Project Stink Ray Engine

Hey, welcome to a horse power shop full of cool Corvettes and even our latest project we affectionately call Stink Ray.

We'll get to the beast in a moment but first a quick look at one of the beauties. How about a faithful reproduction of a 1963 grand

for

Corvette race car?

This one was built by Bill Adams the same man who helped develop the original,

he used the original blueprints of the Grand sport to build this four inch tube chassis by transferring it to AC ad system.

Then added a day a 44 rear end with 409 gear

pull over shocks and

cfour Corvette brakes

on top. The race belt body is faithful to the original, but the real fun is under the hood. Those exotic weber carbs are just for show. You see, they're used as throttle bodies for the fuel injection system

hidden under the intake of a 383 small block making about 450 horse.

Well, today we're gonna take this 383 small block we built up on the show last week and drop it into our director. Don's 76 Stingray. Hey, but before we get down to business. Here's a quick update for you.

After pushing the old ramshackle right into the shop, we went to work, finishing up the Stroker short block. We got from Huntsville engine and performance.

We used a moroso oil pan to button up the bottom end.

A Haley system, X two induction package

and added a March accessory drive system.

Today, we plan on dropping in this 383 along with a new transmission headers and exhaust. But when I went to work, pulling out the old engine and trans, I was in for a little surprise and it wasn't pretty,

the old engine came out pretty easy

and the old transmission came out pretty easy too.

But after I got the radiator out,

that's when things got pretty ugly,

the car's radiator core support was completely rotted out a big problem in these older vets. So I removed it and got another one on its way.

I also found a huge crack in the fiberglass firewall.

So I prepped it by cleaning it with Acetone

and then sanded it down.

Then after mixing up some resin, I applied it to the firewall,

followed by a strip of fiberglass pad and repeated that about four times.

I'm still itching a little from all that fiberglass flying around. Now, after it all cured, I went back over it and the rest of the engine bay with a sander and then touched it up with some black paint looks pretty good considering what I started with.

Well, I'll sure vouch for that. Now, before we drop in our new motor, I'm gonna lay in our headers first. Trust me, it's gonna be a lot easier to do it now

than once the engine's bolted and, and we try to snake them in from the bottom side, check out these headers. Now, these things come from headman and they feature a 38 inch flange here for a nice leak proof seal. Plus the tubing is 14 gauge for extra long life. Now, the primaries are one and +58 inch diameter and they feed into a three inch collector here on one more thing we popped for their extra cost, ceramic thermal coding.

Well, here's a little problem that Mike found out about when he lifted the old engine out the boom on our engine hoist. There just doesn't extend far enough to clear the long snout on the old projects. Stink ray here.

So, what we've done is remove the front tire through a jack stand under here and now we're gonna attack this thing from the side.

All right, let's see here. All right.

All right. That's it.

We only want to do this job once. So we're sealing up our headers with a set of copper seals from Mr gasket. Now, here's a tip. Just start the outer two header bolts and the gasket will slide right into place

as soon as we get the stink ray in the air, we can install this new transmission from underneath. By the way, this is a good match for our Stroker.

It's a th 350 for B and M good for the street. And even some strip use has recalibrated valve body, high performance friction plates and a new adjustable modulator.

Now check out the guts of the torque converter, this whole shot, it's going to work with it

and this thing has furnace bra

fins,

heavy duty torrent and bearings and should give us a stall speed of about 2500 RPM. S

Oh, here's an important tip for you.

The new converter comes with this new front seal. You wanna make sure you put this on your old transmission if you're reusing it.

Now, before we can install our new set up, I need to bolt up this new flex plate to the crank shaft.

Now, this also comes from B and M and it's sf I approve, which means the flex plate and ring gear won't fail even under high RPM.

Well, as soon as I get through torque in these boats to 55 ft pounds and after the break, more projects stink. Right.

Welcome back to horsepower and the Corvette Corral. Now, before we get started working back on old project, stink ray over there,

I know you had have noticed this classic 66 Corvette sitting in the background.

It belongs to a friend of ours from year one which by the way has recently started offering reproduction parts for Corvettes built through 1982 and I'm sure we're gonna be burning up the phone lines

once old projects stink. Right. Gets a little bit further along now under the hood. This thing's got a 427 aluminum head big block that cranks out about 500 horsepower

and it's got that classic road race. Look thanks to the fender flares and those five spoke Americans,

our Corvettes got a long way to go to look that good,

but we're making progress

so far today, we've dropped in our 383 Stroker

and just finished bolting up that B and M turbo 350

with the car still up in the air. Now is a good time to help that Stroker exhale a little better

earlier, I got a head start cutting off some of the exhaust where the trusty saws off.

Now it's time to remove the rest of the system.

