After eyeballing the manual for the PacBrake, yep. Takes place of stock EBPV flapper. Neat! So, may as well grab a delete pedestal.

The solenoid looks just like a boost solenoid, so probably easy to swap if needed. I would guess it just uses o-rings or the like to seal internally, better to remove and eyeball on a bench. Hell, it may work. Pop on some ear muffs, light the truck up and see what happens. Wiring is very simple and probably was slapped together at a shop.

 

Thanks Hit Man. Riffraff shows out-of-stock on the Garrett EBPV-delete pedestal. Interesting that it's $170, whereas the delete pedestal labelled 99.5-03 by Garrett is only $113, and the non-Garrett is only $98.

 

Drove an hour from the coast yesterday and watched EGT's throughout. Never saw north of about 650*F, and mostly saw 400*F to 600*F. No trailer, empty bed, full tanks, and me. WOT on a half mile 5% climb and still fairly cool EGT's. OAT mid 50's F. On the freeway portion of that route, held 75mph smoothly and still not much reaction on EGT. This PSD is a beast! Also, tranny temp gauge needle barely lifts off the left side at all. Wondering if I need to verify it's accuracy against actual temps. What are y'all seeing on tranny temp ranges with empty truck but fully warmed up, and what temp ranges when towing sizeable load?

 

You need to add 300 degrees to the exhaust temps to see what the temp of the exhaust is at the cylinders. With the pyro stinger after the turbo, I would try not to let the temp go over 900 degrees, as that would put the temps at 1200 at the cylinders. Aluminum starts to soften at 1250 degrees.

 

If anything for the CCV, get a new set of o-rings (dieselorings.com sells them), pull the doghouse to give it a good soak in solvent, and reinstall with the new o-rings. Reasoning is that the CCV screen probably has a fair amount of caked-on grease by this point which is a restriction for allowing vapor to pass. Put another way, the more caked grease on the screen, the less vapor that will go to the intake and instead go looking for another path of least resistance (such as from around the dipstick).

 

Thursday my local indy dives into up pipe, down pipe, left pipe, right pipe, etc. as discussed here. I would love to be involved, but out of town that day, and have zero spare time to wrench this one myself. One thing occurred to me this morning in prep for that: should I be putting Liquid Wrench (or similar) on various bolts and nuts that need to come off for the job? I haven't scrutinized state of affairs on the various parts involved, but can do so soon. Do the exhaust manifolds need to come off to fit the bellowed up-pipes from Riffraff? Any penetrating compounds known to be better than Liquid Wrench? Obviously periodic rapping with ball peen or similar on the candidate hardware as the penetrant soaks in. Curious for any advice those who've been down this road have to offer.

 

Manifolds do not need to come off for up pipes, but the turbo does.

 

The turbo does not need to come off to put the new bellowed uppies on. I installed mine with the turbo on. It may be easier with the turbo off, as it might give you a little more room, but the job can be done with it in place.

 

Good on you, I'd rather just pull the thing

 

Yes, not afraid of pulling the turbo. Also, I read somewhere on this forum about "moving the firewall" a bit to ease the installation of new pipes. Is that necessary or recommended for the Riffraff bellowed pipes? If so, how exactly does one move the firewall? A modified form of jaws of life??? Also, any best YT sources of 7.3L how-to videos? Is any one channel/author better than the others, or is it task-by-task search each time? Guessing most of you who are super helpful advisors here don't need no stinkin' YT videos to do anything on this truck.

 

No, you don't need to do anything to the firewall on install. I have done a couple sets now from them and they dropped right in. 3" downpipe does take a little firewall work though.

 

Have seen videos of the uppipes going in place without touching the cab. Definitely a tight fit, but workable. Does seem that there is a fair amount of cussing that (usually) gets edited out. Aftermarket downpipe seems like a mix of experiences where some need to mod the cab, and others do not. But you already have an aftermarket downpipe, so not a factor at this point.

Penetrating oil should not hurt; especially on the turbo bolts if it is going to come off. Might not do anything on the uppipe bolts, but does not really matter as they are sacrificial at this point anyway.

Toward the amount of space for swapping out the uppipes, I made it easy on the shop folks and let them lift the cab as part of that job. While seeming a bit extreme, there was a bunch of other work for that visit and one of the items was body mounts. So, the cab had to lift anyway and doing so actually saved a lot of labor for all the other stuff that got touched. While the cab was up, we also noticed the frame had surface rust and dosed it with some cans of rust reformer paint. We were suspicious of the clutch going into that project and discovered that it was done, so having the cab out of the way made that part of the job easier as well. Another thing that we found with the cab up was that I now have a radiator core support replacement in the truck's future (will probably do that as part of the intercooler install).

By the way, was it previously mentioned to group the planned work with overlapping items, and that you never really know what to expect until getting there?

 

Riffraff box of goodies arrived this afternoon, including Hydra, bellowed up pipes, and most of the minor bits and pieces you all recommended above. Liquid wrench application here and there tomorrow, then into the shop Thu. Looking forward to elimination of the fft-fft-fft exhaust leak on acceleration, and playing with various tunes on Hydra. Thanks all.

 

Really curious to hear how the up-pipe install goes. If you don't mind keeping this thread updated that would be awesome. I'm getting closer to doing mine.

 

Happy to update this thread. Unfortunately my new-to-me local indy will be doing most of the work. I am triple booked on too many fronts this week, and want to solve the exhaust leak at least. I can guarantee pre and post photos, not sure I want to burden indy with blow-by-blow photo documentary responsibilities.