I ran into a friend of mine at the mall on my lunch break and he asked how my car is doing. i told him i want to convert to TPI. he told me he has a TPI setup minus the wiring. He has the TPI, injectors, mainfolds, computer, and everything but the wiring. he wants $400 for all of it. I offered $500-$600 but he said $400 so im gonna take it. Should i take this to a shop like east cost preformance or the shop up by CHEF where they know f-bodies? or does anyone know a place that can tune it install it and have it running right other then those places? also where can i get the wireing?

 

i'd make sure i had the harness, ecm, and corect prom in hand before i did anything, including buying the tpi parts. little things like not having the harness and not being able to find one really slows down a project like this.

 

is there any sites like painless wiring that would have a harenss?

 

You also need to get a TPI alternator bracket, TPI thermostat housing.
I did the swap a year ago and all these small items stopped me right in the middle of the project.

Went from this,

to this,

 

was the swap hard? did you notice a significance increase in performance? The swap in your car looks very clean and nice. Thanks for letting me know. If you can email me with any other problems you ran into that would be great.

 

The swap wasn't too hard. I had a lot of help from the members of this board which helped tremendously. John Millican modified my MAF harness to SD for me as well as helped me wire up the car and troubleshoot some problems that I overlooked, like not hooking up ignition power to the ECM.
I installed 87 TPI heads as well as a Crane PowerMax 2050 Camshaft. Best out of the car was 14.1 @ 99mph with a 2.3 60'.
Previous best with the carb was 14.9 @ 92mph with a 2.1 60'.
All runs were on street tires.
Here is a video of the car about 2-3 days after I got the TPI setup running. Right Click and "save As" Video of my car

 

you can pick up a tpi setup complete cheaper at a 'u pick it' type of yard..... and you might be kind of disappointed with the stock setup.... i'd say go with LT1 or a Stealth Ram... just my $0.02

 

The stock setup is great.... for stock engines.
If you actually plan on making power you will want to upgrade to a different sort of setup, like dan said.

and theres a lot more to the TPI swap than just the intake and wiring.

you may need new injectors to match your HP output. you will need a new fuel pump and have it installed in the fuel tank. you will need the wiring for it too... you will need to customize your chips and buy the chip burning hardware if your motor isnt a stock L98. you will need to run a return line to the fuel tank. you will need an AFPressureRegulator...

and the list goes on. it usually costs a person about $1100 total to do the swap on a motor that has a carb. thats just the average, though. and thats for a STOCK EFI setup, we arnt talking high RPM potential performance, we are talking OEM Stuff.

 

What cars didn't have a return line? My car had a return line.
The chip burning software and hardware isn't required but is nice to have. My programmer and software paid for itself. I burned a few chips for some people, mainly simple ones, and got my money back from the programmer.

Fuel pump in the tank may require a new in-tank assembly as the carb pickup doesn't have a provision for a pump.
I went with an external in-line holley pump on my car, 45psi 255lph.

 

so zephyr when is that car gonna be running!

 

soon, hopefully. It's been down for so long, it's going to feel like I bought a new car.

 

well hopefully when the owner before me changed to carb he didnt change the tank. the car was originally a 305 TPI which might help the install go a lil smother im hoping.