Made some progress this weekend!
My homemade gantry crane - one thing they don't really stress is that these oil pans are DEEP. I scraped the core support trying to get over it.
I wasn't planning on it, but I had to remove the intake to position the load leveler low enough to get that much clearance. The first time I lifted it, I had 6" inches of pan below the core support. So now it has new felpro intake gaskets as well.
Unfortunately, I got some indicators that this was not a well cared for/healthy motor... so that kind of bums me out. SO MUCH CARBON. Lord. The cathedral ports on the heads were literally caked with heavy carbon, as were the runners on the intake manifold. I had a 226k LT1 out of my old camaro that had nowhere near this much gunk in it.
I'm not ready to tear this motor down further, so I just stuffed paper towels into the ports on the heads, used a razor blade to scrape some of the heaviest deposits off, then after removing the towels used a shop vac with a small tube adapter to get in there and try to clean all loose material out as best I could. The back of the valves themselves seem clean.
On the intake side, used some towels and light application of brake clean to wipe out the ports and the injector nozzles.
Gonna send it, and cross my fingers that this thing will actually run, at least for a while. I see running some techron or other cleaner through the first couple tanks in my future.
Summit racing manifolds are on - painted black with VHT high-temp header paint. Fitment was great between the frame rails and clearing the starter, but I did have to grind down the forward bolt flange/ear on the driver's side a bit because it was hitting the temp sensor. It had a lot of extra material on the casting.
Anyway, wiring harness is mostly done and connected, except for the PCM side and fuse box. I need to figure out a mount, the PCM should be here tomorrow from Brendan at LT1swap. Then I can locate the fuses.
The throttle cable is off the donor truck, I had to grind out the hole in the firewall just the tiniest amount to get it to fit (oval fitting vs rectangular on the stock square cable). It's connected to the pedal but still has a little slack.
Seems like folks either bend the pedal rod, or put a ferrule on the cable - something one might use on a bicycle brake cable. I bent the pedal just a little bit and it's improved, but I'll need to bend it another 1/8-1/4" or so to get the cable tight.
As far as other stuff, last year I had bought a 93 firebird motor, and the guy threw in a mostly complete body harness, fans and more. So I went through my boxes of stuff and I have the dual electric fans and wiring harness, and I stripped some of the heavier gauge power and ground wires out of the body harness to help finish my setup. I realized I had a complete fuse box I could have repurposed instead of buying new, but oh well.