NOOOOOOO !!!O6/20/04I was out driving around just now and some guy in one of those Neon SRT4's drove up along side of me. There was a huge stretch of road ahead of us with no car's anywhere in sight so I dropped it into second gear and nailed it for about 5 seconds or so. By that point I was about 5 car length's ahead. It was obviouse this guy didn't have much under the hood so I got off the gas. Then the car started running really rough and the tone of the exhaust was completely different. I came to a stop at the next intersection and the car stalled on me (it's an automatic). I started back up again and I got a code 33. The car felt really weird driving home afterwords. It just doesn't feel as smooth as before under acceleration. I really hope it's nothing seriouse.****************************************************UPDATE:06/23/04Turns out that code "33" was for the MAP sensor. Well, I picked up a new MAP sensor today ($85 ) I disconected the battery to erase the ECM and replaced the old sensor. Started the car up and took her for a spin. No difference. When I stomp on the gas it feels like I'm running on 4 cylinders (now I know how import driver's feel ). I got back and popped the hood and the valve cover breather is spewing oil all over my passenger side header. It's also smoking like a chimney. I take off the breather and the smoke is "puffing" out. Not a good sign) It's also coming out of the exhaust. I took it to my mechanic and described the symptom's. He right away asked if I was on the bottle at the time and when I said that I was he said I'd probably killed the motor. Anyways, not exactly the way I wanted to start off my summer but hey, atleast I had the car on the road for 2 month's this year. 2's better than none I guess. It's been one problem after the other. The very day my insurance started (April 1st) my tranny blew up. Then I messed up the suspension, now this. I can't afford to repair anything right now so I'll have to call up the insurance company tomorrow and tell them I won't be driving anymore. That's it for this summer. In all honesty though, I really don't feel as bad as I thought I would. I mean, in a way, I'm actually kind of releived. I knew that the motor would let go one day or another and always thought to myself "this is it" whenever I hit the spray. Now it's finally happened. I can stop worrying about it now. Since I have to rebuild the motor anyway, I may aswell build it with some heavy-duty parts to keep this little "accident" from happening again. Since money is an issue, (like always) I will be using what I can from my current set-up, the stock heads (they've been ported/polished with 2.02intake/1.6 exhaust valves) the ported intake and factory 2bolt block.I'm considering just "rebuilding" the motor with a set of forged pistons and connecting rods. A new crank (forged?) and a girdle to strenghten the block. I'm going to upgrade the LT4 Hot cam with a GM 847 cam aswell. ****************************************************UPDATE: 07/01/04Well, during these past few weeks I made the decision that if had to rebuild the motor ( the car felt like it lost 2 cylinders) I may as well "throw in the kitchen sink" sort of speak. I decided to go with a stroker since the cost of the parts wouldn't be very much (if any) higher than a basic 355 rebuild. I setteled on a 396 with forged piston's, H beam rods,and a STEEL crank. (That and all the other crap that comes with the rotating assembly) I'm getting it at dealer cost ($2200CAD). Labour and machine work are obviously extra.I just got off the phone with the insurance company and cancelled my policy with them. No more driving for me this summer About 3 day's ago I decided that since I'm pretty much broke at the moment, it would probably be best if I did as much of the work myself as possible in order to save myself some money. I've always done most of the work on my car myself up untill now, mainly things like maintance and installing "bolt on" parts and left all the seriouse stuff like cam changing, head porting etc. to my mechanic.Well, I decided to take apart as much of the engine as possible and have the car towed to the shop when there was nothing left other than the block in the engine compartment. I was pretty nervouse, actually pretty scared that I might be getting in over my head but at the same time, I was also real excited at the same time. What better way to learn about motor's than to tear down your own? It's not like I was able to go anywhere with the car so I pretty much had all summer to take my time with it.It's been 3 days since I started taking stuff apart a little bit at a time. I'd stop by my parent's house after work each day (that's where my car is right now) and take off a few more pieces. By this time yesterday, I had taken off the radiator, air intake, alternator, ignition, tranny cooler, air conditioner compresser and all related pieces, the intake manifold, opti, waterpump,emissions, and crank pully. Today, I manged to get off the driver side header and pull out the plugs. That's when I noticed that one of them was completely bent. (not good) I eventually pulled off the head and saw that one of the piston's was missing about a huge chunk of it's material on the outside perimeter. It completely disappeared!! Vanished !! All I could say was... Holy **** !!The head itself is scratched up, but my mechanic told me that can be fixed real easy and that at the most, I'd have to pick up a pair of new valve's (2.02/1.6)I have to say that taking apart my motor has been really cool. I've never done anything like this before. I'm getting hand's on experience and the entire experiece is getting me that much closer to learning how to build my own motor one day. ****************************************************I took a few pic's to show you the progress so far.