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The “Ecu” wheels appear to be coming offf…

I placed an order in early May for a pcm wiring harness and flashed pcm. The company was Swap Specialties and Performance. ( http://swapspecialties.com ) Initially they told me 4 weeks turn around. As of this day it’s been roughly 13 weeks  and they don’t answer their phone consistently (4 times in probably 40 calls) and when they have they told me “it’s being buttoned up and will go out Thursday”- but nothing has ever appeared. Then the story changed to “that person doesn’t work here anymore” but the line about it shipping on Thursday continues.

I finally filed a paypal case against them and not surprisingly they did not even reply to that. Thankfully Paypal was able to recover my money. ($730+). Their conduct was very poor and the multiple lies were not appreciated!

If nothing else I hope my frustration saves someone else the hassle. I will admit I don’t know what I will do next- this is a big setback.

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LTG Motor Mounts

To get the motor off of the pallet I wanted to build a “skate” to hold the engine and trans. My goal is to add wheels to the engine and the trans and have an assembly  that can move around and probably running.

This is the passenger side of the engine that a mount needs to connect towards

 This is the drivers side of the engine. This is what I suspect the mounting plates will look like. 

I tried to mount the paper version on a piece of steel and trace it out. My goal was then to cut it out with the plasma cutter. Unfortunately 25 amps was not enough and the breaker would trip at that point.  A 4.5″ angle grinder did a good job and soon after I bought a bunch of flap disks with the intent of getting them to being really smooth and pretty. Next up I need to measure and cut spacers as the plates will not bolt flush to the engine block.

More to come..

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Ecotec Update!

After a large amount of research I was frustrated by the poor development of the LTG motor by General Motors. The initial launch was so strong but the follow through of the crate engine was very poor.

My hope is that I can add some content for anyone with an Ecotec build that isn’t willing to pay $8k for a crate motor, $4k for a manual trans, $2k for an ECU and a good few other packages to get things going.

I managed to talk to Andy at Swap Specialties and he gave me a good amount of faith in the process and their development.The order at the end of the day was for an almost fully loaded harness. –  http://swapspecialties.com/product/gm-echo-tec-standalone-harness/

One aspect that Andy mentioned was their ECU and harness doesn’t require the fancy PWM fuel pump controller and a dead head pump. This is ideal because I have a fuel cell and would not want to modify the filler mechanism.

Lead time is 4 weeks but there is plenty to do and buy before I need the harness!