Here's what we're replacing those old pipes with. We got these 2.5 inch ones from Flow Master and various mantle bit pieces so we could fab up our own exhaust system.

Now, for mufflers, we're going with their super forties and Classic black. Of course, this is the highest flowing muffler they make for the street

and to make sure we're a street legal, we're gonna replace the single factory catalytic converter with a pair of these metal cats from supreme performance.

They should match the flow of our mufflers pretty well.

We started by boating the producers to the collectors.

Next we slide a piece of our pipe through the cross member

and tack it to the producer.

This is where the cat's gonna go and then the rest of the exhaust is gonna run out the back to the stock location. Now, before we get any further, I wanna drop the gas tank and see what kind of condition it's in.

Since the car's been sitting for so long, we know the fuel is no good.

And from the looks of it, the tank's never been out before.

As expected, the fuel was all tarnished with a lot of sediment from the bottom of the tank.

But things got worse inside. I found pieces of the filler neck, even a main baffle that was broken off at the welds

on top of that, there's a few small holes in this liner allowing fuel to get between the liner and the tank. Now, it's a good thing. We didn't just flush it out and refill it because you don't want to run a whole bunch of trash through a brand new fuel filter or a carburetor.

So by some small miracle, if I can get another one of these today,

we'll put it in.

Well, miracle or not, we gotta have a starter eventually. So I'm gonna bolt up this little power master. Now, don't let the science fool you, this excess torque model was designed to spin over high compression, big blocks so it ought to have no trouble with our little Corvette.

Our mission system is gonna work together well too, because it all comes from crane. Now, at the heart of the system is their street race distributor with a billet aluminum body

and a small diameter cap. So this thing is gonna fit in some pretty tight spaces. That's a fully electronic distributor with no weights or springs inside, but check it out. It has nine preprogrammed mechanical advanced curves and three for the vacuum advance. Plus, it also has a built and map sensor and check this out. This slip collar right here

allows you to adjust the height for different deck heights in your block. Now, the wires we're gonna plug into it are crane's 8.5 millimeter race plug wires. The silicone insulation jacket and spark plug boots are gonna give protection up to 600 degrees and with only 25 ohms of resistance per foot. Well, we're gonna get full spark energy to the spark plugs

while Chuck installs the distributor and wires. Let me show you the ignition box we got, it's a high six multi spark unit that delivers up to 10 times more energy than a stock ignition system.

The rev limiter is adjustable without changing any chips and it's got a small led that blinks trouble coats to help you troubleshoot any ignition problems we're gonna wrap the system up with this LX series coil. Now, this thing's been designed to give out high energy in a compact package and it's specifically for CD ignition

systems. Now, all I gotta do is find a place to mount it. All

the box should be mounted in a place where it gets plenty of air flow around it and away from moisture.

Well, the same thing goes for the coil, but you need to remember to keep it within 18 inches of the distributor. Now, speaking of that, I've already mounted up the distributor here and we're gonna finish wiring it all up while you take a short break. Now, when we come back, we're gonna finish up the fuel system and the cooling system and if we get lucky, we might even hear this monster run today.

Hey, welcome back to the horsepower shop as we finish up our day's work on project Stink Ray here. This of course is a 1976 Corvette owned and uh may I say neglected by our director, Don Karet,

but we're bringing her back to life so far with an engine, transmission, exhaust and ignition. Now, we need to turn our attention to the cooling system

earlier. You may remember seeing Mike remove what was left of the car's radiator core support.

Well, here's the GM replacement we ordered and installed from mid America motors for,

well, with that core support bolted up, I guess we're ready for this aluminum radar that we got from B cool. Now we've used their stuff before so we know this thing's gonna work. Well, it's got extra cooling capacity. Thanks to a pair of one inch cooling flues here and this high efficiency fin design.

Now we pop for their optional cooling fan module here that includes a pair of small fans,

all the wiring relays and the brackets that you need

to make it all work.

The radiator mounts in the stock location,

then we can mount the dual relays,

install attempt sensor switch

and finish the wiring system.

That'll take care of the engines cooling. But what about the transmission? We're gonna handle that with this B and M super cooler that uses a pretty interesting flat plate construction.

It's about 33% more efficient than the old round two fin style.

You see fluid actually flows through flat metal tubes in here and that gives more contact area with the air flow coming through. This thing.

Installation is pretty simple using the four nylon mounting rods from the kit.

They've got pads on the other side to protect the radiator

and we just use these locks to keep them in place.

Now, we just take some of this hose from the kit and run lines to and from the transmission.

It's finally time to start running the fuel system and we're gonna start it out with this mechanical fuel pump from Haley. Now this thing flows 100 and 10 gallons per hour and to get the fuel from the pump to the carburetor, we're gonna use some A N lines and fittings from Earl's

with the fuel pump in place. We can run a dash eight line from the pump to the fuel filter.

