I vote Meth injection.

shouldnt be. you could also convert to an LS7 take out cam. you would need an early ls2 front cover and cam sprocket

pffft Why not skip the 6.0 and strap a jet engine in between the strut towers? :P

Got it degreased and separated from everything. Put the ARP rod bolts in, torqued with 3 passes. That took forever

Tomorrow, cam swap, pin the crank, install new balancer assembly and begin fabbing the tensioner bracket so I can order the blower pulley

Can't wait to see the end result. Let me know what brand tires you will be using so I can buy some stock in that company

Got the cam in but couldnt finish up the job. I misplaced my valve spring tool and the LS2 timing chain wont be in until monday. The impact that supposedly had 750lb/ft of torque couldnt budge the crank bolt so I broke out the cartoonishly oversized breaker bar and made short work of it (I love the giant tool lady at autofair). The Chrysler balancer puller tool from advance auto works awesome to remove the LS balancer if you do one thing. Take the longest push rod and slip a 1/4" drive 5/16" deepwell socket over the end and tape it on. Without it, the push rod is too short, the socket gives it just enough length to fit without risking the crank threads

This swap wasnt as trouble free as the last one. The lifter retainer rods didnt slide in at all, not even past the first lifter on either side. It must have something to do with core shift. Since it was on the engine stand I just flipped it over and let gravity hold the lifters up. Simple

Ill make another spring tool tomorrow if I cant find it

Bolt thread puller tool ftw.

Last of the internal parts showed up, LS2 timing chain and hardened PRs so I buttoned up the engine one last time and pinned the crank

Still no headers, must be on a slow boat from China

Anyways, this is whats meant by pinning the crank. Anyone who's ever had the balancer off should note there is no keyway and thus nothing to prevent the balancer from spinning on the snout when a high load is placed on the drive belt IE blower

Starting off


Install the balancer to be ran or aftermarket drive hub


Mark where the pins will be installed and install the drill guide like it was a crank bolt, sans all that torque. Drill to the target depth, remember to lube the bit with oil as you go. You dont want to burn one up halfway in


Remove the fixture and blow the shaving out with compressed air. Drive the pin in. It needs to go slightly below the surface


Install new bolt and torque to spec

thanks for the photos. I'd always heard about the process, but (since I'm not at the power levels yet) never looked into how it was done. Honestly looks a lot easier than I was expecting it to be.

Looks good. You may have mentioned it somewhere in the thread and I may have missed it, but what type of horse power levels are you shooting for?

Shooting for 5xx at +15psi. Perftruck.net has shown more

Headers are in, hopefully they fit the chassis

good luck with the headers; i know where your old y-pipe can be used.....

who's headers are those?

Ebay 2010 camaro stainless 1.75 primaries 2.5 collectors

I am very curious about the results of the header fitment. If you do a mockup can you tell us how they fit?

Yes I am curious about those headers too

From looking at how far down the headers reach in comparison to the oil pan, it looks like those probably wouldn't work in a lowered car, but I hope you prove me wrong

Got the rest of the front accessories so I started playing in the garage again





The tensioner plate wasnt hard. 1/2" aluminum is expensive though. M8 and M10 threaded rods are impossible to find locally so I took common metric bolts, cut the heads off and welded common 3/8" 16 threaded rods to the ends and tweaked them till they were strait

Ran into an issue with the WP pulley. I designed the kit around the 98 WP which uses a bolt on pulley and is recessed quite a bit




Solution is yet another plate located in space with a fixed idler. Ugh

Man you are crazy good with CAD.

If you need something bolts, nuts, washers etc. and don't mind waiting a couple days I can get what you need.

Why not use a '98 water pump? I've never heard anything bad about them.


And I guess now we understand why the Maggy kit is so expensive.

