Thread: Project Sebring GT Spyder

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Here are some pics I took when I got home.

Awesome Mike! Glad your on the road! auto cross sounds fun! Car looks excellent. Thumbs up.

Amazing thrash to the finish line! Congrats! The car looks amazing!

Times 3 Mike! I agree with the others. You've done a lot of incredible work and the car reflects that. Can't wait for some more updates.. hint hint LOL

Good one mate, it looks bloody gorgeous, I'm not surprised it's a head-turner!

I'd wager you're as happy as a dog with two tails...

"while lying in bed mulling this over, ........" significant, unlogged build time.

I'm gob smacked at how well it turned out...........not surprised, but still impressed. Two things strike me the most, though there is so much to take in. First is how successful you were in making it look so much more like an actual Healy than what you started with. Fabulous! Second, I love how you made the engine compartment look both functional and "hot roddy" at the same time without too much showy crap.............so clean looking. That thing is a detail freaks delight.

The car came out beyond great, really first rate build!

It came out bootyful. Congrats on gettinrdun. Also congrats on making Cruising the Coast, you were pretty impressive on the road course.
Nolan

That car just looks RIGHT.


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WOW! Beautiful car Mike, and job well done. You have more patience than I ever dreamed of. CTC is the perfect place to break it in. I’ve never been to it, but I just booked a room there for next year.

Thanks everyone for the compliments. It's been a long, long journey for sure.

I'm really enjoying driving it, for sure. Still needs a lot of tuning and tinkering to get completely ship shape, but it's plenty good enough to enjoy right now!

I have about 14 days to get it ready for a 400 mile drive to Panama City, Florida for the Emerald Coast Cruise. I really need to get that top fitted!

"It's been a long, long journey for sure."

Yep.
Just looked back to when you started this thread: November 2014.
But I think you can say that the end result was worth the toil and frustrations.
It's a beautiful beast and a credit to you.

That's outstanding ! Wow what a hotrod! Glad to see your hard work pay off and it did in BIG way, Congrats !

Thanks, Navy!

Here’s an update on preparations for the next road trip.

Had two oil leaks on the engine. One on the adapter that feeds the Accu-sump and one on the right valve cover.

The adapter leak was fixed by installing a new adapter. The original one was bought from an independent guy on another forum with a CNC shop that was trying to break into the LS parts business. The part looked well made, but leaked where the -10 fitting threaded into the adapter. I even recut the o-ring seat myself in an attempt to salvage the part, but it didn’t work.

The new part was made by Improved Racing and seems to have fixed the problem. Replaced the adapter when I changed out the original break-in oil. This was the second oil change, actually, I changed out the startup oil at 50 miles, cut the filter open. Everything looked good.

The old adapter:



And the new one:



BTW – I would have never thought that finding name-brand non-synthetic 5W-30 oil locally would be so difficult. Four different parts chains didn’t have it and WalMart didn’t either. It simply does not appear to be sold in my one-horse town. I did find some 10W-30 Comp Cams break-in oil that is regular oil. Looks like I’m going to have to order it. I don’t want to run synthetic until I get a couple of oil changes on it. Looks like I’m going to have to order dino oil online! And, it takes slightly over 7 quarts to change it out with the Accu-sump.

The valve cover leak gave me fits. It took 2 attempts to get it sealed. I discovered that the Holley valve cover adapters that I’m using have to be pushed up on the mounting bolts as far as you can to get the lower rail to seal. Wound up making a couple of long, threaded dowls to help position the covers while installing the regular mounting bolts. I also trashed the Holley cover bolts and installed some original LS bolts. They seemed to work better.

I cleaned the oil off the bottom of the car and inspected everything I could get to. Discovered that the driveshaft u-bolts were slightly loose. Not sure how that happened. I must have just snugged them up and forgot about them.

I still need to recheck the front ride height and it would be nice if I could get it up in the scales and check corner weights.

I also tackled the temp gauge mismatch issue. I had a theory about what was causing the abnormally high temp indication. The gauge was showing 235-240 while the ECU was seeing around 220.

Here is what I thought was going on. There are only two places on an LS to normally mount a temp sender. The “normal, factory” sender location is in the left cylinder head near the front of the engine. Since the heads will work on either side, the other location is in the rear of the right head (left head flipped around). The Speedhut sender uses 1/8” pipe threads and the LS head has straight metric threads, so I ordered a brass adapter from Speedhut when I ordered the gauges. On my car the firewall wraps around the engine pretty tightly and is insulated on the inside of the passenger compartment. To make matters worse, there is a nice heavy steel exhaust manifold runner right by the sender.

On the highway, there is enough air flow through the engine bay to keep everything reasonably cool, but in traffic, the heat from the exhaust was being reflected back to the large brass adapter and brass sender. All this junk was getting heat soaked. I was reading some exhaust temp and water temp. Due to it’s front location near the exit to the radiator, I felt that the front ECU sender was actually seeing what should be the hottest water in the engine.

I got lucky in that Holley had provided a hole threaded for 1/8” pipe on the back of the water pump right in the center of the return to the radiator. This was normally for a steam line fitting from the heads, but I ran my steam line to the expansion tank. I ordered a new sender (no way to get the old one out. Too close to the firewall) and a new harness. I spliced this to the old harness and moved the sender to the water pump. Basically, the same deal as putting the sender on the intake manifold of a Gen 1 SBC.

This worked pretty much perfectly. Up to 200, the gauge reads about 5 degrees colder than the ECU, but after that, they match within 1-2 degrees. As far as I’m concerned, that problem is solved.



If you have been following this build since the beginning, you may find it ironic that on my maiden voyage home from Florida 8 years ago, I had false overheating problems due to a misplaced temp sender and I had nearly the same issue on this maiden voyage. Fate? Irony? Coincidence? Maybe all three.

Worked on an electrical issue that was bugging me. The voltage seemed to be all over the place. It would read 12.5 and then go to almost 14. The dash gauge and ECU agreed, so I figured it was a real issue.

The Holley accessory drive I’m using uses an alternator that appears to be based on a very late model Corvette part. May even be the same part. It is rated at 150 amps (I think that’s right) and is a 6-phase alternator. Basically, it’s two 75 amp 3-phase alternators in one case, which is supposed to allow it to put out more amperage at low RPM. A little research turned up that the Corvette units also have a more sophisticated voltage regulator than older GM alternators, that can supposedly analyze the battery condition and has a wider range of outputs to correct issues and save fuel. Couldn’t save much fuel, but I guess every little bit helps. 12.5 to 15 volts is normal and Corvette owners reported that the voltage would vary in that range at any given time.

I was about to dismiss my issue as a non-issue when I noticed the voltage falling to 12 on the ECU. Gauge concurred. Nope, that ain’t right. I checked the alternator output and it was at 14.7 while the fuse block was showing 11.7! I found a loose connection on the battery disconnect. After tightening it up, the voltage settled out at 13.5.