i used obx stainless mid length headers. i think they quit making them though. dont see any on ebabe.

 

I haven't done them personally, although I think that the prior owner may have. I've pressure tested a couple times and had no issues. I should probably get one done again soon and take a look at those parts. Even if the prior owner did do them I'm not certain it was a good job (some of the wiring work he did was simply awful). That's a good reminder though, thanks craby!

 

Craby's prophetic words have come to fruition-the last pressure test revealed a leak in the intake manifold gasket, so she's on time-out while parts come in. Didn't overheat the engine, but she started to drink coolant with no visible leak and then developed an inconsistent knock on the left side higher in the engine (lifter knock if I'm not mistaken.) The knock was the instigator of the pressure test, and I haven't driven her since it started a couple days ago. So, went through the list and have fel-pro plenum, intake manifold, and valve cover gaskets on the way, along with a new pcv valve, valve cover grommets, Fail-Safe thermostat (OEM temp), 12 Melling lifters and the fluids and filter for an oil change and coolant refill.

Also, on another note, I have fixed two issues that seemed to be fairly vexing ones for some. I've seen a few threads where they've been mentioned that never really had a resolution or an answer that was posted.

1. "Jumping" oil pressure indicator: This I had given up on and fixed more by accident than anything else. When idling I sometimes would have the needle on the oil pressure indicator leap back and forth. This apparently was due to a 3rd party Oil Pressure Sending Unit-as soon as I replaced the one I had put in a few years back that was not AC Delco with an AC Delco OPSU, the issue went away. Score one for OEM.

2. Engine hesitation under load during acceleration: This one perplexed me for a bit, and I troubleshot it by looking at the holy trinity of combustion-ie spark, air and fuel because it would not throw a code when it happened, and it was inconsistent. If I accelerated gently it didn't happen, but sometimes giving it the gas resulted in jumpy acceleration and some popping sounds that may have been small backfires. At first it was very rare but eventually it started to increase in frequency. New plugs, cleaned the MAF sensor, cleaned the K&N air filter, replaced fuel filter and no luck. Well, those were the inexpensive shots in the dark, so I had a buddy of mine who's a professional mechanic look at it, and he couldn't find anything wrong with it either. Looking at what I had done to the vehicle so far and had never done I settled on spending $150 on replacing the ignition coils, which I believe were still the factory ones. After buying a couple new socket adaptors to get at the rear coil I got them replaced and this did the trick while returning about a mile or two of mpg I'd lost. I replaced them with MSD coil packs and marked the cylinders with a permanent marker on the tops like the originals had to make it easier to connect the right plugs to the right coils.

Hopefully my trial and error on these two issues can solve problems for someone else with less guess work.
Also hopefully I'll get the parts I ordered by Wednesday, with a stretch target of getting the work done by the end of the week....That parts list wasn't too terrible on the pocket book, although I think the work itself is going to consume some time. Headers/CAI still on hold as I had to replace the majority of the front end suspension in our Discovery II truck after my wife slammed into a rather large pothole with it, breaking both of the front coil springs near the bottom. After spending some time going over her daily driver with a finer toothed comb than usual, I ended up prioritizing that vehicle over the Camaro and did a front suspension rebuild on it as well as fixing a few minor items that developed over the winter. Buying parts for the Camaro always seems so inexpensive after I get done with any kind of work on that Disco though!

Oh, and I've got a couple new LED turn signal lights on the way for the Camaro, trying some different ones after the prior LEDs I had in there burned out. I ordered the first set off of CARid only to find that despite the fitment tool on their website saying they were good, they were too long to fit in the enclosure (which is about 2 inches, a little over). They were Putco Plasma switchback LEDs (super bright lights by the way, I was disappointed they didn't fit the enclosure). So I got CARid to replace them with a Lumen NB Series replacement bulb, less shipping. I'm not super pleased that they charged me for shipping after saying that the bulb was a match, but hopefully the Lumens when they get here are better. In hindsight, I should have processed a refund and re-ordered the ones I wanted. The first ones were here in 24 hours. The return took about 5 days to process and they must have shipped the replacements slower than the originals, since it's been 10 days now. Hopefully these will fit and be bright enough to be good signals, the original LEDs I had in the front turn signals weren't as bright as I would have liked since they faced downward.

Looking forward to getting the Camaro back on the road again soon!

 

After opening up the engine and taking a look at the rockers, push rods, and overall condition, I've decided to go deeper. While not done for, the rockers and push rods are showing enough wear to warrant replacement in my mind. Since I'm this far in I might as well go the rest of the way to the head gaskets and have the heads decked. Don't want to do this work and have to come back in six months to a year to do the head gaskets. Also found that the fuel regulator was leaking, which may explain why my mpg was dropping recently.
Head gaskets, head bolts, exhaust manifold gaskets (all Fel-Pro), exhaust bolts, LS6 medium duty valve springs, Viton valve seals, Yella Terra 1.9:1 roller rocker arms & pushrod kit, new fuel regulator have all been added to the parts list and ordered. Maybe I'll have time to pull the exhaust headers and paint them while I'm at it, but I'm a bit under the gun since I need to drive the car by Thursday night this week-fingers crossed I can get the heads decked in time.
On the plus side the new rockers should provide more air to the engine, for only a little over a hundred dollars more that the OEM replacements, and they're lighter weight parts with a limited lifetime warranty. I'm also hoping this will set the engine up to go another 60-100k without any major work.
However, she must have been hurt when I said she was a cheap date compared to the Disco, since this has about tripled my parts costs plus the machine work. To me it'll be worth it to get her back on the road and purring again, although from a value of the car to cost of repairs perspective some might argue the cost is excessive-those people just aren't me apparently.

