96dreamer's Never Ending Build Thread

My original plan with the car was to have a boost controller and separate tunes for e85 and 93. After thinking about how that would work out and thinking about my options I decided to take another big jump with the car.

Local shop had a MS3Pro ultimate with harness and a few sensors pop up for sale that I jumped on. This setup will allow the car to have significantly more potential and give much more options for tuning that the factory computer could never achieve.

With the computer in hand it have me the motivation to continue on the rest of the car. The first thing I wanted to knock out was the intercooler setup. I had a treadstone tr1245 waiting to go on for a while. I made up some stainless brackets at work that mount the intercooler. They sandwhich between the factory bumper support and the impact absorber. Us the factory mounts and allow for a little adjustment in all 3 directions.

Mounted on the intercooler

Mocked up on the car

And fully mounted with the bumper support in place

More to come later

How big is the onboard MAP sensor in the MS3?

Tabres said:

How big is the onboard MAP sensor in the MS3?

Click to expand...

4 bar lol. I don't see myself ever surpassing that. If were to eventually end up pro mod status and need more than that I could add a larger external one.

I wanted to make sure the car didn't have any issues staying cool with the blower and I have always smelt a little coolant after driving the car. First thing I did was pick up a used ac condenser of a newer car to replace the pre tsb condenser my car had. Then tried to figure out where the coolant smell was coming from.
Turned out it was the radiator which is a very nice steeda unit so I wanted to salvage it if possible.

It was leaking on every corner from the first few sets of coolant passages.
To find the exact spot of the leaks I tore the fins out of each corner, waited for the wife to leave the house and made a dunk tank.

It was leaking at the braze joint to the tube sheet of the header on about the first 3 rows. I threw the radiator in my blast cabinet to clean up the area around the leaks and built up epoxy around the joint.

Back to the very professional dunk tank to very no leaks, held to around 20 psi so I called it good.

After the radiator debacle I decided to tackle the oiling situation for the blower. Took the pan into work and had a fitting tig welded on

Then made up some an hoses for the feed and drain.
Drain line turned out great. Nice subtle turn right to the pan. Feed line turned out just as good. Very happy with the hoses and fitting from silicone intakes. Kind of a pain to assemble but once they were together I had zero issues.

Nice fix on the radiator. Next time pull vacuum for a bit on the radiator while sealing the leaks. This will seal it better

mschmidty said:

Nice fix on the radiator. Next time pull vacuum for a bit on the radiator while sealing the leaks. This will seal it better

Click to expand...

I actually did on 3 of the 4 corners, the 4th was somehow pushing water out of the leak with a small vacuum on it. I know it makes no sense and defies logic and physics but small bubbles would form in the epoxy with the vacuum applied. As soon as I released pressure it would quit. But its been holding now for about a year and a bunch of heat cycles so I'm calling it a win.

Man, it's inspiring seeing all the work you've done. You've got some skills. Great build!

Sent from my SM-G970U using the svtperformance.com mobile app

With the blower mounted and oil plumbed and inter-cooler mounted I started on the charge piping. When I bought the blower kit It came with what I believe was a inter-cooler kit for a gt. I bought a few more 3" bends and made what I had work. Ended up with this.

"hot" side

Cold side with filter pipe

Hole in the fender

The power pipe had a port on it for a bypass valve i'm assuming. It wasn't needed for my setup so deleted it.

Everything more or less mocked up for the first time.

I didn't get any pictures after it was all welded up but there are only 4 silicone joints on the piping and each one has a rolled lip on the piping. Plus I was abble to keep the factory fog lights. Outlet of the blower, inter-cooler inlets and throttle body. Just after the blower outlet are the 50mm bov flange, boost solenoid reference port and then the 50mm wastegate flange. After the inter-cooler in the fender well is the IAT bung. I opted to forego using a maf sensor in favor of running the internal map sensor so there was no need for the hpx maf sensor and flange or sensor housing I had.

Sorry to rewind your build a bit, and maybe I missed it, but how did you handle the coolant cross-over and fuel rails for the C-Head swap?

Did you ground the radiator?

Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk

nomoretickets said:

Sorry to rewind your build a bit, and maybe I missed it, but how did you handle the coolant cross-over and fuel rails for the C-Head swap?

Click to expand...

When I first did the swap I used the factory crossover, cutoff the tabs and bent up the factory plug wire hold down and welded it back to the crossover. With it being raised for the blower now it's set up a little different.

The fuel rails i've actually done two different ways. First I cut and bent the factory tabs so that they attached to a stud that went into one of the lower intake holes. I didn't really like that setup and redid it while doing some wiring. The way it is currently set up is the factory hold down tabs are cut off and I welded some flat stock to the factory rails so it bolts into the mach fuel rail holes.

I plasti dipped them black after this and they blend in very well.

Bouttime09 said:

Did you ground the radiator?

Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk

Click to expand...

I have not. I did redo the grounding from the battery and the engine block to try and reduce the chance of grounding through the radiator. I am also running a zinc anode in the radiator drain location to act as a sacrificial point of electrolysis. I'm fairly certain that was the cause of the leaks in the radiator previously.

I knew with the new forced induction setup I wanted to get rid of the pcv system. Even with the separator I was unhappy with how much shit was getting into the intake. I plumbed in 10an lines from the factory pcv ports on each valve cover and ran independent lines to a catch can where the fuse box used to be.


I also replaced the IAC line with the same 10an line to a fitting that got welded to the intake pipe.

With mechanical stuff mostly buttoned up I moved onto wiring the MS3. I originally wanted to mount it under the rear seat but the harness was a few feet to short to run all the way back there. I settled on mounting it under neath the passenger seat, this actually ended up working out pretty good.
Everything for the install gathered up. There's a fuse just after the battery running to a relay that powers a two bank auxiliary fuse box.

