At this point I was happy with the status of the rolling chassis, and moved on to harvesting its new power plant from the suburban. The 96-00 Vortec 454's are great engines, but suffer from early MPFI ECM shortcomings. I decided to swap out the stock "black box" ecm with a much more capable 0411 which is used on most '99+ DBC GM vehicles. However, with all the variables already associated with this project (modding the stock harness to fit the C10, pieced together fuel system, cam swap, modded tune, etc), I decided to complete and iron out the 0411 swap in the currently running/driving suburban to rule it out as a reason the C10 might not (who am I kidding... when) start the first time.
Here's the 454 ready to be plucked and provide some new motorvation for my C10.
Lextech provided the fantastic pin-out document that made this intimidate project very straight forward.
I loaded a tune from another member on the OBS forum that I had tweaked to my liking, and it fired right up! So obviously I had to go verify the performance.
Once I was confident with the ECM swap, it was time to get the 454 out of the burb.
I promise, there's a 454 under there somewhere
I'll mod the stock harness to work for my project. The current plan is to tuck everything and locate the ECM and fuses/relays in the cab of the truck... we'll see if that's doable.
THERE's the 454! It ran and drove like it should, but definitely needs a lot of attention before going to its new home.
The goal is to have a ratty looking old truck outside, but open the hood to a crispy clean fresh engine bay. First step: remove all the emissions junk. The original plan was to just use blockoff plates, but after looking at the intake, I decided to shave all that junk off permanently.
Getting tiggy with it, welding up a couple small holes.
MUCH better. Some of the chunks I cut off are sitting on the valve cover.
And this brings us up to the current status of the project. I've got the 454 town down as far as I need to and the new cam is in place. I settled on a used take-out from a Mercury Racing 454 Mag, and the corresponding dual valve springs and hardware.
Seeing things finally coming together has me pretty amped up about getting this thing making some noise and on the road. Hopefully I'll continue to make fairly quick progress.