Now,my own Chevy truck

Now it's time for one of my personal experiences. My own truck is a Chevy Pickup. It's only mildly warmed over with a set of aluminum cylinder heads , set of Flowtech headers and a roller camshaft.

Now here's the issue I ran into. Since I have yet to update my ecm programming,like completely remove the programming for the oxygen heat sensors behind the catalytic converters,I had to leave those in and the result is a set of converters that are starting to plug up and I'll explain why.

One fine day I was dropping my daughter off at school and I noticed that my engine temperature was way higher than it should be. Then the engine started missing and I knew right away that there was something wrong. It turned out that the light casting factory Vortec head had a small crack in one of the intake valve seats. My machinist pointed to crack out to me. Anyway, the crack rendered the cylinder head useless and I was shopping for a set of new heads. I had been down to a buddies retail store a week or so before this little incident and remembered that he had a set of aluminum heads for a good deal. It turns out that it would be more cost effective to put these heads on my truck then replace them with stock since I didn't have a core to exchange for the factory heads. So after getting the parts I needed to go with the aluminum heads,I proceeded to go about putting these heads on the engine.

Once I had everything bolted up I noticed that the factory valve covers would not fit the head properly like the service tech from the manufacturer assured me,neither were the gasket mating surfaces from one side to the other the same size. So after some modification and a constant oil leak I got the truck running. Now,since I essentially changed to physical properties if the combustion chamber buy using these heads,the temperature senor behind my cat converters was giving a false reading.And at the time I was not aware of the fact that my oxygen sensors needed to be replaced. They started reading leaner exhaust and signaled the injectors to add more fuel. Now,we all know that more fuel can be a cool thing! However,when your getting more fuel all the time,it fouls up the spark plugs,injectors and more importantly,your catalytic converters tend to start plugging up and restrict your exhaust. K,now you see where this is going right? Just remember this little note when you see your catalytic converters glowing cherry red under your Chevy.

Bascally,I was asking my ecm to operate outside of it's parameters. And that just doesn't work. The truck would start to run like it had water in the gas and mis-fire all over the rpm range. This turned out to be a serious problem on the hyway. What it was doing was resetting its programming. So,yesterday a buddy of mine plugged a scan tool into the truck,erased the ecm and it started to run like a top. Then we started to up-plug sensors and we figured out that the oxygen sensor for the right hand bank is not even working. This little bit of news was great,so now I know what I have to replace. However I still have to get the programming redone because this little problem will just happen again. Or the other option,a Power Programmer would help get some of that horsepower I was hoping to gain when I put the aluminum heads and headers on the truck. Basically,the heads are aluminum so the combustion temperature will be different,the headers create an exhaust pulse that helps to scavenge more burnt material out of the chamber as well as help to create a negative pressure situation inside the cylinder which helps the intake pulse into the cylinder more effectively and faster. And I was hoping to gain at least 50-75 horsepower with these add-ons. Well,it didn't happen. So before you start something like this,consider the programming in you vehicles computer.