Yesterday I took the BBK aluminum airbridge out of the storage cabinet and tried again to get that to fit on the car. I was figuring I could eliminate the MAF sensor housing completely and just use a separate IAT sensor. That would give me more room to work with. But the angle of the airbridge is the snag. It pretty much will just go in one place and one place only to align with both the throttle body and the outlet pipe of the intercooler. And where that spot is is directly above the radiator. Which puts it pressing right up against the hood when I close it. I guess the height of this 427 is higher than the stock LS6 and the larger throttle body raised the center line of the throttle body opening too. So both of those changes conspired to make the airbridge just sit too high.
Ideally I should run four inch diameter aluminum or stainless steel tubing from the intercooler to the throttle body, but no way a four inch pipe is going to be able to run between the hood and the radiator support. I would need to either flatten a section of the tubing like an airbridge, or I would have to find a hood that would allow 4 inches of clearance where I need it.
I have read accounts of people cutting and rewelding their radiator cradle to make the piping fit, but that's going beyond my pay grade. Plus they apparently didn't have an intercooler like mine to deal with, so that would throw a whole nother set of wrinkles into it.
Supposedly DeWitts makes a shorter radiator but so far I haven't been able to find out much about it. What hints I have seen seemed to indicate that you still need to drop the radiator cradle a bit to use 4 inch pipe.
So unless I get hit with a miracle of an inspiration, I don't see any alternative to sticking with that plastic airbridge I now have. I guess I just have to check it frequently to make sure it's not working loose from the heat cycles making the plastic go soft and pliable. I will be extremely surprised if the airbridge doesn't just pop apart eventually. If I were smart I would figure out some sort of screen to put on the front of the throttle body to catch any plastic fragments when that happens. But I'm guessing that would be a whole nother level of "pain in the ass" to fabricate.
I got the new coupler I've been waiting on, but I've just been holding off working on the car while thinking about other options. Plus it's just been crappy weather around here anyway, so not like I'm going to take the car out anytime soon anyway. Incentive has been lacking, I suppose.
Oh yeah, I also found out that the Sunoco I was getting my non-ethanol gasoline from apparently dropped the 93 octane and offers 91 octane instead. So I guess I might as well just go with the ethanol contaminated crap and complete the AFR tuning using that. Probably needed to do that anyway. Tuning for non-ethanol gasoline and using ethanol gasoline will have the engine running too lean. So I guess it's better to tune for ethanol and have it run slightly richer with non ethanol gas than the reverse.
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