Vortec time for the SAR guy :-)

[SARCruiser]

Looking good! it gets to be really fun when parts start coming in. What are you doing for routing your exhaust? And are you getting mandrel bents exhaust tubing or what is your plan?
A hint with the tach.. you will pretty much destroy the Autometer housing to get to the inners. I tried to take it apart without damaging it much and it was a waste of time. But, it isn't too hard to make it fit perfectly. The hardest part is positioning the gap between the face and the front of the stock housing so that the lighting is the same as the other gauges.

Thanks for the tip on the gauge. I kinda figured it would boil down to completely demolishing it... pity it isn't a cheaper gauge... The tach in my tuck has always been dimmer at night then everything else so this seems like the perfect chance to remedy that.

My next batch of parts should be in Tuesday according to Fedex (they haven't been wrong yet ). Sadly my big shipment from Advance Adapters won't be in until Thursday but I have plenty to work on between now and then.

Nice man. When youre done I may have to come up to fort fun and check her out. I live down in longmont. Do you go to COWY meetings?

Sadly, I haven't had the chance to hit up any of the local club meetings since they always seem to fall on nights I have a SAR training. I'll have to try to hit up the different clubs once this thing is back together. Right now my only wheeling buddies have a stock IFS 4runner and a heep...

 

[SARCruiser]

Sensors

I pulled the factory sensors for the oil pressure and engine temperature gauges and I know where they're going (pictures of that tomorrow) but I need to figure out what the threads are so I can get the correct taps.

The oil pressure looks like M10 x 1.0? Is that right?

The temp switch is a lot bigger and looks like a 1.5 pitch?

If someone knows, that would be great, otherwise I'll just make a run to Ace and check them on their bolt measurement rack.

 

[phishincruisin]

oil sender is 1/8" BSP. I tapped above the oil filter for 1/8" NPT and used an adaptor. They are pretty close in thread. The coolant sensor is M16x1.5

 

[SARCruiser]

oil sender is 1/8" BSP. I tapped above the oil filter for 1/8" NPT and used an adaptor. They are pretty close in thread. The coolant sensor is M16x1.5

Thanks! I'll see what my local machine tools shops carry and go from there with adapters and such.

As for your earlier question on the exhaust, I'm ordering some mandrel bent kits from Columbia River Mandrel Bending. One kit in 2.5" for header to y-pipe and a 3" kit for the rest.

Out to the garage with me for more work. I'll post up pics of today's progress tonight after I call it a day.

 

[phishincruisin]

I'm not sure what gauge you are thinking, but I'd recommend going with 14 gauge if you plan to butt weld everything. The added thickness makes it much easier to weld, and the joints will be stronger then if you use the 16 gauge.
A local exhaust shop recommended I flare and weld all my joints, as they have seen the weld joints fail due to all the vibration, but they also make everything out of 16 gauge.
Have you thought about putting a flex pipe or two in anywhere? Depending on the types of flanges you are using you might find that it helps in aligning everything after you burn the welds in and get a little deformation due to heat. I picked up some 2.5" stainless flex pipes with aluminized steel ends for around $12 a piece on ebay.

 

[usmcruiser]

Thanks for the tip on the gauge. I kinda figured it would boil down to completely demolishing it... pity it isn't a cheaper gauge... The tach in my tuck has always been dimmer at night then everything else so this seems like the perfect chance to remedy that.

My next batch of parts should be in Tuesday according to Fedex (they haven't been wrong yet ). Sadly my big shipment from Advance Adapters won't be in until Thursday but I have plenty to work on between now and then.



Sadly, I haven't had the chance to hit up any of the local club meetings since they always seem to fall on nights I have a SAR training. I'll have to try to hit up the different clubs once this thing is back together. Right now my only wheeling buddies have a stock IFS 4runner and a heep...

if you wanna go wheeling let me know. I only have a stock 60 for now but when the 40 is done....if ever...lol....I will bust out the crazy all day.

 

[SARCruiser]

Been a long day but got a lot done too.

Right as I was about to leave to go shopping for thread taps, the FedEx guy showed up with two more boxes of parts.

Headers

To answer one of Phishincruisin's questions, these were in the shipment today as well.

Heat shield

Pulled the stock exhaust manifolds to prep for the headers.

Also got the stock motor mounts off the V8. You can see in this picture the location where the Toyota oil pressure switch for the stock gauge will come to live. The oval fitting directly above the oil filter. See some pictures below for more details on the actual piece. Directly above that is the "frost plug" I need to remove to install the block heater I picked up at NAPA today. I need to come up with either a 17mm Allen wrench or a heavy-duty bolt and a couple nuts with a 17mm head to get it out though...

