Last year I put a 6BT and NV4500 in my 80 series. I love this swap and would love to see more people doing them. However, I know that the swap has been plagued by some high dollar flops and vendor issues. I don't have a bottomless wallet and I too was scared away by the vendor issues when I decided to do my swap so I designed and fabbed my own adapter. It is actually significantly easier and cheaper than you might think. I have posted the drawings and a how-to over in the diesel tech section that you can find here. I thought I'd cross post here as I think its of interest mainly to the 80 series crowd and could also be used to swap a chev LS motor in using the NV4500.
One other tech note that worried me about this swap was adding the clutch pedal to the truck. This turned out to be way easier than I thought. You can either order a pedal from Japan/Australia ($$) or you can be cheap like me and go to the wrecking yard
. Turns out chevy ck pickups of around a 1993 vintage use a clutch pedal bucket assembly that is almost a bolt on in our trucks!! You'll need to heat and bend the pedal a bit, but it is darn close to factory. You can then cut down the pedal pad on the stock automatic brake pedal to match the GM pedal and order a new pad. You couldn't tell it wasn't stock.
Stock Chev Bracket:
Mounted in the truck:
I believe the pedal in that picture isn't hooked up to the linkage so it looks a bit more off than it actually ended up. Anyways, it felt great driving it and can't be beat for the u pullit price of free with trans I go over how I did this in posts 16 and 17 of my build thread here.
I'm not on mud a lot these days, but I sure have learned a ton from you all and hope this helps somebody going forward. Thanks!
One other tech note that worried me about this swap was adding the clutch pedal to the truck. This turned out to be way easier than I thought. You can either order a pedal from Japan/Australia ($$) or you can be cheap like me and go to the wrecking yard
. Turns out chevy ck pickups of around a 1993 vintage use a clutch pedal bucket assembly that is almost a bolt on in our trucks!! You'll need to heat and bend the pedal a bit, but it is darn close to factory. You can then cut down the pedal pad on the stock automatic brake pedal to match the GM pedal and order a new pad. You couldn't tell it wasn't stock.Stock Chev Bracket:
Mounted in the truck:
I believe the pedal in that picture isn't hooked up to the linkage so it looks a bit more off than it actually ended up. Anyways, it felt great driving it and can't be beat for the u pullit price of free with trans
I go over how I did this in posts 16 and 17 of my build thread here.I'm not on mud a lot these days, but I sure have learned a ton from you all and hope this helps somebody going forward. Thanks!