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Shortly after the purchase of my 1996 Firebird Formula the mod-fest began. After a set of underdrive pulleys, Borla and cold-air kit, the power I was hoping for just wasn't there... so on went the Vortech 6psi kit. Over the next year or two I put on a new 58mm throttle body, driveshaft, driveshaft safety loop, torque arm, 4.10 gears which later got switched to 3.73, roll bar, control arms, engine brace, sway bars and bumped the boost to 8psi. Most of the installs were performed by L.G. Motorsports in Garland TX.
Either time caught up with me, or another speed shop (now out of business) that I tried mucked something up. A few months back they put on a new in-line fuel pump (a NOS to replace my T-Rex which was getting kinda noisy), a gutted MAF, SLP shorty headers, and another fix of the dreaded intake manifold oil leak. They went with a friend of theirs to do the ceramic coating, and either SLP sent me a really bad set of headers, or the coater warped a couple of the flanges. The things leaked from day one, and even when I asked LGM to reattach the headers they still had a bad leak from the center of the passenger side. The intake manifold leak fix never worked either, and was later found to have a fairly significant crack as if it had been overtorqued. But regardless of the cause, a month later I started to get blow-by and the power really began falling off.
Time for a rebuild.
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Its a little hard to see
but there's a cloud of oil coming out of the breather. Also, at the bottom
of the image you can just make out some of the cracked ceramic goop I put
on the headers to keep most of the exhaust from leaking into the
car.
"All images are on site are thumbnails " |
| Normal Wear on Rod Bearing |
Not Quite So Normal Wear Pattern (shattered ring lands on piston 7) |
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