Well here are of the well overdue pictures from the last 3 months. Looking at the pictures, I don’t feel like I have accomplished very much, but I know I am getting closer to the fun stuff.
I ordered my camshaft, valve springs kit, and push rods from vinci high performance in the beginning of December in hopes that I would be able to build the motor over Christmas time when my plant is shut down for machine maintenence. Well, the box arrived a couple days before Christmas and I was super pumped. My wife calls me and tells me the Cam came and that she brought it inside from the front porch. I asked her if it was heavy, and she said, no not really. It was at that point that I knew I was in trouble. I came home and opened the box and found 12 push rods, 8 valve springs, and the retainers. Everything else was missing. I want to give props to Roger Vinci for making it right. We worked with the shipping company and filed a claim, and I sent him back the box and parts that did make it to my house. I would highly recommend ordering from him.
Fast forward a couple of weeks. It was time to get the motor cleaned so I could start disassembly to get ready for the cam swap. Here is the engine after I finished power washing the outside. At this point, I didn’t know I would be taking the short block apart, so I was pretty concerned about getting water into the engine. I taped everything up pretty well, but ended up getting some water into the engine (based on what came out when I drained the oil).
After washing, I removed the trailblazer differential and oil pan. Removing the differential was a challenge, because for some reason it had corroded itself to the oil pan. I had to use a ball joint fork and a 3’ long pry bar to get it off.
Once I had the pan off, I saw that my engine had the 24x reluctor wheel. I now had enough information to order my wire harness. My LH6 is a little strange, because it seems to be a mix of gen III and gen IV parts. I have noticed that it is more expensive to do the wiring harness and tuning with this engine because the computer on this engine was only used a few years. I did luck out and because the previous owner had the TB tuned at a local performance shop so he still has the HP tuners license.
A little winter weather gave me an excuse to get some work done inside the house.
After removing the cylinder heads, I realized how big of a mistake I made when I left the intake off. Even though the engine was covered up all last year, I didn’t think about the fact that mice could build a nest on top of the engine and pee down the cylinders. It looked really bad when I took the heads off and reaked of urine.
The cylinder head and valve looked much worse than they really were.
I had toyed with just rubbing the cylinder with WD40 and hoping that there was no foreign matter on the piston rings, but after thinking about how much money I had in the motor, I decided to pull the pistons and hone the cylinders with a ball hone to see if it would clean up.
It’s a good thing I did, because the pistons in the cylinders with the rust were disgusting.
I cleaned the head gasket material off with a razor blade and an air grinder w/ scotchbrite.
I honed the cylinders using a 4” brush research flex hone. I do want to mention that while I was reading threads on LS1tech about honing, I saw a lot of people who wanted to hone the cylinder with the engine in the car. Some people had some success doing this, but after honing mine, I would not ever attempt to do that. There were stone particles everywhere on block.
Honing didn’t clean up everything, but I can’t catch my finger nail on any of the areas where the rust used to be, so I think it will be ok. I am putting new rings in it. Hopefully it doesn’t use too much oil.
This is what came off of the mains after honing
The two problem cylinders after honing:
Cleaned block
As a side note, I was able to convince a buddy of mine to get an old truck. So after a few months of looking, we found this really nice two tone black/white ‘87 long bed with 95k miles for $3500 bucks. That got me pumped up for working on my project again.