****************************************************UPDATE: 07/18/04Thought I'd update you on what's been happening with the Formula.I managed to take remove just about the entire engine except for the block 'cause I don't have an engine hoist and I'm pretty sure the block would probably be just a little too heavy to take out by hand. **************************************************** At that point there was nothing much left to do other than to take it to the shop and have them remove what was left. The flatbed showed up at around 10:30 (an hour and a half late ) but hey, better late then never I guess. She was taken to the shop and left there for a day or two to have the block pulled. A few other things were done aswell, along with a good cleaning from a power washer to help me with painting the engine compartment later. ****************************************************Since I had removed the ABS system from the car and had no intentions of putting it back in, I had Andy (my mechanic) bend some new brake lines for me. The final set-up is A LOT cleaner than with that huge ugly ABS unit in ther taking up space. It look's even better that I had hoped. **************************************************** Here's some of the stuff I took off the car that I'm NOT putting back in. All emissions equiptment, The ABS unit, Heating core, AC and all related hardware, and finally, the front end bracing. Combined weight of all parts is just over 67lbs. More importantly, that's 67lbs off the FRONT end of the car. ****************************************************Here's what the car looks like as of today 07/17/04. The motor's out and the engine compartment's been washed down and is ready for me to start sanding it for priming and painting later. Since ther's a lot of crap I won't be putting back on the car like the AC for example, the holes along the firewall and so on that were used to hold these pieces on with brackets will all have to be filled in and sanded down so that the final look woll be SUPER clean. No holes or lines anywhere!! ****************************************************Next thing to come off the car will be the rear bumper support. From what I've been told, that's another 35lbs I'll be able to shave off. I'll take more pic's when I actually get around to doing it.Money is still a HUGE problem for me at the moment. How big a problem is it?? Well, let's just say I might not even have enough $$ to pay my rent at the end of the month I'm not really worried though 'cause I always manage to find a way I got a bunch of parts I'm selling (like my NOS kit) and will be getting some money off them which I'll use to put towards the new 396 rotating assembly. The goal is to have the parts before the end of the summer. Have everthing assembled over the winter, and have the car ready by spring. Having money for car insurance to be able to drive it.... well... that's another story. I'll continue to keep you guys posted on anything new that happens. Stay tuned. Let me know any suggestions you might have about mods I might want to do before everthing goes back in...07/24/04Since I've now taken out the entire engine and all accessories, there are only a few minor things here and there in the engine compartment that I have to remove before I can prep everything for paint. I wasn't able to get at the rest of the heater assembly from the out side so I had no other choice but to tear apart the dash to get to the rest of it.Let me just start off by saying that this was by far the biggest pain in the ass project I've ever had to do. I never thought it would end up taking me an entire day to get the dash off the car but it did. There must be 1,000,000 srews holding everything in place and if that easn't enough, the are another 1,000,000 of those "clips" that hold the wires secure to whatever part they tied to. I was forced to cut all these clips to be able to take everything apart. What a freak'n nightmare. When I finall got the dash off I couldn't believe just how many wires and connections there were. It looked as if my car was built by NASA. Funny thing is these Fbody's aren't at all "high-tech". I can only imagine how many wires and crap are in the BMW's, Cadallic's etc. I don't even want to imagine.When that was done, I had a huge gapeing hole in my firewall that had to be covered up. I managed to find a piece of... well, honestly I have no idea what it was, in my garage that I used to cover up the opening. I took the measurements and cut out an appropriate sized piece. Did a little more "tweaking" to get it to fit right, then marked all the holes. Drilled them, then painted the panel an "aluminum silver" It turned out pretty darn good if you ask me.Anyways, the next day Sunday, I decided that it would be the best time to also remove the passenger side air bag since I really had no use for it. That, combined with all the duct work, heater fan and brackets shaved of another 37 pounds from the car. Total weight removed so far is just over 100 pounds including the front bumper support. Next week I'll take out the rear bumper support as well. Should be somewhere along the lines of another 30-35 punds. When everthing's back together, the total weight should be in the area of 3000-3050 pounds (the car weighed exactly 3200 before I started taking stuff off)I haven't gotton around to putting the dash back on since I made the decision of switching over to a carburator set-up. After seeing all those wires and sensors and and such I just wanted to get rid of everything and have nothing but an engine under the hood. The decision isn't final just yet, but if that's the route I take I'll leave the dash off so that I can take out ALL the wrireing behind it first.���������****************************************************��������