nocutt wrote:...you have to remember I had completed the swap with the help of WestCoastFiero back circa '98, when RollinGTZ & Fastlane came on I was probably not on bstuff, but rest assured there was a continuum between my car and theirs. Unfortunately I don't know what happened to either of these vehicles nor their owners. I know RollinGTZ complained about the difficulty of the swap and general maintenance...
All the 3800 v6 swaps in all the Berettas I have seen are completely unique...ALL and I am not talking little things here and there...the approach was different in comparisons to say 3800 v6 swaps in fieros (I personally took a road race approach) and then I feel none of us ever continued to do swaps or influenced others enough to create some kind of "lineage"...I believe it is just based on the owner, I think we are a bit eccentric in our own way...lol I took the turbo route because I was already in that area of performance (Lc6/buick) before getting into these cars, but it was a very long and lonely road for a while...there was ABSOLUTELY nothing on the market, for Berettas (well there was mantapart...God forbid you sent them your well earned $$$) talk less of the 3800 v6 sc'd/na...when the market exploded it was also geared towards the L67, but that did not still translate into our little niche (mind you this turbo setup translated very, very well I might add understandably in the GP community) and there was also a configuration war going on between the 60 degree guys and 90 degree v6...and it was quite entrenched (in our community) many chose the 60 degree v6 even when there was nothing besides moving up in displacement...loyalty, familiarity runs deep!!
Ha, yeah. Total truth there... I remember asking
RollinGTZ about his $600+ custom half-shafts and getting an abrupt "If 3400s are snapping axles, what do you think a 3800 will do to them?" when all I was really interested in knowing was if the lengths had to be custom or not... And FWIW I have
never broken a CV joint on one of my cars... I had serious concern at that time if my pax-side CV would end up too short and the DS too long due to the extra ~1.25 inch or so on the harmonic balancer due to my Series II's second (Super-Charger) drive-belt, and the 5/16 inch shims I made between the engine and transaxle bell-housing to accommodate an off-the-shelf 3800 flywheel, which is dramatically thicker than a 60-degree V-6's flywheel... Anyway, yes, it is the individual uniqueness of the 3800 builds that makes them more interesting than a 3X00 swap IMO, and as I've said several times before, the engine almost seems to fit the Beretta better than the 60-degree engine does (for instance, look at the heater-hose connection locations -the stock Berettas need piping wrapping almost completely around the engine to get coolant to the heater-core, whereas the 3800 has the outlets right at the back of the engine...), and I had a step-by-step write-up back on
bstuff proving that the swap could be done with the basic tools required to swap a stock engine, a hack-saw and a power-drill -not a very tough swap IMO, I never really got what
RollinGTZ was griping about.
Although interestingly enough, my
front plugs are really easy to get to and my
rear plugs are a b!tc#... I am thinking that my engine is located slightly farther back in the bay than yours is? I had stock 282 tranny-mounts on my five-speed before I switched over to the F40, were your tranny mounts custom?
I looked a bit through your old thread you linked, and if I caught it right, you are using N/A PCM code?
Now if you want to talk about lonely, try swapping a N* into a five-speed Beretta...
There isn't a V-6 fan in either camp who appreciates that swap as anything other than a freak-show
, and the only cheering section seems to be newbie pipe-dreamers who say that they are 'gonna do that next week' when their pay-check clears and their uncle gives them the ol' Deville...
No clue that even the flywheel needs to be custom, the tranny modified, and that the engine doesn't actually fit inside the engine-bay without ditching the power-steering pump and belt tensioner, not to mention the oil-pan...
Virtually zero aftermarket support, and probably never will be, and my "new" DHP won't even talk to the PCM, as I understand it...