyno some day when I get the extra money to afford it, but for now it would be fun to see what I can come up with using what I have.
 
For anyone interested, I hooked into the stock O2 sensors with a multimeter (they just put out a 0-1v signal, so it's pretty easy to read), and found that the car was pretty lean on full throttle. I know it's just a narrowband stock sensor and not super accurate, but I went ahead and bought a bigger set of jets for the secondaries and the car is a whole new animal. It pulls hard all the way up to 6000 and my little windshield accelerometer tells me the jet change alone was worth 20-40 hp. Still stumbling off of a full throttle hit though, was going to try to put a bigger discharge nozzle on it, but need to order one as no one around here stocks Carter (Edelbrock) carb tuning parts. That or I need to find someone around here that would let me borrow a different carb for a day and see if that fixes it.
 
Well, looks like the issue resides in the carb tuning. I leaned it out some, but it still shows rich when cruising. Figured I'd unplug the MAP sensor to negate the vacuum advance curve as a test and the thing doesn't skip a beat when you hammer down now. It's running rich enough that it doesn't need the advance on cruising, so unless I buy some more carb tuning pieces I guess I'll just leave the sensor unplugged.
 
dude check out dynomax VT mufflers....sooo sick and you won't need cutouts!!! did you end up keeping any of the old LA small block stuff from the 318? were you looking to get rid of any of it? PM me! haha thanks, -Dan (ps, i am very jealous of your engine sway i still got a /6:(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
-

Back
Top