A friend of mine recently bought a one owner 82 Corvette that basically sat outside most of it's life in Northern Arizona, suffered a bit of neglect I guess and was not driven much. About 40,000 miles on it. Automatic and T-Tops. A 5.7 or 350 cu in engine with cross fire? Dual throttle body fuel injection. The interior had pretty much rotted out so off to Carvel's Atco upholstry shop where I have had upholstery work done and they are doing my Hornet Sportabout and will also re-do the drivers seat in my Saturn Coupe.
I have never really heard anything good about the fuel injection used on that and considering the amount of neglect and the age frankly it ran pretty lousy going across Phoenix much to my surprise. Face it. GM has made very few notorious crappy cars, the Vega being at least one example but on the whole GM design is generally state of art and if in good condition should run well. This did not.
And it quit at the shop.
A little bit of diagnostics with no tools other than a too large crescent wrench and a conversation with the owner that indicated a new battery was installed. The owner, a good guy, a wanna be car guy but face it. A new radio installed so he can have his tunes and some one else installing a battery led me to look at it and determine the connections are loose.
Are you reading this Chocolate?
Led me to believe it probably would work better if they were tight. And it did.
And surprise. It actually ran a whole bunch better coming home. A car that old and that neglected and that level should be owned by some one who either has enough money to take to a top notch mechanic or smart enough to do things like install their own battery to make sure it is correct. So I went through my service literature and found data on that engine package. To my surprise it is tune-able.
That tells me that even if the fuel injection system was not the best design in the world it can be adjusted and if it can be adjusted it seems to me that you can get it to run pretty darned good.
So if it has a bad reputation it is probably because the dealer did not bother trying to adjust it. Just tell the owner nothing can be done. Like they did with the Cruise Control. It can't be fixed, parts are not made for it any more.
Damn. Dealers used to be a place where you could go to get quality parts and service.
My experience over the last couple of years with dealers is the best they can do is sell and install flushes of this or that at $50.00 a pop which do little more than remove $50.00 from your pocket.
Which is a lot of money to pay for a $5.00 mystery fix in a can.
I think not only can I fix the Cruise Control which appears according to my Data to have been used on anything GM made during that time interval so parts have to be everywhere but it can be tuned to run pretty damned good.
This should prove to be an interesting project somewhere down the line.
In the mean time I have to get my interior over to Atco and make room in my Hornet for the distributor where it interferes with firewall.
My Mercury Marine 5.7L V8 is quickly becoming a pretty potent Corvette 350 cu in engine now and i am getting excited to hear it run.

 

Unc...............the problem with dealerships is the old guys are gone. The old tech's the old parts guys. So evan if the parts are to be found by the counter person they have no idea what the parts are. As for the tech's I'd hate to see anyone of them try to rebuild a carb. Yet it's not their fault, cars are not the same as they were when we were young. Nothing is rebuilt nothing is tuned. They replace heads never do they rebuild them in the shop, and that goes for everything. The old ways are gone and the old guys went with.

 

To some extent that is true, the old guys are gone and being able to tune something is less of an art and more of a science and in some cases just a statement from the parts book that it does not need it and it can't be done. It has not ceased to fascinate me to see an add for a "Tune up" that says something like X dollars for a 4 cylinder car and Y for a 6 and Z for a V8 and some damned fool comes in spends the coins and leaves with a new spark plug wire and an oil filter (parts extra) and brags about what a good mechanic was found at the ZZZ muffler shop. Never realizing there is nothing to tune. The car tunes itself every time it is turned on by checking sensors and changing computer outputs based on the sensor checks. The knowledge of how and why something works is gone with the old guys along with the what to do about it when it doesn't.
I was a national tech support for a company that no longer needs them as their business failed due to mismanagement and the biggest single problem faced at that level was 3 fold but interdependent.
The service force was hired (and paid) to replace parts until something worked with out the knowledge of why the parts were replaced. Manpower is expensive parts were cheap, paying some one for knowledge was limited to their support which they were to call and ask for help when they got to the end of their check list and it still did not work.
When called a common question was " I replaced the computer 3 times and it still does not work should I replace it again?
A question that comes from a complete lack of understanding of what the computer does and how it does it. Along with a manual that did not include a verifiable means to validate that the computer was actually bad.
How, the question would go in parking lot discussions, does the computer, relating to a car and it's electronics know to generate a spark and why.
Why can't I see an electrical diagram of how it is done.
And the theory being abstract in many ways was incomprehensible.
The could understand how a points distributor works which can be drawn out and demonstrated.
A computer can not.
It is a block with inputs to it and out puts from it and things run because the outputs are generated and the out puts are generated as a function of the inputs.
There is no direct way to schematically present it.
A generation or two down stream and you have some one wondering why their car runs like crap, the one they just got for $300.00 that looks pretty and they want to know how to make it run better with out spending the money required to pay some one to do it nor having the knowledge to even attempt to doing it themselves and have no clue what the vocabulary it that discusses it.
You know something, Chocolate really was a breath of fresh air. She listened, thought about things and found someone that actually knew what they were doing and talked to them about what she thought. And if something did not make sense to her she asked questions and thought some more until the pieces fit in her mind. Whe was willing to concede that she might be wrong about something but had enough moxie to think and act until the pieces fit.
That was refreshing and for me? Fun.
Some one who says it can't be this because I have a pretty car is a hopeless waste of time.
They? Want instant gratification similar to what you can get from a facebook meaningless friend.
In some cases the technology has indeed replaced the art in service and repair. Time does march on. The statement made that they don't make them like they used to is quite true and in many cases thank goodness.
Cars do not perform like they used to. Today it is far better.
I am old enough to remember the advertising for the power pack Chevy V8 of one horsepower per cubic inch. A 283 hp 283 Cu In Chevy small block Will wonders never cease, from the factory yet, not from the speed shop.
And I just read about the 580 HP Chevy Camero using an engine with direct lineage to the infamous 283 and not only does it have 580 hp it will get 20+ mpg while the 283 was pegged at about 9mpg, pass smog when the 283 couldn't and did not have to, and run on substandard gasoline, I said run, not develop 580hp but it will run and not scatter pistons all over the engine while the PowerPack Chevy required the best premium gasoline available at the time to be able to go to the grocery store with shedding parts.
All of this leads to arguing how much HP and MSD ignition will give you for what ever the expense is when replacing a distributor with a set of points that still functions.
And according to Physics text books the answer is none.
If a spark is generated the cylinder goes bang and the cylinder don't care how the spark is generated just that it is there.
Or the current Saturn argument of why shouldn't I used 5W20 motor oil. The factory recommends it and the dealer insists on it. And comprehending the answer is out of the question.

 

And a last comment having to do with a dealer.
When you take something in for repair and the recommendation is to use a $50.00 flush of something or another you know for sure that the toilet is where the money will go.

 

Man, I just LOVE the way UnclJohn puts it in a nutshell - you are da man!

 

a 40 sq yd nutshell.
I had to rest during that 2nd to last post

 

Crap derf ............ I had to go take a nap before I could finish. It was a good read.

 

You might try Mid America motorworks for parts for that year car. They carry a lot of that stuff. And your right the crossfire injection was not that great but still better than carbs. A Corvette that year with those low miles could be worth a few bucks. 82 as you know was the last year for the C3 and although it was a realtively low HP. they still ran good and are somewhat attractive to some Corvette people especially if they are numbers matching. My 2 cents worth.