This is the piece that will be drilled and tapped for the oil pressure switch.

Some of the Vortec equipped trucks had a factory oil cooler that attached at this point to the oil system but on the rest, it's just this odd little cap that lends itself well to becoming an oil pressure port.

Test fit the headers. I do have some concerns with motor mount clearance on the right side of the engine around the header but I won't know for sure until Thursday when the motor mounts are delivered. I could always fab up my own if needed but I was hoping to save myself a little extra work in that department.

You can see the clearance concern in this picture.

Plenty of room between the header and the block though.

I also got to work on stripping down the wiring harness. You can see my pile of removed wires in the back corner. I hadn't even pulled the electronic transmission wires at this point. Basically, I used the pinout chart from LT1Swap.com, pulled the pins and wires at the PCM end and traced it backwards to the errant sensor or plug. Keep in mind, I'm keeping all of the emissions stuff. If i hadn't, the wiring harness wouldn't hardly have had anything left to it!

 

[SARCruiser]

Also spent time today continuing teardown.

Got the driveshafts out and disconnected the shifters, all the remaining fluid lines, electrical connectors etc.

By late this evening it was time to drop the v8 back onto it's tire and move the cherry picker over to the truck.

Some finesse, brute force and swearing at missed electrical connectors...

Bingo! No more 2F! (Notice how my brother in law manages to be "that guy" in every picture...)

Now there is a very dirty gaping hole in my truck just begging for the new power

Gotta spend some time tomorrow... I guess really later today after I sleep... and clean the heck out of the engine bay and my garage floor. I think my friends and I managed to get as many fluids onto the truck and floor as we did into pans

 

[exrsa1]

SAR, looking good. I check your thread every day to see the progress. Here is a link to show what I did for the tach on my conversion: TACH

Ex

 

[Rigger]

Nice going!

You have all the parts showing up, a great work space, and plenty of helpers. Keep up the progress, man! This is a very inspirational thread.

 

[satchel]

Nice progress. I just finished mine up (is it ever finished) in May and I'm down in Denver so if you would like I can head up that way some weekend if you want to see where my motor mounts are positioned and so forth. By the way, I just used a resistor to get my tach working so if you would like I have another one that I'm not using you could have if you don't want that signal conditioner or whatever it is. It's pretty simple to do. Anyway, feel free to pm me if you would like to look around mine to help you out any.

 

[Dirtgypsy]

Updates? Hope things are going well!

Clint

 

[SARCruiser]

Sorry for the lack of updates. I sliced the tip off my middle finger on my right hand prepping dinner the other night so things have been a bit slow...

I'll try to get an update up later today.

 

[SARCruiser]

Progress

Again, sorry for the delay on the updates but working with a heavily bandaged and painful finger has been...interesting. I was finally able to dive in the last couple days and make some good progress with the help of my friends

Took care of the tach while I was confined to the house late last week.

Got the old tach and cup removed and removed the tach from the cup. Here is a side-by-side comparison with the new tach.

After disassembling the new tach pod and some careful cutting of the pod bezel with a Dremel, I got the new tach out and stripped down so I could reassemble it in the stock pod. The bezel you can see above is pressed on very tightly and I didn't want to potentially break anything critical by prying so four even cuts around it with the dremel made it all come apart rather nicely.

This is how far down I had to strip it.

Put in some longer screws.

The screws to mount the new tach are about 1/4" wider than the stock holes so you do have to open up the stock holes a bit to make it work.

Mounted in the stock cup using some 1/2" nylon spacers and a couple washers.

From the back.

And mounted back in the gauge cluster.

 

[Granite Grinder]

That looks absolutely beautiful!
Nice work!

 

[SARCruiser]

More progress

This is how my box from AA arrived via Fedex.

Fortunately, everything inside the box was accounted for and intact.

Got the V8 up on a friend's engine stand to do some more work.

Took a bolt and two nuts and welded them together to make a 17mm allen wrench to get the frost plug out for the block heater.

Block heater installed.

My friend taking care of the old motor mounts.

Put the new motor mounts on the engine, bought a serpentine belt and got the mechanical fan removed.

Then the caster on the engine stand failed...

Frantically got it back on the engine crane before any more of the stand collapsed and there was no catastrophic damage to the engine.

 

[SARCruiser]

That looks absolutely beautiful!
Nice work!

Thanks! Phishincruisin gave me the idea during his swap.


