See that white Chevy truck parked behind my Suburban in the last post? That was my Grandfather's 1988 C3500 with a 454 and TH700-R4 my dad built for him. That transmission had survived behind the big block for a number of years with my grandfather regularly towing a 24' Bayliner Trophy. The truck was parked in that spot on the side of my father's shop because my grandparents had been traveling too fast on a washboard dirt road one day. Grandpa (who was driving) had turned the wheel to negotiate a curve, but the truck kept going straight. It rolled once and landed back on all four wheels. They wound up in a ditch with one flat tire but luckily no one was hurt. My grandparents swapped that one flat for the spare, piloted it to my dad's shop and rented a car to drive home.
I'm not sure what negotiations happened with the insurance company, and it was unfortunate the ole' workhorse had to die like that, but one large lump of iron from it would live on. A crazy scheme began to formulate. It involved taking those 7.4L of displacement and transplanting them into the Suburban. We also planned to upgrade the drivetrain to compensate and went as far as locating a ¾ ton front axle and disc brake power booster. The C3500 had been equipped with a Dana 80 rear axle, but we passed on it due to lack of aftermarket support.
I kept driving the Suburban as it was until I wore through the front brake shoes. During the summer of 2002 I had a job 45 miles from home, so my dad found a 4x4 longbed Dodge D50 for me to drive around in the meantime. Great little truck after we went through two cracked stock carbs then wizened up and installed a Weber instead. Much better fuel economy than my 7.5 mpg town, 10 mpg highway Suburban. Plus, I got to drive a vehicle with a manual transmission full time, which would be a handy skill later in life.
I drove my Suburban to that summer job once, no front brakes and all (because we were diagnosing the mystery vacuum leak on the D50 carburettor). Constantly downshifting to slow down while descending switchbacks in a crowded National Park was an interesting challenge. That was the last time I piloted it under it's own power. It is now 2010. Eight years have transpired and the Suburban has been very, very slowly transforming the whole time.
This is one of the last pictures I took of it before the Suburban was put into hibernation:
I was out of the country for a couple of years. If you can put 2 and 2 together based on my geographic location and demographics you'll figure out why. When I came back the entire drivetrain from the Burb had been removed. The 355 was on the shop floor, the NP205 was under a bench somewhere, and the TH700-R4 had been installed in a customer's vehicle. The front Dana 44 was long gone as was the rear 12 bolt.
Aww, such a sad widdle mouse motor all cold and lonely on the concrete floor.
I was perfectly fine with that though. My dad had replaced the ½ ton running gear with a '71-'72 Dana 60 full floating rear axle and the ¾ ton front axle we had rescued from the salvage yard (we didn't yet realize it was a 10 bolt, not the ¾ ton Dana 44 disc brake front we had assumed). He had modified the Dana 60 to fit my Suburban by chopping off the spring perches and positioning both at the correct width. Thinking ahead he welded them on at a bit of an angle to help with future pinion alignment. He'd yanked the 454 from my grandpa's truck, had it cleaned, honed and all ready to reassemble. I kept busy spring of '05 by piecing it together in the afternoons after I found a job locally.
That was my dad's '54 Bel Air convertible in the background. The story about how he acquired it was a convoluted one involving a mechanic's lien, a mental institution and prison inmates. He sold it to a private party a few years later. By this time he had also parted ways with the '72 shortbed stepside.
The 454 went together as a stock rebuild, no need to overbore. The crank, rods, pistons, everything checked out so it went back together according to factory spec. Not bad for a motor with 143,000 miles on it. The only changes were in the camshaft, exhaust and Edelbrock 3764 TBI intake manifold. Okay, and the GMPP valve covers. I just had to have 'em so I purchased some through Summit Racing. And that K&N 63-1007-1 Aircharger kit too. My dad being busy with running a shop, and wanting me to gain experience again, had me assemble the engine myself with only the service manual for reference. He did check in over my shoulder every once in a while though.
There were some other pieces to the puzzle that my old man had been stockpiling. Namely a 4L80E and NP241C he had rebuilt and stashed under a teardown bench.
After a few months of assembling grocery store shelves for 8+ hours a day some crazy idea hit home that I didn't want to work in a factory performing manual labor for the rest of my life, so I settled on a career choice and was accepted at a school in Arizona. That meant leaving behind my non-running Suburban once again for a 3 year program. Wanna know something? It's really hard to work on a car when you're a 7 hour drive away from it.