73-87chevytrucks.com Pickup

[bfofish]

looking good! can't wait to see it done!

[roundedline]

It was a little slow due to Easter, but

Thursday April 13th:  Went and picked up a set of F-body exhaust manifolds, picked up some Trans Fluid and found the actual CORRECT pinout for the wiring harness.

Saturday April 14th:  Expected to bolt the manifolds on only to find out that they don't work.  Started getting ill.  Apparently I need to get some manifolds now.  After a bit of a lull, we decided to check the drivetrain angle.  It was OFF by about 3 degrees.  So now I need to make a new trans crossmember.  The Tranny tail needs to come up some.  Since all of the parts are not yet on the truck, we decided to mock up the frontend and get the tilt ready for mounting.

We decided to mount the cab back on and check for fuel line mounting clearance, transmission clearance and firewall clearance.



While we had it on we decided to get the bumper mounted and then get ready to chop the rad support for the tilt frontend.  We mounted the '81-87 bumper bracked on the '80 frame and then mounted the bumper.

Chris Lucas
www.73-87chevytrucks.com
www.captkaoscustoms.com
Project Su
Jimmy 2WD Project

Edited by: roundedline at: 9/27/06 4:38 pm

[toplessblazer]

Chris, 4wheels&off-road magazine did a 6.0 liter swap in an mid 80s 4wd blazer a little over a year ago. If I remember correctly they wrote in the article that the 97-98 F-body (camaro/trans-am) manifolds had the best clearance for the blazers frame. Might want to give them a try. I had a 5.3 I was going to put in my blazer and it had the truck manifolds and there was no way they were going to fit in between the frame rails. Ended up selling the 5.3 and bought a complete running 89 suburban. Way less modification.

Anyway if you know anyone that subscribes to that mag you might want to see if they have their old issues. It was a 2 part story and had a lot of good info on these new style engines.

Sorry I didn't see where you had said you already got the F-body manifolds. In that article they gave specific years to get and it was either 97-98 or 98-99. There are like 4 or 5 different designs GM makes  

Edited by: toplessblazer at: 4/21/06 11:19 pm

[roundedline]

Thanks for the info Topless.  The article is here if anyone wants to see it: www.4wheeloffroad.com/bra..._0406_eng/

They are '98 manifolds.  I have been looking for those when I found out the '00-02 werent going to work.

Chris Lucas
www.73-87chevytrucks.com
www.captkaoscustoms.com
Project Su
Jimmy 2WD Project

[roundedline]

Found out the reason nothing was working the way I thought they should.  Without even thinking about it, the motor mounts I ordered use the existing LS motor mount location which is 4" behind where the "normal" SBC mounts are.

These are the pictures of the engine mounted using ECE mounts:






Wednesday April 26th: Ordered a set of LS motor plates from S&P to mount the engine in the correct posistion.

Chris Lucas
www.73-87chevytrucks.com
www.captkaoscustoms.com
Project Su
Jimmy 2WD Project

Edited by: roundedline at: 9/27/06 4:39 pm

[Z28 c10]

Well it's good to see that even people who know what they're doing, overlook some things every now and again At least you found the problem and didn't have to fab the plates yourself Chris. Good luck with that 6.0 and keep the pics coming. The project is looking great.

[roundedline]

Well, I was going to make my own in the beginning.  I wished I would have now...  I was trying to get everything together and running for this coming weekend show in Maggie Vally, NC.

Chris Lucas
www.73-87chevytrucks.com
www.captkaoscustoms.com
Project Su
Jimmy 2WD Project

[roundedline]

Since it was Mothers Day weekend, I only had Saturday to work on it and I got a late start so the accomplishments were minimal.

Monday, May 1st:  Recieved the engine plates from S&P.


Saturday, May 14th: Drove up to pull the ECE mounts off and replace them with the S&P mounts only to find out when I got there that I had left the motor shells at home STILL bolted to the 454..  It went downhill from there...

Sunday, May 15th:  Unbolted the motor shells from the 454 and sent the 2 sets of manifolds BACK to the shop.  The new mounts should solve the clearance problem with the frame.

Chris Lucas
www.73-87chevytrucks.com
www.captkaoscustoms.com
Project Su
Jimmy 2WD Project

Edited by: roundedline at: 9/27/06 4:36 pm

[roundedline]

Just posting a teaser pic from this weekends progress, I will add another post later when I get more stuff uploaded.
We got the new mounts on, chopped the rad support (more than once) pulled the tilt out of the crate, and mocked it up, then Sunday we got serious, and chopped the rear cross sill for the bed to gastank clearance and put the doors, bed and tilt on. Now comes the fun of actually aligning all this stuff...

For now.....


Saturday May 20th: lifted the motor up and pulled the ECE mounts off and replaced them with the new S&P plates.  Installed the "normal" SBC mounts and dropped it back in place.  As you can tell, the motor sits back quite nicely now.  Once the plates were on I took the original Truck manifolds and test fitted them.  The driverside fit fine.  The passenger side still hit some (of which I had expected) and I chose to see what I can do along the lines of grinding down the area I don't want to use since I liked how they exited the truck.  After some grinding I got it so it doesn't hit.  Now I just need to plug the hole off.










Once that was out of the way we decided to pull the Tilt frontend out of it home of about 8 years.  We pulled it out and set it on the truck for a general idea of what we were up against.

Chris Lucas
www.73-87chevytrucks.com
www.captkaoscustoms.com
Project Su
Jimmy 2WD Project

Edited by: roundedline at: 5/30/06 4:20 pm

[bigblock73]

Looking great Chris, looking great.    

Jeff

'73 swb 2wd

73-87.com

[123 pugsy]

Thanks for the tease pic.Looking Good!

[1BadC10]

Cool Project!

Edited by: 1BadC10 at: 5/25/06 5:43 pm

[roundedline]

Sunday May 21st: After successfully removing the Tilt from the crate we decided to start on the core support next.  Since the leading edge of the core support is built into the tilt A LOT of metal had to be removed and we still are not done.  I plan to update my How-to section on captkaoscustoms.com with the process, but here is what we started with and here is where we are now.





Once we got this far we realized that there were going to have to be some modifications on the mounting of the core support and we needed to get all the body panels back on.  We trimmed the bed for the Blazer tank Mod and then set it down on the frame.  The we mounted up the doors and tried to get them aligned as best as we could.  (yes these are GM doors from another truck and they need some serious work to be perfect)  Once we got the body line fairly close we began the inspection process and dropped the frontend on and tried to align it.  This is were we are currently

Chris Lucas
www.73-87chevytrucks.com
www.captkaoscustoms.com
Project Su
Jimmy 2WD Project

[1976Scottsdale]

Looking great Chris.  Just curious, what is the color of the bed or do you know?  My 76 Scottsdale was the same color and I never could find out what it was.  Thinking of painting my 78 that color, or silver and black.

[1980cdeluxe]

Just wondering what size tires, and what kind of wheels they are.. I like the way they look, real sharp.