Some more updates:

The flywheel I ordered from AA doesn't fit. The bolt pattern on the crank is slightly different. I missed where I was supposed to get a stock LS1 flywheel to work with this engine.

Oh well, got an aftermarket stock flywheel on order from Jegs and will be returning the one from AA. The one from Jegs is about half the price too.

Also ordered some ARP flywheel and pressure plate bolts along with some relays for the fuel pump and electric fan.

I was originally planning to run an adjustable temperature control switch for the electric fans but now I think I'm going to have Brendan at LT1Swap.com turn on the computer fan controls since those run off the temp sensor in the engine head instead of a sensor inserted in the radiator. One less sensor to potentially fail, right?

I decided to move forward with mock-up without the clutch installed so I could start working on mounts.

Had to replace the top 4 bolts on the rear inspection cover with lower-profile heads. There was about 1/16" gap between the bellhousing and the engine with the stock bolts.

Mating up the transmission/t-case. This is when having big firefighter friends is useful

The other thing big firefighter friends are good for is bashing on things with a hammer... like the firewall...right up until your gas pedal ends up at a 45 degree angle because he went a little too crazy with the hammer...

That's going to be fun to fix. On the plus side, I have a lot of clearance for the v8 on that side now

Did the first few test fits and made some measurements for the transmission crossmember. The engine will be slightly further forward than what is pictured below but I wanted to get at least one shot of the Vortec in the engine bay

Got the engine and trans back out and did a little more work on the crossmember.

Also picked up a Contour fan from Loveland Auto Salvage for fairly cheap. Even has the Bosch motors . Got that mounted up using some 1" square tubing in a method borrowed from Spook50.

As I said earlier, I'm going to run it off the PCM controls so I need to get my PCM back with the pin locations before I deal with the wiring.

That's it for now. I'm not sure if I'll be able to do a whole lot today or for the next few days and I'll be out of town this weekend. I'm really itching to start getting things finalized enough to work on putting things back together

 

[rover67]

If your motor has a fuel pressure regulator on the fuel rail you won't need the corvette regulator. just plumb the return to the original return for the 2F. I'd run a new pressure line though.

Also, you might want to think about trying to do an in tank pump of some sort and also sticking with the mechanical fan setup. I did a few variations of each and settled on an in tank pump and a mechanical fan.

I am not too far away either if you have any questions or want to take a look at something. My motor has been in my truck for a while now so i've been through a lot of bug working outs with it. Looks like you are well on your way though.

c ya!

 

[fj40-84]

nice man i will do it but i need your help
pleas give us more picture about your project even small Details
thanks

 

[SARCruiser]

Just got back from a week and a half out of town this weekend but we managed to get s few more things taken care of, namely got the engine permanently mounted

Decided to re-use the factory transmission crossmember. Moved the holes forward 2" on the frame rails, drilled new holes and welded in some 3/16" walled 3/4" tubing to sleeve the frame and prevent crushing. Used some 3" long grade-8 bolts to attach the "horns" to the sleeved frame rails. You can see one pair of the factory holes in the first pictures. Factory used captured nuts in the rails on this style crossmember.

Disconnected the transmission from the vortec so I could assemble the clutch now that I have the correct parts. While the bellhousing was out, I transferred the ball joint for the clutch release fork. The two studs had previously been transferred to align everything correctly.

The LS1 flywheel from JEGS bolted in great with the ARP hardware.

Had to use a universal clutch alignment tool from NAPA to put the clutch together since none of the local parts stores carry just an alignment tool anymore, you have to buy the full clutch kit

Used the lockwashers and bolts from AA to reassemble the bellhousing onto the transmission and then onto the vortec. Aligning the transmission with the clutch installed was way simpler than I had envisioned it would be. It all slid together like we were doing things right

Did some final test-fitting with the assembled drivetrain and the repositioned transmission mount.

Marked the location for the motor mounts and pulled the drivetrain one last time and welded in the motor mounts. I've just been using a gloss rust-olium heavy-duty enamel paint on all of the frame work. It blends in very well with the paint my body shop used over the galvanizing.

The firewall got painted with some VHT flame-proof paint and then put the Thermaltec heat insulator over that. I also patched the hole from the factory throttle linkage with a piece of 22-gauge sheet attached with some short sheet metal screws and silicon gasket maker to help waterproof the hole.

And finally got the drivetrain in under its own weight and support

Now I just have to get the body panels back in and wire, plumb and othewise hook everything up... oh and fab an exhaust. One big step closer but still a lot left to go.