 

There's some seepage around the head gasket, so going that far was clearly the right call. Have the heads at the machine shop, should be back tomorrow by noon. Talked with the guys at Intense today, and they believed that the parts I've got on order will be here tomorrow as well, so kind of on hold at the moment. Couldn't get a couple of the bolts on the exhaust headers out-handed them off to my mechanic who has a welder to see if he can get them out or drill and tap them again (although hopefully welding a nut on the bolt will work, doing that in cast iron isn't usually a good time).
Since that happened, probably won't paint the headers, but I do have the heat shields and valve covers, we'll see if I can polish those tonight while I wait on the heads and rockers tomorrow. I see nobody sells those heat shields anymore, so despite the fact the ones I have are a little bit mangled, I'll be putting them back on. I've got the rest of the gaskets, head gaskets and the exhaust manifold gaskets arrived this morning. Also have a couple of metal cooling elbows that I don't think I mentioned earlier to replace the weaker plastic ones. Now, if I can just get my wife to come back from shopping to watch the boy, I can get back in the garage. Still hopeful I can get this back together in time for a long trip this weekend, including break in time.

 

worn rocker

Valve covers, rear polished

cleaned up the heat shields


Yella Terras, LS6 valve springs, Viton valve seals

A picture of one of the worn rockers that are getting replaced, you can see where the light hits it differently it was starting groove into the rocker arm.

Pictures of the valve covers and heat shields. The front valve cover is cleaned but not polished, the back one is polished. I couldn't get them looking like billet chrome, but they do look better than they did when they came out.

The Yella Terras and associated parts arrived. According to Intense Performance these are supposed to add 20-24 HP with the upgraded valve springs. BTW, Intense was exceptionally pleasant to work with getting these parts!

 

I am looking for a 1996 z28 camaro console lid.. Any suggestions?

Thank you
Roxy

 

Yella Terra 1.9:1 rocker arms

Coming back together

Two more days to get this finished, but those rocker arms sure look pretty.

 

The engine was back together in time-only a couple of issues post rebuild. I didn't account for the exhaust flange donut gaskets, so I've got a little exhaust rattle where the old gaskets were reused. Easy enough fix that I should be able to get to this week. Also lost the temperature gauge, a slightly more serious issue. Replaced the temp sensor, which didn't work immediately, and since I lost a little coolant down the front of the engine swapping them it of course immediately threw the belt when I started it back up. Reconnected the pig-tail and it started working-for the next 150 miles, then quit again. So I picked up a new pigtail today, we'll see if replacing the connector does the trick or not (I figure the probability of the new sensor failing that quickly isn't great, but suppose it's possible).
At highway speeds the engine appeared to be running very cool-in the 150 degree range despite having a 195 degree thermostat, and would get up to 195 only during in town driving, so the cooling system flush seems to have worked very well or the radiator fans aren't working properly. Other than that, mpg seems to be better-at an average speed of 75 mpg over 218 miles I was able to get about 26 mpg, which is within the 25-31 mpg range even though there's an exhaust leak and the temp sensor wasn't functioning. I would think that once those two issues are resolved the mpg may improve a little bit. The best I've ever got out of the vehicle was 34 at 55 mph with a tailwind, but either way it's better than the 21-24 I was getting prior to the engine work, so that's good.
I do feel a little more power in the engine, and the engine is maintaining 75-80 mph at 2100-2200 rpms. Since I didn't really take any metrics before the engine was opened up as I thought I'd just do the intake manifold, I'm not sure that this is significantly different, but I do seem to recall the RPMs being higher previously to maintain those speeds (if anyone with a stock V6 happens to notice what their RPMs are at around 75 mph I'd like to know). Overall I'm pretty happy with the repair-engine sounds better, better mpg, better power, engine running cooler and no more disappearing coolant.
Also got the front turn signals replaced with the new ones from CarID-the Lumen series lights are brighter and are outward facing instead of down, so they've made the front turn signals much brighter, which should be safer. These fit in the enclosure nicely. I also noticed that there was a rear marker light burned out, so I replaced both of those with a set of LEDs from Auto Zone. The passenger side had some connection issues-cleaned the contacts up a bit to try to ensure a good constant connection.
I've got nearly 600 miles on the engine since the work was done, so I'm pretty confident I've got a good break in done at this point. Once I get the temp sensor and exhaust leak worked out, it's probably back to the Discovery II. I've got a tow package to install and got in a fender bender that's going to require replacement of the front bumper (good excuse to put an ARB bull bar steel bumper on it I guess). Those two things will probably also require a suspension upgrade to account for the increased weight. Suspension in the Camaro is also probably getting close to needing a refit again too.
Hopefully with this rebuild the engine will be good to 300k!

 

has it changed the way it sounds. love the big cam sound in a car and was wondering if it changed.