It seems like my updates are starting be on a monthly basis which is better than nothing.
The main focus the last few weeks has been dealing with a stubborn oil leak I was chasing all last year. I had oil dripping out of my bellhousing after a hard drive, and even some smoke coming up through the shifter hole after going full throttle from light to light. The starter was also coated in some oil. I am 90% sure the leak was coming from the back of the intake or a bad valve cover gasket but could never pinpoint it to a specific spot. I am changing my intake and will pay close attention to the seal on the rear china wall, but my OCD had me worrying about the rear main seal and if something was leaking there. I had put a fresh rear main seal on the engine last year, but maybe I had damaged it when trying to stab the input shaft into the pilot bearing? Anyway... out came the transmission just to be sure!
Everything looked ok when I got everything apart, and even the back of the flywheel was relatively dry. The only thing I noticed was the small gasket behind the seal carrier was a bit wet... which could have been contributing to the leak:
I replaced that seal along with a new rear main seal while I was in there. I hate oil leaks (and all leaks in general!) so hopefully now everything stays nice and dry:
So, onward with my Holley Terminator X install! I had sent my "universal" harness out to a member of the 3rd gen Camaro forum to modify it to integrate with the 3rd gen Camaro body harness. He typically does harnesses for people doing LS swaps, so we had to work through a few details to make the ECU work for my small block but I think we got all the details worked out. We went back and forth quite a bit on where I would be installing sensors, what inputs I wanted to use, where I wanted to mount the ECU and ignition box and he built the harness to my specs. I would highly recommend working with him for your harness needs, he was patient with all my questions and suggested a lot of good upgrades!
I just got the harness back last week and it looks great. Everything looks like it will plug in where it needs to go. To get my old harness out, I had removed a ton of stuff under the hood since I worked so hard to hide everything. Getting the new harness was the last piece of the puzzle I needed to start putting things back together as I again want to hide it as much as possible. What I had been doing in the meantime is mocking everything up on my workbench, ordering the parts I need for the intake install and generally trying to get ahead as much as I can. Sometimes this can be frustrating as it seems like I'm not getting anywhere, but it should pay off this weekend when I have a few hours to work on the car and parts can start flying on!
Hopefully I'll have some good progress to report at my next update... I should have all the parts I need to get it running again!