305man

Ahh, that explains the weight. But the suspension work is well worth it nonetheless. On the web page at the beginning of this thread, the guy who wrote it suggested that suspension work be done first in the "modifying the L03" section if I remember correctly. I agree w/ him. DarthIROC earlier in this thread showed his appreciation for the guy's attention to suspension work as well. The guy who wrote that webpage put alot of good info in there contrary to what some others on this board may say. They're so fixed in there opinions of tbi and 305's, they've been blinded to the fact that no system is really better than the than another. They all have their disadvantages and their advantages. I'll check out that thirdgen.org site. Let me how the car turns out!

305man

Oh, yeah can I get some feedback on the tested setups on the third page. To get to the links to those setups, scroll to the bottom of the first page and click the word "link", then scroll to the bottom of the second page and click the link "Hot Rodding the 5.0 Liter L03", finally scroll to the bottom of that page and you'll see the links to various setups. Let me know if you think they're accurate, whether the mods are good in your opinion, etc. Are they bull$hittin or what.

Chris Ja

The suspension mods are going to make a difference. I was doing 2.2 or 2.3 with my IROC. After changing the LCA and panhard bar I was doing 1.85 if I did not go up in smoke on street tires. A set of IROC exhaust manifolds are less restristive than the 305. I have a set if someone wants them with the Y pipe. If you can't pick them up you just have to pay the shipping. A dual snorkel air filter housing helps. There are things that can be done to help the performace of any engine. Hot Rod Hawk a friend of mine has a 96 Firehawk you see in the mags that has a TBI set up. He has done the BFG addes and RamCharges add. His car is pulling the front wheels. He has went into the high 10. I beleive with NOS. As I stated before anything can be made fast .
When I was younger and didn't have much money I did small mods to my car and was proud of it. Everyone has to start somewhere. You guys with the 305 don't give up.
I live in Warren Mich and my # is 586 558/6694 if someone wants the exhaust maniflolds and y pipe. They came off my 87 IROC.
See the link in sig to check out my rides.

Jim85IROC

So you politely call me an idiot, then you spend the next 20 minutes typing a laundry list of why tbi cars suck. Sometimes I wonder why I speak at all.

I'm well enough informed to know the limitations to tbi, and to know that Black Echo's article was crap. He found little or no gains on his car, and neither has the legions of lemmings that followed that site since. That stuff doesn't make as big of a difference as he claims. Pure and simple. Dyno your car, do those mods and dyno it again. Until then, your ***-dyno is all you have to go by, and we all know how accurate those are.

The fact is, the tbi computer is SLOW. Very slow. It doesn't have the resolution necessary to really keep a highly modified engine under control. It does ok on a stock one because nothing changes much. You can burn new PROMs and get decent results, but there's a HUGE brick wall with the stock tbi system. This is why everybody that gets all defensive over tbi still only runs 15s with their 305. There's only a small handful of 350 tbi guys that are in the 13s. The rest are all in the 14s or 15s.

Does that mean that all tbi sucks? No. Aftermarket tbi systems work very well because they have more sophisticated control.

The other problem that you did a great job of highlighting for me is that everything else on the tbi cars needs upgrading too. The cam is crap, the exhaust manifolds are crap (not that TPI manifolds offer a significant improvement), the exhaust, differential, rear gears, etc. A tbi car is expensive to upgrade because yo need to change everything on the car.

So... call me ignorant, or whatever else you'd like to call me. I own a tbi vehicle and I'm familiar with tbi. I know its limitations. I'm just willing to admit that it has them.

Chuck!

The slow baud rate on the tbi computer is pretty annoying, but its simple enough to overcome if you just take a few sample readings. At any test and tune you can get 4-5 runs in and each run will yield at least 5-6 good points of data, so by the end of the night you have enough to do what you want. If you're trying to tune your ve tables you just have to drive around town a little bit longer to get some more readings. The only thing that I havnt read a good fix for is the problems over 6400 rpm with the 8746 computer, but not many guys can spin their motors that high anyways.

But therein lies a benefit of tbi. Because it isnt overly complicated its very cheap to modify. To start burning chips now it only costs about $120-150 for the pocket programmer because now we have an ecu file so we can use free winbin, and we dont need to buy software to connect the pc to the car because of the free WinALDL software.

NJ SPEEDER

i am actually starting to wonder why you speak too.

maybe you shoudl go around and read soem more about ecm and home prom burning. you have clearly missed several years of development and haven't read much abotu what people are doing with very little doen to their tbi motors.
the stock ecm can be modded from 1 sample every .8 secodns to 15samples per second with radio shack parts and switches it over to a wide band O2 sensor. self correcting software allows you to cut and past teh data log into a spread sheet, then jsut hit enter and you have your new chip. after market stuff is expensive, and it controls teh same perameters as the factory ecm. there is no real performance advantage to the, you just don't have to burn chips to adjust, that will save you about 15mins at a time. then again, i wait in teh lanes more than 15mins, so it really isn't saving me anything.
a bunch of tbi guys with 305 are way into teh 14's, several are looking to get into the 13's this summer, and there are a ton of 350 guys who have been in teh 13's for a very very long time(trying reading up on teh 9C1 cars and you may have known that). we have also seen 305's hit very low 13's and i think at least 1 person is already into teh 12's with a little nitrous.
saying that tbi is expensive to modify is also a very large stretch. gears, exhaust, cold air intakes(open element in tbi's case), after market intake manifolds and computer chips are all very common mods for anyone looking for a bit more performance. doesn't sound to me like the tbi guys really spend money on anything other than a cam, which is not soemthign that everyoen with any induction does. and since the cam of choice for a lot of the 305 world is a stock LT1 cam, it is only $35-50 bucks and a day of work more than what a lot fo other people spend.

jsut because the stock motor is not gonna tear up teh world does not mean that the system is bad. it simply means that the stock set up is not optimized very well.
you need to read up a bit more before you say that any induction system sucks. i don't know what you think you have learned from the tbi car you own, but you coudln't have looked to far into it if you can't realize that it is a legitimate form of induction to work with.

later
tim