Now, we can install the feed line on the carburetor

tape, our steel braided line to prevent fraying and cut that to the proper length

and run that line from the filter to the carburetor.

Well, that about wraps up the fuel lines on the top of the engine. Now it's time to add some fluids for the transmission. We're using royal purple max A TF.

Now, this stuff is designed for high temperature applications and exceeds all the oe specs for Ford and Chevrolet.

We're gonna break in our engine with this petroleum based motor oil. Then after we run it a couple of 100 miles and break in the rings and bearings,

we're gonna switch to some of this royal purple synthetic. Now, the reason is, of course, synthetics have more lubricity

and that will even

the rings from ceiling to the cylinders. Plus we get less friction and wear and better gas mileage. Well, obviously, we're not gonna be firing up the stink R today. We need that fuel system complete. But hey, I say we made some major headway. Remember what the engine looked like when we started?

Well,

this is proof that we've earned our keep today, don't you think

horsepower TV S Quick Tech is brought to you by

Wyotech.

It doesn't matter what kind of car you drive, you want your lights to work inside and outside.

But if you just bolted on that aftermarket power adder,

huh? There's one light you never want to see.

Adam Steffi keeps automotive students at Wyotech abreast of the latest onboard diagnostic gear and how they analyze problems.

Well, this is our OTC Genesis scan tool. This gives us all our information anywhere from uh codes to all our parameter identification for each individual sensor in the vehicle.

We can actually scroll down here and see each individual sensor,

actuate, outputs, uh check the, check the parameter identification for the sensors and so on and so forth.

If you install a larger than normal exhaust system or too large of an exhaust system,

you decrease your back pressure, too much and you could affect your EGR

valve, which in turn could turn on your mill light.

Let's say we had a more aggressive cam. Adam.

How's that gonna affect the computer?

Well, actually, it could affect it in a couple of different ways. Joe, we have uh normally when people had a high performance cam shaft, they increase the duration or how long the valve stays open and the lift of the cam as well

that can affect it. A couple of different things. We have the map sensor here which senses vacuum.

Now the overlap and the uh high duration of the CAM and so on is gonna affect my manifold vacuum, which in turn is gonna send a signal back to the PC M sensing that low vacuum.

Uh The PC M may interpret that as a low manifold vacuum condition and turn on the mill lamp.

Usually manufacturers will let you know that the the vehicle needs to be uh reprogrammed, possibly a high performance chip. Uh whether the fuel pressure maybe needs turned up something along those lines.

Well, another after Margaret swap might be from a flat top to a dome piston. How's the computer going like that?

Well, actually, Joe, what happens here is when you go to a dome type piston, you affect the compression ratio actually increasing it quite dramatically with this type of piston.

When that happens, you in turn uh increase the chances of detonation to occur.

When detonation occur,

this sensor here will, will pick that up as a detonation sensor or knock sensor. This will send a signal back to the computer which will in turn retard the timing and cause performance problems as well.

Adam says superchargers and turbos actually are less likely to upset the OBD

because of the way they make power

normally under wide open throttle emissions is not monitored at all. So

uh depending on what you install, such as a super charger, a turbo charge or maybe nitrous oxide,

those usually are more prevalent at wide open throttle and it doesn't check them as often.

Hey, let's get to the point

multi point that is if you're thinking about making that conversion in your non emissions carbureted engine. Well, now you can

with one of Edel

Brock's pro flow EF I systems, everything you need to start enjoying more horsepower and throttle response even better fuel economy. Now, here's the manifold that comes with the system, it's ready to go everything from the fuel rails to the fuel injectors.

Of course, the brain. So the kid is right here, this ECM

that comes with a separate chip calibrated for your application.

Of course, you also get this calibration module and this thing lets you make all kinds of adjustments right from the front seat without a laptop.

Now, they've got these systems for Fords, Chevys Mos

and now even AM CS and Jeeps the price. Well, they start at about $2100.

All right, I'll give you three seconds to guess what this is.

Give up.

Well, it's for all you guys who hate looking at those old discolored calipers.

Here's a cool way to hide them. It's nostalgia's new wheel accents that help eliminate brake dust and brighten the appearance of custom wheels. Now, they're pre drilled for a variety of different lug patterns and better yet

they're made a 20 gauge polish stainless and laser cut for a mere like finish.

Now, they're available for wheel sizes from 15 to 20 inch and the price Well, that depends on your wheel size,

but our time is about up. We will bring the vet back in a couple of weeks. Not only to hear it run, but to improve the handling, breaking and believe it or not even the looks. Meanwhile, we're working on a hot edition of horsepower for you next week. Don't you dare miss it.