Techno Duck's LS1 conversion

What you explained sounds normal to me. First gear has always been temperamental on my car even after 2 different transmissions, i never engage it unless its at a complete stop. And with the torque from this motor its usually not necessary to use anything other than 2nd.

Fitted the Spal 16" straight blade fan with the rubber shroud gasket. The gasket has to be trimmed to fit the radiator profile; a little bit of trial and error fitment was all that was needed.

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Overall i am quite happy with how everything fits with the shroud gasket. The fan is now totally sealed around the core of the radiator. Have not been able to run the car with the fan yet, will complete the wiring tomorrow. I test ran the fan with two leads directly off the battery and it sounds like an air raid siren going off. The curved blade fan was fairly loud, i would say this is probably 10-15% louder!

The rubber shroud gasket raises the mounting depth of the fan slightly. The fan took some playing with to slide in and out of place, clearance with the tip of the waterpump pulley is tight!

Will report back with results soon.

Just under 1800 miles on the swap right now, right around 500 miles on the new clutch now. It is running great... car sat for a little over 3 weeks while i was away. She fired right up yesterday and hasnt given any fuss.. really loving the car!  

Looks good. I like the uncovered areas of the radiator, which should aid cooling at speed.

One warning for you, watch out for the spring-loaded serpentine belt tensioner. Mine chucked the belt off on the track. Lemming, Mark A and I have all gone with one of these:

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Rich

Rich, good reminder. Ive been meaning to 'upgrade' to the Katech fixed one.. if i remember right i was having trouble deciding what color anodizing to get so i never ordered. Are these the only types of problems i have to look forward too with the LS1?   .

Rich L. wrote:Looks good. I like the uncovered areas of the radiator, which should aid cooling at speed.

One warning for you, watch out for the spring-loaded serpentine belt tensioner. Mine chucked the belt off on the track. Lemming, Mark A and I have all gone with one of these:

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Rich

^ + 1

However, this could allow the belt to be over tensioned.

Is there a tool to allow the tension to be measured while being manually adjusted to prevent over stressing the limits of the shafts/bearings of the various components, e.g. alternator, p/s pump, water pump?...and if there is...what is the recommended tension?  (Like the old 944 timing & balance shaft belts.)

The tension on the belt is set with a torque wrench.

Katech PDF instructions

ummm...about $500 less than the 944 'Special Tool'  

Techno Duck wrote:The tension on the belt is set with a torque wrench.

I have one of those tensioners and I guess I missed the torque'ing process. What's the torque spec that you apply to it?
Thanks!

I have the Katech tensioner...

Completed fan install and have put about 100 miles on the car so far. The temps now drop very slowly while sitting at idle instead of the slow creep up. Basically if i were to get stuck in traffic on a hot day the fan would still likely never shut off but i dont think it would overheat. I think this is as good as its going to get for now working with a single 16" fan. Looking at things closer, fabricating a proper shroud would be difficult also, to do it correctly would require spacing the fan off the core some and space is tight between the waterpump pulley tip and fan housing as is, also the fan motor is about .75" from the crank pulley.. so really not much space to work with.

I would say i am only 99% satisfied with this now but i still have concerns sitting in summer time Jershey shore traffic on the NJ Turnpike in the middle of August on a 100 degree day coming back from NJMP, but ill see how this does for a few months. Right now i think the best solution would be dual fans. The single fan covers about 75% of the core, i think with dual fans unshrouded it would cover closer to 85-90% of the core with proper placement. You could run the more efficient paddle blade fans also due to no space limitations from the crank or waterpump pulley. I dont think the stock fans will be an option.. space is too tight with the thicker core.

Anyhow one thing led to another and i checked all of the hose clamps to make sure they were all tight. While i tried the heater control valve as soon as i put just a hair of torque on the clamp the plastic barbed fitting snapped off. Not a huge deal... new heater control valve was in stock at Advanced Auto down the block from my house . I decided to relocate the heater control valve also. It was originally sitting right over the headers and no doubt it was cooked from all of the ambient heat. Infact the two barbed fittings on the heater side were quite deformed, on the waterpump side they were fine. This is likely because no coolant flow going through the valve on that side to help cool it off. Anyhow i am happy i found this in the driveway rather than at the track!

I relocated the valve further forward a few inches off the waterpump... this was also no issue because i had bought spare heater hoses a few weeks ago from Autozone to keep in my track spares box. Talk about an easy fix.. this would have resulted in a weeks downtime waiting for parts if it still had the turbo motor!

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The control valve used to be right next to the fuel pressure regulator so it was really not in a great spot heat wise. The red gasket material around the hoses is just to prevent rub through from the zip ties.

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Replaced the belt tensioner with the Katech one, it only took about 10 minutes, i wasnt sure what to do with all my free time so i went for a drive . Hit the 2k mile mark finally.

I have a few odds and ends to finish up. I noticed i was getting around .8v of voltage drop between the battery and connector for the fan. This is quite high, i probed around the wiring run and noticed across the fuse alone i was losing .09v, the holder was getting quite warm also. The other big loss was at the wire run from the relay to the fan connector, .42v!

The entire wire run right now was all 12ga it seemed.. the run from the relay to the connector looked almost inbetween 12 and 14ga wire. Anyhow i replaced the fuse holder with a heavy duty one with 10ga leads. Tomorrow i am going to replace the wire run from the relay to the connector with 10ga wire as well. I am hoping to cut that voltage drop in half with these slight changes.. that should increase the efficiency of the fan some also.

