hoping to shake it down this sunday 4/2 at island
94 Formula Has Been Sold - But not forgotten
On March 20 I closed a deal on selling my 1994 Firebird - purchased new 27.5 years ago. This heavily modified car had been sitting in my garage undriven, for several years. I've reached the age (80 years old) where I'm not capable of maintaining it and continuing to modify it. I had never reached my goal of making a 9-second pass, even though the car was fully capable of it.
I had several people interested, but they seemed to want to convert it back to a "street" car, and that was at odds with what I wanted for the car. I was looking for someone who fully understood the car and wanted to continue on my path to proving its capabilities.
I was fortunate to find someone "local"... someone who had admired the car for years, someone I had helped several times on the ltxtech.com site, and someone who was obviously "hands on" capable of continuing my work at my high standards. I will have every opportunity to watch the progress, and be present when it fulfills my goals,
Off it goes, into the sunset:
![Tire Wheel Vehicle Plant Automotive parking light]()
![Tire Vehicle registration plate Automotive parking light Wheel Vehicle]()
More progress info to follow.
I had several people interested, but they seemed to want to convert it back to a "street" car, and that was at odds with what I wanted for the car. I was looking for someone who fully understood the car and wanted to continue on my path to proving its capabilities.
I was fortunate to find someone "local"... someone who had admired the car for years, someone I had helped several times on the ltxtech.com site, and someone who was obviously "hands on" capable of continuing my work at my high standards. I will have every opportunity to watch the progress, and be present when it fulfills my goals,
Off it goes, into the sunset:
More progress info to follow.
41 - 60 of 78 Posts
If you look at my posts above, at the bottom of the post, right hand corner is a down arrow. Click the arrow and my “signature” showing the build is there. Yes it was done 23 years ago. At the time, I used what I feel was the best ported stock heads availabel. They were flowing almost 300 CFM, best numbers available AT THAT TIME.
My build was intended to be a dual-purpose vehicle - fun on the street, decent in the 1/4-mile. It was also my purpose to keep the appearance of the car as stock as possible, at least from the outside.
In my mind the build was successful. The engine made 490 HP at the flywheel on 94-octane fuel. Fun on the street. I had opted for a solid roller cam. I would have wanted a more aggressive straight motor build. I dropped the car at the shop at the very end of 1999. Build was partly delayed because Callies was waiting for enough orders to do a production run on the 3.75” Stealth 1-pc RMS crankshaft. That took until April. But the sh*t hit the fan.
In February my employer sent me to northern Italy for 6 months. They had loaned me out to Honeywell to evaluate the expansion plans of a generic pharmaceutical plant they had just acquired, incidental to buying out another company. My input was limited. The shop seemed to focus on my want for a “street” build by setting “passing NJ emissions“ as a goal. They achieved that with the wimpy custom 230/242 114LSA 0.590/0.590 camshaft.
But the rest of the build went better - switch to arm the first stage of the nitrous system, and the MoTeC engine management was programmed to deliver a 125-shot of dry N2O…. still fun on the street. Use my thumb to push the button on the shifter and the MoTeC fired the 150 HP 2nd stage. At that time, flywheel HP on an engine dyno was 762.5 at 6,000 RPM, 752.6 lb-ft at 5,200 RPM.
www.firebirdnation.com
Not really useful on the street. Eventually the nitrous was bumped up to produce 800 HP/800 #-ft. But those numbers were arrived at using a chassis dyno, and back-calculating using the drive train losses of the original build, since we had both engine dyno and rear wheel chassis dyno numbers.
The choice of the solid roller cam has been questioned. Yes, the wimpy cam did not support high RPM. But…. it offered a significant factor in the nitrous build. With the TH400 the 760+ lb-ft hit of the nitrous. The engine rev limiter was set at 7,200 RPM, and the nitrous cutoff at 7,000 RPM. The shop the built the engine had a huge amount of experience with nitrous builds. They felt that it was better to run a large shot at higher RPM where cylinder pressures are reduced significantly. Yes, less torque, but more RPM, and we all know HP is torque X RPM. So, yes the solid roller made sense once the N2O was applied.