After laying it in position on the carpet I decided I didn't like that set up and got a sheet of kydex to form to the floor. This allowed me to mount all the components to the kydex and have a nice clean install.

Threw the seat back in to check clearance and make sure everything was accessible.
Seat moves all the way forward and back with no issues. With it in the full forward position the aux fuse box is fully accessible.

I knew i wanted to something a little more robust for ignition than the coil packs with coil on plug wiring I had before. I also didn't want to put the factory coils back on the car purely for asthetics.
I settled on trying to make ls2 d585 coils work in a coil on plug configuration. Anyone familiar with these knows they are a pretty robust coil that can make a ton of power.
Coils removed from the mounting bracket and steel collars removed.

Amazingly the factory boots fit right over the stub on the bottom of the ls2 coils.

When dropped into the heads they almost look like they were meant for it. The only issue is they stick up probably an inch higher than the factory coils.

In comes the heavy fabrication materials. Using only the finest that was available I used the factory coil cover hold down bolts to locate a piece of cardboard and traced the outline of the coil to the bottom. Took a few tries but I got one cut out pretty tight to the shape of the coil. Once I had the first one I transferred the dimension to solidworks and patterned the layout. I printed this out, glued to a piece of cardboard and cut the coil reliefs out.

I scribed the pattern to the plug cover.

Then I Drilled out all of the corners of the reliefs and used a coping saw and file to get the holes as tight to the coils as I could.

The result was a pretty slick factory cop cover that not only locates the coils but holds them down and allows the heat sink to cool the coil.

For connecting the coils to the plugs I wanted to use something a little more robust than the springs that the factory coils used. I came up with a stainless wire with the correct connectors crimped and then soldered on. I also included a small ferrite donut to try and reduce electrical noise, I think this was mostly lost cause though.
Here is all 8 of them made up

Clipped onto the oil and a plug

And what the assembly looks like

They are sometime a pain to get lined up to the plug but when they do they make a very noticeable click when they slide onto the plug. This plus the coil covers resulted in a pretty robust coil solution.


Continuing on with the mountain of a project that was wiring up the ms3 I moved onto the engine bay. The goal was to not have to run any additional wiring through the engine bay. Since I was not using the maf or iat and deleted the egr and sai It left a number of factory wires that ran back to the ecu that I could repurpose.


Here is everything pretty much buttoned up.

I also pulled the dash to allow the 2ga wires to be ran easier and make splicing into the harness at the ecu manageable for someone other than a contortionist.

flex fuel sensor installed and plumbed to the return line.

Electric boost controller installed in the passenger fender area.


I also eliminate the factors o2's and gutted them from the trans harness plus removed the speedcal box that was constantly giving be issues. Little magic here, some soldering there and we have it more or less fully wired.

I like those coil packs. I'd like them even more if the plug was turned 90 degrees.

How you did the covers is nice too. Are you going to tune it yourself?

01yellercobra said:

I like those coil packs. I'd like them even more if the plug was turned 90 degrees.

How you did the covers is nice too. Are you going to tune it yourself?

Click to expand...

I've been tuning and driving it for a little over a year and a half now. This build thread is a little out of date lol. Trying to get everything up to date so I can post things as I actually do them.

Sent from my SM-G950U using the svtperformance.com mobile app

So needless to say there were a ton of small things on the car that I didn't take pictures of or I've just plain forgot to this point. So heres a few things I skipped over up to this point.

I knew I wanted to run knock sensors but the factory ones really aren't the best fit for the ms3. I picked some up from a mercedes, I think, that shared a similar bore spacing and bore that is more of a wideband style. The bore of this accepts a m8 bolt vs factory m10 so I made a threaded bushing to go in the factory hole and loc tited it in place.

checking clearance to the intake


I also ditched the factory o2s and installed dual innovate lc2 widebands. I ran the wiring up behind the shifter through a hole in the floor with a rubber grommet installed and installed under the driver seat in a similar fashion as the ms3.

And since these pictures were next to each other in my folder this is what the ms3 looks like 100% mounted up and everything cleaned up.


The center console had always had issues holding the shifter bezel because all of the clips had broke over the years messing with the car. I finally got tired of it this time having the car tore apart and made some metal inserts for the shifter bezel to attach to. It ended up working very well and solved the issues of the bezel popping out.

Buttoned up the front crash bar, intercooler piping and power steering lines.


And for the first time in about 6 months powered up the car to start setting up the project file on the ms3. I opted to buy a bluetooth adapter for the ms3 which is absolutely worth its weight in gold. Here im sitting outside the car setting up the .msq. You also get a peak at the drag pack I picked up during the build process.

Double post due to a server error but I have more to post anyway.
So after getting everything set up, mechanically checking timing and dealing with a faulty cam sensor it was ready to fire up for the first time.
The was the first time it was running on recommended settings from megasquirts manual. I failed to get a first start, owell. It runs!

I started it without the belt for the blower hooked up jsut to make sure nothing was leaking and so I could get the ve table somewhat close before adding boost.
Once I was satisfied I threw it all together and took a trip to my buddies house to shake it down.

At @02Toner 's house on the maiden voyage.



Car drove flawlessy there and back and watching the ve analyze change up the ve table was pretty cool. Hit a whopping 4lbs of boost on this first trip. I think I had a 4lb wastegate spring in it.

As i mentioned before I also picked up a drag pack for the car. Sve's 15x10 and 17x4.5 in dark stainless with a 28" m/t et street pro r in the back.


Unfortunately they never even saw the road bolted to my car because on the second drive this happened....

Sounds like you were on a roll prior to the damage! Did just the loose stud do all of that?