Assorted ramblings and bolt-ons with Daniel and George

[Keiths1976]

Daniel I’m so sorry about everything and your loss . Sending my prayers that life will make its way back together or start over new

[Duke George V]

Shit went sideways last night, but all things considered, everything went way better than it could have. I got some new tires put on the wagon. I left the shop, drove a short distance, stopped to get out to take a picture of my new kicks, then had a gigantic freakout.



A transmission cooler line blew off suddenly. I got it fixed and refilled, but man, that was wild. If I hadn't gone to get tires, that could have happened on my commute this morning. That would have turned a $50 oopsie into a $2000 transmission rebuild.

[tlc1976]

Good thing you were able to catch that. One time downstate with my kid, I blew a cooler line while driving in BFE and and the car eventually started skipping. I knew what it had to be so I stopped and dumped in a gallon I had in the back. Carrying around extra fluids on trips is nice. Got me about 20 miles up the road to AutoZone so I was able to fix the line in the parking lot.

[Duke George V]

GENTLEMEN

[tlc1976]

Nice. Does that make 3 Century wagons in the stable now?

I towed quite a bit when I had my 90 6000 wagon. It did well, aside from the gas mileage being just about cut in half.

Looking forward to taking out my Cruiser, but we got a month or two of winter left.

[Duke George V]

No, two wagons. The brown one went away a couple years ago after I took parts off it. It was a disaster, not worth reviving. I still have the yellow '92 sedan though.

[Duke George V]

FUCK Interstate 40.



Potholes on that shitty stretch of tarmac completely buggered my alignment. These tires are three weeks old, with less than 3000 miles on them.

[Duke George V]

Image hosting site Imgur will be removing images not associated with an account.

Like many of you, I have been using imgur for hosting for a long time, anonymously. It will be a monumental task to rehost everything I've posted here over the years. I feel like a lot of this thread (and my old head gasket thread from 2013) will probably end up dying. I'll do what I can, but there isn't a ton of time. May 15th, apparently.

[tlc1976]

Wow that’s crazy. Michigan is always a mess between the potholes and road sections shifted by the frost. So I don’t pay for alignments, I just sight down the car and it comes out damn close. Usually mine doesn’t go that far off though. It breaks the balljoints first. I’ve gotten to where I run my tires softer than I should on all my vehicles, but it’s so cold here that my tires don’t burn up.

I remember that time I went to the show in DC. The potholes on the interstate were like craters. I blew the belts in my brand new front tires.

A month from now I’ll have had that car for 20 years. Still drive it most days when there’s no snow.

[Duke George V]

Alright fellas, here's a little treat for y'all that's relevant to the thread:

And finally, here's a couple photos of work done on the black wagon.

Getting started:


On the agenda is general tune-up stuff: rotate tires, spark plugs and wires, air filter, clean the MAF, fuel filter, engine oil and filter, transmission oil and filter. I've been experiencing what feels like a misfire recently, so the goal is to chase that down.

We've all done plugs before, so here's the important image:


Looks like #2 had a pretty bad crack in it, unless that's just gunk. They're all the correct Delco plug for the engine (41-601), which is nice to see. I replaced them with Autolite 605 gapped to 0.060", as that's the currently recommended plug in the 60degreev6 community. Everything else went about how one would expect for a tune-up. The transmission oil smelled and looked a bit spicy but not quite burnt, and the magnet didn't have very much on it.


Couple interesting things to note. It seems as though someone has been in this transmission at some point. There was RTV gunked all around the pan's edge. The pan was unpainted, and is probably aftermarket, since it doesn't have

DIV OF GMC
Hydra-Matic
4T60

embossed into it, and the gasket was the typical aftermarket rubber style. The side pan had RTV in the edge as well. I'm not complaining about any of that, mind you. It's just pleasantly surprising.

The misfire cleared up quite a bit after all that, and it starts faster with a fresh fuel filter. However, I still feel it sometimes when passing on the highway. I'm going to try rerouting the 7x crank sensor wire to see if that's the problem. I had that issue on the white wagon a number of years ago:

[Keiths1976]

Brother I got to the junk yard and snag the 3400 one up to 2005 it’s in better condition and pops right in what usually breaks is the stupid clip on the engine .

[Duke George V]

It's finally cooling off in Vegas, and I'm sick of trying to figure out why the black wagon is still misfiring after basically rebuilding the ignition system, so it's time for George to ride again! Gonna get an alignment soon.

[Pontiac6ksteawd]

I forgot what engine that has in it... But have you ohmed the injectors yet? My 2.8 and 3.1 both had injector issues that felt like a misfire

[Duke George V]

It has an L82. I'm leaning toward injectors, but since testing that requires pulling the upper intake, I'm not going to do that just yet. I plan to change over to the non-A-body-style throttle body, throttle position sensor, and mass air flow sensor, and get another '97 W-body PCM from Milzy. There's a '98 Grand Am at the yard up the street that's not been picked apart yet, so I'll grab the upper, TB, TPS, cruise module, throttle cables, and MAF from that. Then I'll probably just slam in some new injectors as a matter of course.

I know I said when I bought this car that I didn't plan to do any modifications, but I consider the MAF swap a necessity at this point. It's becoming more and more difficult to acquire the Buick-style MAF, since it was only used on a few cars for a few years. Whereas the newer style was used on many more cars for many more years, so it's both more plentiful at the yard and easier to buy new if I need to. The factory TPS doesn't seem to be calibrated correctly either, reporting 66% at actual WOT. And yes, "while I'm in there", why not just upgrade to the 2000+ top end, right? No time, money, or motivation for that.

[tlc1976]

What plugs are you running? I tried the platinum style skinny tipped plugs before and mine ran like crap. Back to the standard AC copper plugs and ran great. I’ve read from others who had the same experience with these engines.