Probably should have taken more pictures and documented the progress of this build better, but here is some pictures anyway.

Bought the car this winter from a guy on the board as a roller. A very clean 1984 z28.

 

notched the K member. Installed some hawks lsx conversion. motormounts.

 

Bought an L92 with vvt out of a 2007 cadillac escalade. I wanted to retain the VVT. I ended up using an L99 water pump and spaced ls1 power steering and alternator out. The L99 waterpump required no spacers which was nice.

 

Bought the 1 5/8 headers from hawks.

Also used a LS3 intake manifold, injectors and rails. The throttle body i used was off a 2010 vette 90mm TBW (not pictured)

 

I bought a standalone harness from an outfit in AZ called Sand and Street Performance. The fit and finish was excellent. I also got my ecu from them which was an E38. They were hands down the best deal I could find. I also ordered a harness for my brothers lsx swap and they gave us a discount. They failed to install the VVT part of the harness, so I had to pin it into the plugs myself which was a good learning experience, but costed me some downtime. I wired engine harness through the firewall exactly where the old harness was and also installed the computer in the stock location. Very tidy install.

 

I ran the credit card style MAF sensor in 4" aluminum pipe along with an old tpi intake that I modified. I wanted to motor to look like it came with the car originally.

 

Cool swap! One thing I'd say is that the original intake is probably choking that engine.

 

So I started the car. Burped the cooling system. But now I could use some advice so hopefully someone can chime in. The car idles nice, but runs awful when I try to drive it and give it any throttle. I believe it is all MAF sensor problems from my tpi airbox. It also throws up MAF errors on the OBDII along with too lean errors sometimes as well. I really would like to use the old tpi box because I like the look of it, and now I have quite a bit of time and $ tied up in it. I believe my problem is that I am getting too much turbulance where the MAF sensor is. I tried to add a honeycomb screen that I took from an ls1 MAF sensor, with hopes that it would straighten out the airflow, but no. So I feel my only hope to get this thing running properly is to run some 4" intake piping to a cone air filter and have a nice long straight section to install the MAF sensor. Could it be something else? I have good fuel pressure...

 

I still have open headers, but I don't think that really would have much of an effect on it running so horribly.

 

the tpi box is not really the best breathing option for these motors. IIRC, you should have at least 2-4" or more of straight tube before a maf if you don't have the honeycomb to reduce turbulence. Try grabbing a cheap cone filter to go over the maf and see if you're still having the same problem.

Also, did you have the engine tuned for that style MAF? pcm may not be calibrated correctly for the MAF's output

 

The calculation I read for minimum tube length for straight flow into the MAF is 1.5 X tube diameter.

M

 

Your numbers are definitely much more precise than my semi-educated guess, but I also put my MAF about 10" away from the closest bend, so we're on the same page

 

I did try the honeycomb- didn't work. I Just ordered the aluminum and cone filter. The ecu was tuned for this MAF sensor, by the same guy that made the harness. They are different plugs so he should have known... but you never know. Thanks

 

Did you get a custom tune? One thing with that custom made MAF (especially considerng the turbulence due to not having a straight path in front of it as others have mentioned) is that no standard MAF tables are going to do the trick. You're going to need a tuner to build new MAF tables from scratch.

 

i thought there was a build on here where they said the tpi intake was not letting him run the car right due to restrictions.

 

Read that too, hence my response.

 

the tpi box will hold you back for sure but it should still run fine. your issue is the MAF/tune put the stock maf on with the stock table. how he would know what the sensor would read in your tube is beyond me. i would bet the table is all wrong

 

https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/tpi/...pi-camaro.html

https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/fabr...i-air-lid.html

I'm looking to do one of these for my build

 

fiberglass does wonders !

 

Very clean intake. Looks like it came from the factory like that. Where did you get yours tuned? Milwaukee area?

 

did my tuning myself and with the help of a tuner over e-mail. basically its just a matter of following the procedures with efi-live and my wide band but he did help walk me through several things and knew what to adjust and where to smooth out tables for unrecorded data

 

my project has kinda stalled as college has resumed. Anyway I built a new intake using 4" aluminum tubing with the cone filter as many on here have done. Still runs bad as many of you presumed. I have a feeling my mail order tune is just bad as the fan turns on every time that i turn the key? Anyways I think at this stage I need a dynotune... I figure they will be able to sort out my issues... hopefully. I'll post pics of the new intake shortly.