Unfortunately, the car never made a full nitrous pass. The math says it was a high 9-second build. Somewhere in my file folders there should be NA passes with a best of 11.5 and a best of 117 MPH (not on the same pass). There should be a pass with the 125-shot that wasn’t much in the way of ET (11.1) due to the soft launch on the converter, but hit 127.8 MPH.
Sorry for the long winded post, but it just seems the logic of my original build didn’t seem to make much sense, and to me it did.
My build was intended to be a dual-purpose vehicle - fun on the street, decent in the 1/4-mile. It was also my purpose to keep the appearance of the car as stock as possible, at least from the outside.
In my mind the build was successful. The engine made 490 HP at the flywheel on 94-octane fuel. Fun on the street. I had opted for a solid roller cam. I would have wanted a more aggressive straight motor build. I dropped the car at the shop at the very end of 1999. Build was partly delayed because Callies was waiting for enough orders to do a production run on the 3.75” Stealth 1-pc RMS crankshaft. That took until April. But the sh*t hit the fan.
In February my employer sent me to northern Italy for 6 months. They had loaned me out to Honeywell to evaluate the expansion plans of a generic pharmaceutical plant they had just acquired, incidental to buying out another company. My input was limited. The shop seemed to focus on my want for a “street” build by setting “passing NJ emissions“ as a goal. They achieved that with the wimpy custom 230/242 114LSA 0.590/0.590 camshaft.
But the rest of the build went better - switch to arm the first stage of the nitrous system, and the MoTeC engine management was programmed to deliver a 125-shot of dry N2O…. still fun on the street. Use my thumb to push the button on the shifter and the MoTeC fired the 150 HP 2nd stage. At that time, flywheel HP on an engine dyno was 762.5 at 6,000 RPM, 752.6 lb-ft at 5,200 RPM.
Dyno - Flywheel HP (orginal build)
www.firebirdnation.com
Not really useful on the street. Eventually the nitrous was bumped up to produce 800 HP/800 #-ft. But those numbers were arrived at using a chassis dyno, and back-calculating using the drive train losses of the original build, since we had both engine dyno and rear wheel chassis dyno numbers.
The choice of the solid roller cam has been questioned. Yes, the wimpy cam did not support high RPM. But…. it offered a significant factor in the nitrous build. With the TH400 the 760+ lb-ft hit of the nitrous. The engine rev limiter was set at 7,200 RPM, and the nitrous cutoff at 7,000 RPM. The shop the built the engine had a huge amount of experience with nitrous builds. They felt that it was better to run a large shot at higher RPM where cylinder pressures are reduced significantly. Yes, less torque, but more RPM, and we all know HP is torque X RPM. So, yes the solid roller made sense once the N2O was applied.
Unfortunately, the car never made a full nitrous pass. The math says it was a high 9-second build. Somewhere in my file folders there should be NA passes with a best of 11.5 and a best of 117 MPH (not on the same pass). There should be a pass with the 125-shot that wasn’t much in the way of ET (11.1) due to the soft launch on the converter, but hit 127.8 MPH.
Sorry for the long winded post, but it just seems the logic of my original build didn’t seem to make much sense, and to me it did.
Okay I'll stop commenting on this thread it seems like everything I say is being taken the wrong way... I sincerely appreciate all of your help you've given me with my 95 ta and don't want that to get interrupted...
But just so you do know I'm not talking from some kind of inexperience. I do have a low 11 second car that's obviously capable of more as I've never even tried the nitrous yet...
I built every part of the suspension transmission engine all the tuning except for I couldn't bore the cylinders LOL...
The honest truth is I'm tired of it, it's no fun to drive on the street and I enjoy driving my trans am much much more...
ASTA LA VISTA BABY!!... LOL
41 - 60 of 78 Posts
