Dear all,

Hello from the Netherlands! I was looking to properly introduce myself on this forum but I cannot seem to find a general introduction section. So before getting into my questions let me introduce myself. My name is Alain and I live in the south of the Netherlands. Since many years I have been an American car fan and I have owned a 1982 Chevrolet Caprice Estate (ex-hearse), a 1994 Lincoln Mark VIII and a 1978 Chevrolet Blazer. After selling all of these I still wanted to buy a car that I have loved for many years. So recently I got a good deal on a 1990 Pontiac Firebird! Although this car has a lot of rust which I am fixing now, the engine and transmission seem to be strong. Currently all the interior has been ripped out and there is a big gaping hole on the right side of the car. Here I am rebuilding part of the rear suspension mount and a lot of rust around the wheel welds.

Now to my question. Because sometimes you want to do something else then grinding and welding I am also looking at my engine. It is a 3.1 L V6 and I suspect a lot of smog parts to be present. Besides the fact that the spring on the carb does not return by itself and basically it will be stuck at WOT :-) I also found other things I want to address. It seems on the left side and right side there are parts that I do not recognize and some are not even connected. Enclosed there should be pictures and I have marked the parts I would like to know more about:
1. What do they do? Especially the right one is connected to the throttle which I am curious about.
2. Can they be deleted?
3. Does it make the car perform better?
Left side
Right side

 

The right one is the cruise control and the left one is the charcoal cannister

 

Welcome Aboard, Alain!

tealman answered the first one. I'll attempt the other two.

2. Yes, they can be deleted. It would involve more than simply removing the components, however.

3. There is no performance penalty for having the cruise control installed. It passively operated by engine vacuum and unless there are leaks in the vacuum tubing, it will not affect performance, fuel mileage, nor emissions.

3a. There is no performance penalty for having a functional EVAP system installed. At open-loop mode it is completely disabled, and during normal closed-loop mode it merely admits fuel vapor collected from the fuel tank to maximize fuel mileage and lower emissions. Again, unless there are leaks in the vacuum tubing, there is no performance loss from having it, and thus no performance gain by removing it.

Removing the EVAP system can set error codes and affect operation and cruising speeds, however. To prevent this, some parameters in the ECM would need to be changed. For example, there is a mixture offset applied by the ECM when the EVAP system is commanded to the purge function. Without the extra fuel and air being applied by the EVAP system the engine can potentially run rich by locking the BLMs into a limited lookup table (search "BLM cell 4" for details).

 

Thank you both for the input. It clarifies a lot. Honestly the cruise control should have come into my mind when making the connection with the throttle cable
For the EVAP system you can see in the pictures that it is already disconnected. I did not do this but a previous owner did. Is there a scheme that shows how to connect this so I can attempt to reconnect it again?
Also is there something in this canister that should be replaced every now and again, like a filter?

 

There should be an emissions hose routing diagram under the hood. It should indicate the connections for the EVAP canister. If you don't have a label there are threads here which have all the examples.

I believe that loose line should connect to the steel tubing routed back to the fuel tank. That line should be along the right subframe rail. There should also be a tank pressure control valve in that line somewhere.

Earlier models used a fiberglass filter pad on the underside of the canister. I believe that was eliminated in about 1987/88, but you can unclamp the canister and check.

 

Thank you. I will dive into this soon.