Experience my friend

I may take you up on that. I was planning a decent order from McMaster soon. One thing I cant seem to find is spacer sleeves. I can find tubing in damn near any ID, its the thick walled stuff I cant locate. When I do it's plastic/nylon and Im not comfortable using that on the engine. Seeking .85"-1" OD with just enough ID to clear a M10 thread about 8" long

I would use a 98 WP if I had one or knew of one FS locally. Took me forever to find that one. Might trade with my 5.3, but Id have to crack the coolant system open again. Bleeding that sucks

Mine is taking forever because Im blazing my own trail here. Fab this, order that. It takes time, which Ive got plenty of. Im a cheapo too so the expensive part specifically designed to do job X isnt on my list. Ill fab something or try a different thing to see if it works, ie the 2010 headers. Also had to ditch the lokar dipstick plan in favor of a cut and welded truck tube. Welding a tube that thin was alot of fun. I actually ripped it in two cleaning the slag out with a drill turning the chuck by hand

I'll do some digging on Monday.

How much space will you have left between your radiator and the front of the pulley?

Its about 1/4" farther forward than this


Fan will be moved to the front as a pusher for more clearance. Tight spot will be up top near the main bracket because the rad slopes back. Intercooler pushes it even father back

I made a mock-up of the new idler plate and built some more conversion metric to STD threaded rods. Had to add a second idler because the only mount point on the bottom was exactly in the path of the belt. Luckily theres enough clearance from the waterneck assuming I can find a 10 rib pulley in this OD


Ill cut it out of the 1/2" alum tomorrow after the guy comes to pick up the 5.3. Then comes the fun job of aligning everything perfectly. If the plates go any degree away from parallel from the block face the belt will get shredded

Wow...like I said before....you're an ambitious man, Pocket. Can't wait to see vids of your car running with this engine!!

any updates?

Are you ditching power steering?

Been slammed with wiring, no time to work on this engine

Last plate is cut from alum and the SC pulley finally arrived nearly a month after I ordered it. Broke my puller tool trying to get the fugger off, man it's on there tight. Trying to find a SVT authorized dealer thats reasonable to yank it off for me

Im running PS, just in that pic I was measuring belt clearance and didnt feel like pressing the PS pulley back on so I left it off and clamped the excess slack in the vice grips

Decided today was for me alone so I finished up the brackets. As soft as alum is, it sure takes a long time to cut. Saw-zall kept gumming up. I "polished" it up with some 120 grit sand paper. Gives it an almost brushed look. Huge step up from the greasy scarred up mess I started with

First up is some humor, my fab-a-tool failure. The M122 pulley is REALLY on there and I broke the tool I made for the M90's. This was my solution. Center section is part of a spare donut tire which fit the rear of the pulley perfectly. Front is some 1/4" plate welded together to make a crude crows foot. Fixed bolts are 1/2 decking carriage bolts with an old 1/2" head stud from some wierd car in the middle. If you look closely you can see the plate flexing quite a bit. I gave up and took it to a dealership. They got it but seemed to have had just as much trouble with it because the old pulley was trashed. No matter, it was scrap anyways. New hub style 2.6 pulley ring installed. Now if I want to change pulleys, it takes a whole 5 mins


Moving on, here is the finalized lower bracket made from 1/2" aluminum. It holds the idler to keep the belt from contacting the waterpump bell. The three studs are some of my home made metric to STD conversion and uses steel sleeves to compress to. Theres the largest idler pulley I could find in the JY on the back. A 10rib belt is 1.375" wide and this thing is 1.60". Fords to the rescue again


Main bracket holding the tensioner attached in the same manner. The maggy tensioner has one HECK of a stout spring. Even with a breaker bar its still quite a pull. The studs will have to be cut down to clear the radiator


Viewed from the rear. Tensioner pulley interference isnt as bad as I'd predicted. I can get a wrench on both. The blue tape is holding the blower gasket in the right spot until I finalize it with copious amounts of black RTV


I like this view. Seems more complicated than it really is


Now Im onto the fun fun job of sanding down the flaking powdercoat on the intake. Takes for-ever to get to all the little cracks and crevices it's got. All the silicone couplers are in, going black this time. Need to order the fuel system, get some motor mounts and figure out the header situation. Almost ready to go

great progress, awesome project as always

this is the only thread I watch on thirdgen anymore, just thought you'd like to know!

