That engine out pic looks awesome! But please tell me there was a second bucket?!Lots of updates, pull up a chair.
So after getting the car back together with the heads/cam install it had some weird hesitation at the upper rpms on their break-in/test-drives. We thought it was something non-mechanical by the nature of the stumble but it seemed to get worse with subsequent drives and with a weeks worth of diagnostics and throwing simple parts at the car (coils, plugs, fuel filter, etc), we were getting nowhere. The decision was made to pull the motor and go through everything. It didn't take much past the timing cover to find a camshaft which was getting ready to seize up, and a scored cam journal. I would imagine that whatever debris made its way through my motor almost a year ago to cause the lifter failure (flip back to the beginning of the thread), had also left its mark on the cam area. Seeing as vipers don't use cam journal bearings (its just a high polished area of the block itself), the entire motor would have to be disassembled to attempt a repair. The ability to perform said repair would depend solely on how badly the journals were damaged, and could lead to a new block altogether (ie. tons of downtime). Instead of making me wait for weeks/months while the motor was gone through, VE/Arrow worked out a deal (for which I was very grateful) where they took my old motor in as a core, and gave me an entirely new long-block complete with a fresh heads/cam build. This entire ordeal really validated my decision to go with them for the build in the first place. They had tons of opportunities to leave me out to dry, but instead, they honored their included warranty and made everything whole for me. Motor arrived in a week or so and was promptly re-installed.
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Thought this was a very cool pic, my old hurt motor (left) next to a gen 3 motor with the rare-as-hens-teeth Stryker aftermarket heads (right). Notice the exhaust port differences.
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With the motor in and the car getting broke in we switched gears to adding some goodies. Started with getting the new tires mounted, no use in wasting that new found power
Went with Toyo R888R's all around--I loved the first gen R888s on my old gen 4 coupe, and was excited to get these mounted.
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345/30/19
Down 20 and 10mm in width, respectively, from the OEM sizes; but honestly, either the Pirellis run narrow, or the Toyo's run wide because they actually sit wider on the wheel than the OEMs. I'm very happy with the way the new 35 pro fronts fill out the wheel well compared to the rubber band 30s on the oem pirellis. Just looks much better in my opinion. A much needed bath, before the showing off;
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Next up was swapping the seat belts. I wanted to tie the yellow calipers into the interior without going overboard, and figured this would be a great way to do it. I got in touch with the guys from www.seatbeltplanet.com, had VE pull the oem black units out, and sent the full pre-tensioner assemblies off for them to get re-webbed. They had everything turned around within a day or two and back to me (would highly recommend them!).
Old yellars back in hand;
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Everything came out better than I even imagined, it really looks nice in person. The whole time I had them on order I was going back-n-forth in my head whether the yellow would look tacky. I mean, its yellow. First time I opened the door and peeked in all my apprehension melted away.
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A few additional days of break-in and I made some 60-130 hits to see the difference with the added power utilizing the Racelogic PBOX. Ran consistent back to back 6.40s (with 2-shifts), an improvement of around half a second from the best bolt-on run I had made previously. I was very impressed, and to be honest, I think there is another tenth or two hiding there with some additional tweaks/seat-time. Stay tuned