Coffee with a friend this am:
Then, with coffee properly downrange, I decided it was time to do something about that “bread loaf”:
You know, everytime I try to work on anything on this car, it reminds me why I can’t stand GM. What a major PITA to get that thing out of there! I swear to sweet zombie Jesus I have no idea how they got this bloody car put together! Everything is just impossible to get to and everything is in the way of everything else. if it were a small car without much room to place things, I would understand it being so impossible to work on something. But it’s not. It’s a big car and things are placed (what seems intentionally) right where they are in the way of something else with an acre of space on either side of it.
F’n GM engineers, never a thought that someone, somewhere, someday is going to have to fix the f-er!
5 mins, baseball bat, dark room and the entire C4 engineering team.....thats all I ask for....
Oh well, enough vetching, back to building:
And, the AL that will make the new glove box:
12”x8ft and 1/8” thick. Nice and chunky for welding and adding details, thin enough to fit nicely.
I just hope I can get my TIG skills together soon so I can at least weld up a proper cover. The “box” area will be small, probably literally only big enough for a couple driving gloves.
But I also plan to make it with a small “hatch” in the back so I can mount the Moated APU1 tuner interface in there.
Then, when it’s time to “tune” or datalog, pop open the glove box, plug in the usb and go for a run. Since it’s going to “realtime tuning”, its just pull over, make your changes and do another run right away. Real-time is the way to go. I used to burn chips for obd1, but that was a major pita and slow as hell. Once I went obdII, it opened up real time changes to me (flash memory inside the PCM) and I never wanted to go back to obdI. But with the Moates apu1, I can do real time changes just like obdII.
Once you get your calibration sorted, you can just burn a chip and pop that into your ecm for full time running. You can also leave the Apu1 plugged in if you want.
another bonus of the apu1 is that it lets you run “multiple” calibrations with a few more bits of hardware. A simple switch boxis remote mounted and you can swap ”tunes” on-the-go.
I’ll probably make on general use tune (what you usually run 99% of the time) and I’ll probably make a second one to deal with electric exhaust “cut outs” for when I want to make a few dragstrip passes.
you can also do stuff like ”hyper-mile” and “towing“ calibrations, but I can’t see a lot of use for that in the Vette.
Hmmmm, maybe the mpg tune might be useful for those lazy summer drives.
Or perhaps a ”valet” calibration to hold it to no more than 45-40 mph?
Perhaps I have some more thinking to do about how many calibrations I need to create.
I’m also thinking about that front license plate filler. I might make one of those cold air intakes you see in place of that filler piece.
I’ll have to make it out of fiberglass myself as I’m pretty sure they’re out of production these days, just like the dash piece I have to build.
The C4 is just too old for those “C4 specific” performance parts. The C4 is at that stage in a cars life where it’s no longer contemporary and treading into “classic” territory.
Restoration parts? No problem.
Performance parts? Not so much ....
