Here are some updates...
The shift light works excellent. I used an 1157 LED bulb & hid it in the AC vent. It comes on at 6500 rpm & otherwise you never know it is there.
My turning radius was similar to a dump truck, so I worked on fixing that.
I added 3mm more wheel spacer thickness to the front to gain additional frame clearance & then ground the spindle steering stops for a few more degrees. This got me almost 1/4 turn additional steering. I have no interference in the front, but everything is very close. I have 2 turns lock to lock now.
I also ran into some issues with rear tire clearance. The rear tire would barely touch the inner bed wheel well on hard cornering. This was due to body roll, not side-to-side sway. I blame that on the fact that I did not have the rear sway bar installed due to a clearance issue with the the large Dana rear. It also wanted to spin the rear inside tire when powering out of a corner. On my local 25mph clover leaf interchange I could enter at 60 & hold about 40 before the rear inside tire was protesting. More throttle would create over steer as both tires started to spin.
I decided to fit a custom rear sway bar since there are no factory offerings to clear the rear housing. I used the factory rear sway bar brackets and links for now, but drilled the lower sleeves for larger bolts. I ended up with a 1-1/8" solid bar which is rather large, but great for drag racing. This substantially reduced the rear body roll & made it very predictable, but I still had issues with traction when rolling into the throttle out of the corner. I gained about 5mph with this change, but predictability was greatly improved.
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With the rear now under control, I could still feel the front roll in a hard turn. I already have the ZQ8 front bar which is pretty stout, but I figured a beefier front bar would also help the rear traction by keeping more weight on the inner rear tire. Last night I installed a solid 1.25" front bar from UMI. This worked very well... turn in response is substantially better. I went out & abused the local clover leaf again & it was holding 50mph under power. Adding more power to maintain 55 was causing some rear tire protest but not that bad. I did not push it any further today as it was only in the high 40's out & cold roads are not the best for traction. I'm hoping it warms up in the next few days to get some more accurate results.
The rear bar is adjustable so I can tweak it some more to see what the results are. It is still at the softest setting.
Double adjustable rear shocks are ordered but I will not see them for another few weeks.
Now that I have the engine tuning sorted, I have to concentrate on driving it nicely to see what kind of mileage I can get... so far I'm taking short test runs (under 5 miles) & having too much fun running through the gears. It has ranged between 10 & 11.5mpg on the last few fill ups. It keeps running better as I lean it out, but I'm reluctant to do more until I can test it for signs of knock on a hot day. I'm at 12.9 AFR & 23.5 deg timing, so there is still a little more to gain here.
For anyone here attempting to use a 4" card style MAF sensor, keep in mind the integral air temp sensor is not the correct range for our early style ECM's. It reads approx 20 high which throws off the tuning & also pulls more timing. I ended up using a remote sensor from an 02' Camaro to get the the correct IAT's.
