my buddy recently swapped headers on his TPI application to blockhuggers for ground clearance issues, and he could not get his knock sensor to fit anymore. He put it in the cylinder head but its not really picking up anything. is there anything else he can do to retain the sensor?

The sensor needs to be in the original location to be able to pick up if there is a knock. You may be able to relocate to the opposite side of the block but he may have to use different headers or modify the headers to clear the sensor.

thanks both sides are pretty tight so i guess he wil probably just not use it.

try the motor mounts
drill and tap for it
you will get a reading there

you serious?

ya thats what alot of people do when they do the s10 v8 swap
when they use the tight headers
there is more room on the mount on the s10 setup
but the priciple is the same

thank you i will let him know.

ya there a few books on the s10 v8 swap that say you can do it
vibration does traval good though metal
so i dont see why it wont work if it in solid and its on the side of the block on the mount (no rubber mount between it and block ) of course

Should be able to put it just about anywhere on the block.

well like i mentioned above, he put it in the cylinder head but he could hear pinging now that previously couldnt hear. he hasnt hooked up a scanner yet to see if its detecting but im quite sure its not.

It might take some experimentation to get it working right. The knock sensor is pretty sensitive to how much torque is used when it's installed, how much and what kind of sealer is used on the threads, etc.

I'll resurrect this one from beyond. I recently had gotten some advice because of some issues I'm having to relocate the KS onto the intake manifold. My concern there is the KS is tuned for a certain frequency. Having it that far away from the ara of knock and into aluminum for that matter I'm sure will change the accoustics of knock.
Thoughts? Experiences? My issue is when datalogging I have a "sawtooth" pattern to my knock counts THROUGHOUT ANY datalog I do. Starts immediately and continually climbs up to 60k counts, drops to 0 only to repeat indefinetly, appearing as a sawtooth pattern in Tunerpro's histogram.
My block is street filled (up to first freeze plug) and I'm using red RTV on the threads.

Only thing I could think of to do to blindly tune this knock sensor is to mess with the torque at which it is installed and see if you get any different readings.

Traviz, the stock location right? I may have F'd up my threads a bit when I did it because orignally the guy who prepped my block (align hone, bore, etc) also did my street fill and didn't take into account I might run the knock sensor on the driver side. SO, there was a plug there that I couldn't back out so I had to drill it out. When I did ofcourse there was ceramic block filler behind it and I might of goobered the threads a bit. The sensor does install fine it seems but I'm hestitant to go in and try to wrench it down more...