Lmao. The tool you made looks like complete overkill, I can't believe it didn't work.

Too bad that main bracket is so big and ugly. Really hides all your work and ingenuity. Still waiting for header results as I expect most of us are.....Keep it up Pocket!!!!

Nitromethane

good god.. awesome progress. you live up to the thread title


any plans in the future to "beautify" those big plates with some strategically placed cutouts and polishing?

Plates will be hard to see much of with the radiator being so close



Probably wont do much more to them

The only thing I'd do to the bracket is engrave something on it like "Genius by Jon" or something witty like that

you need emblems that say "2.0 L supercharge" (122 cubic inches is 1.99 Liters)

Figured the very loud whine was enough of a tell-tale

The big green rubber band came in

Kinda wierd the HD belts come in John Deere green. Im used to a common tensioner tight where you can still press on the belt with your fingers. This one is banjo string tight, I can pluck it and get a twang. Hope my crank snout doesnt mind too much. Following the SC rule Ill have to keep a spare belt in the trunk with tools to replace it. I think Ill stick a cheapo 6 rib belt in there instead of one of these. They're just supposed to get me from the failure point to the shop and I think a 6 rib will be more than plenty for that



Believe it or not there's actually a 6.0L under there somewhere


Fabbed the inlet too. 4" is massive, but the Shelby guys really see big gains around 5"

I thought it was a 4.8 with a really bad power steering pump

So is that coupler going to clear the hood?

Yes

Here it is with the M90's 4" inlet under the stock formula hood, it actually fully closed like this. With the RAII hood Ive got tons of space. The only place that's ever been tight was up front for the SC pulley. I was planning to trim the bracing under the power bulge hood for more clearance for peace of mind, but the RAII hood has so much space its a moot point

i got my baby via craigslist however i was unlucky and bought it from a wannabe mechanic who half-assed and rigged everything to the max...ie. one lug in the back consisted of .stud(a lag bolt with a washer and lockwasher and nut WTF IS THAT CRAP haha o2 sensors=spliced in (omg) im slowly doing things right but its costin me a lot of money and im still lost with some of the electronics on it ie. vss(speedo doesnt work) ugh but it will be well worth it when i get it all back to normal then its time for performance mods!!

now you just need to make a box so it'll suck from the "power bulge" (please don't get a RAII)

glad to see this is still in the works Jon. I'll have to get online more often to check back on it

hope y'all are getting nice driving weather like we are down here

~Steven

This pisses me off. This was supposed to be plan B if the 2010's cant be made to fit. Was supposed to be 1.75" headers with 3" collectors. These are 1.695" (1.625"?) with 3" collectors. Wonderful restriction

Hawks apparently has a deal with the same chinese company that made the 2010 headers for peanuts. They neglect to tell you that and charge you the SSW price but leave off the name plate and replace it with some pretty polish

This is supposed to be SSW quality? Hell the 2010's look better


Same cast flange, minus the pretty welds. Lovely slag in there along with a 4th grader clean up grind


External welds look nice as ever but come on. Hopefully I can pull a rabbit out of a hat to make the 2010's work. Then I can send these pieces of crap back

Back on to the project. Here you can see the A-arm interference area and how much lower the 2010 headers hang


Collection is getting bigger. Need to bring out my 2" SBC headers


Garage is cleaned out. Ready to fit the car in for a serious cleaning before autofair then it'll be time to tear it down. Last things Im waiting on are the fuel system and mufflers. It'll get interesting next week

those are not the SSW headers. if you paid for the SSW headers, call hawks and make bruce aware, he'll fix it for you. shoot, you're right down the street from them, i'd be making a visit.

SSW...is that Stainless Steel Welds?

You sure do have a project on your hands, Pocket. I just bought a T56 tranny from a guy with flywheel, shifter, pedals, etc. for $750 shipped. That's not too bad.

Best wishes with your project!

What really chaps my *** is he knows damn well they're not the good ones and sends them anyways. How many people have gotten them and not checked the diameter to know they're using knockoff's he paid pennies for?