F-Body Europe

I met a dude here who wants to do some mods to his car, so we might as well do the free ones first. Does anyone know what all we can do to get more oomph out of it? The car is a 89 GTA 350 automatic. Car is bone stock.

I have a few questions...

How many degrees do I advance the timing to?

I assume gutting the cats is a good idea? (works for all the other cars)

Are the aftermarket chips for these any good? Superchips, hypertech ect.

Anything that you guys can think of would be helpful.


Thanks,
Jeff

Use your Cat trick then I would work on the intake. I believe you can turn the distributer on that one to advance it. Is it TPI or TBI?

For TPI engines there are quite few free/cheap mods but the most effictive one would be to port the plenum. This modification will not add "dynamic" horsepower that will bury you in the seat springs.....but moreso it will improve the response of your throttle. For some reason GM put restrictive "blocks" in front of the EGR passages and to the left and right of the throttle body openings. You can grind down the front blocks and you can radius the side areas for improved airflow.

You could also modify the air cleaner housing by cutting rectangular "windows" in the sides of the air cleaner to facilitate better breathing.

You could modify the Mass Airflow Sensor by removing the screens but this is a tricky one, and if done wrong, can ruin the part and cost a 'lot' of money for a new one, so I would forget about that one

As for timing, I bumped mine from 6* to around 9*. Any higher and I would get knock retard. Any lower is a performance loss. I always run 93 octane.

As for gutting the cat… You're better off just puting a pipe in its place if you don't want a cat….a gutted cat does add very little power if at all, you would be alot safer with a free flow cat, reason being you need the back pressure on your valves that the cat provides, so if you want good sound and performance get a freeflow cat

As for Chips, those "off-the-shelf" eproms are GARBAGE, they do VERY LITTLE.
They add a couple of degrees of spark advance (which usually triggers knock retard and ends up reducing your effective spark advance) and generally add a little more fuel, which is the LAST THING you need on a basically stock engine as they tend to be overly rich anyways.
I wouldn´t waste my money, for it. But, rather use that money to buy the equipment to burn your own eprom.

Hope this helps a little,

- Alex

So we will do away with the cats, rig up a cold-air system and do the timing for now. Now I take that as 9* before tdc right? Do I adjust that at idle or where? Could you explain the procedure for me to be sure?

Yes Bruce it is the TPI 350. It has the movable distributor like the old sbc's.


Jeff

To set the timing, you must disconnect the est wire. If you are unfamiliar with this wire, it's a brown and black striped wire that you will find by the firewall on the passenger side. Once you find the wire, here's what to do:
1. Start car the disconnect wire. The motor may die out so have someone feather the throttle until it stabilizes.
2.Check set timing to desired position. (I wouldn´t go with anything higher than 9*)
3.Turn ignition off, reconnect wire, disconnect negative battery cable for at least 30 seconds.
4. Reconnect negative cable