Another thing on my list is to replace the 4ga battery feed from the alternator with a 2ga cable. With its current run, the cable off the alternator is about 7ft long. So to 'overkill' the charging system id like to switch it to 2ga. Ill probably do this over the winter.

Here is how the engine bay currently looks; i still need to clean up the wiring along the firewall.

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Over the summer I did some wiring changes as well, upgraded the wiring to my fan and fuel pump (both have relays within 2 feet). I really need to change my alternator wire as well, since my battery sits behind the passenger seat. I'm currently using 4ga and should go to 2.

I'm running a 16" spal fan as well. When my engine is heat soaked after coming off the track, the fan will keep the temps from going up, but it doesn't drop temps for quite some time. However, I prefer a non shrouded fan for the track since it provides better flow at speed.

Tim, ive noticed that if i leave the plastic under tray off the car cools off at idle without issue, quite quickly actually. With the lower tray on it will just barely show a drop in temp on my digital gauge which reads off the upper coolant hose; i am talking it will drop maybe a tenth of a degree every 5-10 seconds. I will continue to run the lower tray though to aid air pulling through the radiator at speed. On the highway the car runs perfectly cool, i dont expect any issues on the track either. Unfortunately there is not much space to fit a more powerful fan, so i am just trying to get this one as efficient as possible.

Which fan are you running? Straight blade or curved?

I do notice at night with my headlights and fogs on, when the fan starts it dims the lights considerably and the idle tends to hunt sometimes aswell. I am running one of the old Iceshark headlight harnesses run directly off the alternator. The 4ga cable also routes along the intake manifold on the engine so it gets plenty of heat soak, so i just dont think its enough to keep up with all of the current draw.

The fuel pump i have been meaning to do for a while.. i am currently running a Bosch pump from a late 70's / early 80's Mercedes 460 SEL 4.9L which is rated at about 10amp continuous draw. It would not surprise me if i was getting quite a bit of voltage drop. This pump is sort of inbetween the stock and 044 pump.

I have the curved blade "Syclone" as seen here [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

As for pumps, I'm using the Walbro 392, which does pull quite a few amps [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Techno Duck wrote:[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Just out of curiosity, what are the two cylinder or canister items between the headlight motor and the dipstick? The front one has three red swoosh marks.

JJR512 wrote:Just out of curiosity, what are the two cylinder or canister items between the headlight motor and the dipstick? The front one has three red swoosh marks.

That's a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] dual catch can. I have the same setup on mine.

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BTW Jon, you have your breather lines backwards. It's supposed to be in the top and out the side.

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From Saikou Michi's diagram:
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Unless I'm cross eyed, that's the way he has it

Rich, great eye! I will fix that later on.. yet another thing to fix from the shop that originally put the car together

I finished up rewiring the fans last week and put maybe 100 miles on everything. Cooling ability seems to have increased somewhat. I was able to reduce the voltage drop at the fan to around .55v running, down from .80. This is about as good as it will get i think.

I also cleaned all of the battery terminals and eliminated the 150a breaker i was using as a battery kill switch. After doing all of this, i swear the car runs much better. With the headlights on, when the fan kicks on it no longer dims the lights momentarily or causes the hunting idle. I found the 4ga cable between the alternator and battery was really poorly done.. more fall out from the first shop. The crimped on terminal at the battery was a 2ga lug with a 4ga wire.. so you can imagine how well that worked. I also made up a 2ga cable to replace that 4ga one.. but i will have to enlarge the hole in the firewall some. After all of the work i did, i lost interest when i found i would need to use a step drill bit to enlarge the hole in the firewall to feed the 2ga cable through. That ill save for the winter maybe.

2 day event at NJMP in about 4 weeks.. cant wait!

That's mine above. This is Jon's from the previous page.

Techno Duck wrote:[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Jon, good work on the wiring. I did a bunch of that, enlarging wires and replacing switches to find that it was my starter solenoid that was bad. Glad your fan is working well.

Rich L. wrote:That's mine above. This is Jon's from the previous page.

Ok, I'm only half crazy, I was looking at your pic thinking, "that looks right to me"

Fixed catch can hose routing, thanks again to Rich for pointing that out! The car will be parked the next 3 weeks until i get back home again; then two days at NJMP i cant wait for!

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The car probably wont be seeing much usage after the two track days in October. I am planning on moving out to San Diego later this year. Id love to take the car out there but would require far too much time and money to make it pass CA smog. I am hoping to make it back every month or two so i can possibly make a track day with it. Its unfortunate that ill likely be using it even less than i am now after everything has been sorted out on it.. but i can say i am atleast confident be basically turn key every time i come home. I dont fear any gremlins popping up like every time i left the turbo motor sitting for extended periods!

I am thinking about buying a 2015 Subaru BRZ to use while in Cali.. and yes i have already looked at LS1 swaps for them

Buy a pick up and trailer, then use the 944LS as a track car! Lots of great tracks out that way.

Lemming wrote:Buy a pick up and trailer, then use the 944LS as a track car!

2nd !!

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I thought about it! I already have a Tacoma also.. So it would just mean buying a trailer, though I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to find a bigger truck. I wonder if it could handle long elevation changes.

Also storage of the trailer might be difficult depending on the place I decide on.

It is something I have considered though! My 951 has been in NY since new, it would almost be like retirement for it bringing it down to Southern California.