OEF14vette

Hello all, ill start by saying i began my swap this past June (2016) and i figured i've been a lurker for some time now and its time for me to give back and share my experiences, pictures, and, info that worked or did not work for me. i found tons of info on the swap which was helpful to point but i found about 60% was opinion and not fact causing me to buy things i didn't need or the wrong parts... anyways everything i show and talk about through this will be what truly worked for me, and please ask questions or add to what i have. The car is a 1974 corvette that had a SBC/Super T10 4 speed. I bought a 2002 LM7 5.3 from a junkyard 141,XXX miles for $325 and the TH400 was a CL score for FREE. The pictures are all before pics of the day i picked the 5.3 and TH400 up. along with how the car looked before setting wrench to it.

OEF14vette

Here are some pics of tearing the engine down to look at everything and get it cleaned up as well as some re assembly of the engine as parts came back from the machine shop. The cam is From Tick Performance by the way they were awesome to deal with helping me spec out my cam, spring, and pushrod package. All machine work was done by RPM Racing Engine Locally out of Wausau WI, and assembly was done by yours truly (me) and my helper in the pic. The just needed polishing and the block needed a light hone about .001" and i put new cam bearings in right away. The rods have ARP bolts i installed them and had them checked and they were right on spec no need to be sized. The mains were dead on as well. Let me know what you guys think ill keep the pics and info of it coming. i have been collecting pics since i started the car is so close to being done engine and trans are in it.

OEF14vette

Here are some more pictures, I wanted my alternator mounted low but didn't want to search for an Fbody mount because i would have had to buy a different alternator so i fabbed one up out of some plate steel, 1" round stock and some Cold rolled Hex stock for my idler pulley. I also wanted to make sure i had sufficient belt wrap on the water pump and as you can see with my setup compared to the camaro setup i am using the truck water pump, tensioner, alternator and balancer and still have more water pump belt wrap just peace of mind i guess. I also included pictures comparing the truck oil pan, the f body pan, and a CTS-V pan and i measured the sump as well. Both the CTS-V pan and Fbody pan fit no problem the truck pan my steering linkage slightly drug across so with a TIG it could be made to work i just didn't like how low the sump hung since the car is low anyways. The CTS-V pan fit great i just went with the F Body pan since it was cheap at O'Riellys and gave me the most clearance all i did was cut my truck windage tray down to fit and trim it where the oil pickup tube mounted. i can see if i have pics of that. The pics of the engine are as i was checking PTV clearance since i put LS1 2" intake valves in my heads and bowl cut them in. I couldnt fit all the pics i will add more with next post

OEF14vette

More pictures of the oil pan clearances and Alternator bracket. I ran into the issue of my two heater hose fittings hitting my passenger side control arm so i pulled them out of the water pump tapped the holes for NPT and plugged them, then i drilled two new holes tapped them and added regular NPT heater hose nipples to remedy it and them pictures are below.

OEF14vette

Some info on what i am doing with the car. I live in Northern WI and we dont have any drag strips close by its about 2.5 hrs to the closest one. So we work on our cars all summer i still daily drive mine when its not tore apart and then 1/8 mile drag race across frozen lake Alexander in Merrill WI last year was the 51st year straight that the club has been racing. We have a Port A Tree, timing tower, pit area, the whole nine yards. Your probably wondering how we get traction? Well with screws... thousands of drywall or deck screws screwed from the inside out with roughly 1/2"-3/4" hanging out then line the tire with a cut open inner tube or piece of rubber then in goes a regular tube. Here are some pics from Last year the car wasn't to impressive being a pretty much stock small block and manual 4 speed car. Let me know what you guys think and anyone in the area hit me up fr details we race 6 races for points have a championship race day and we have classes from rubber 2wd rubber 4wd for entry level where nothing more is needed but a car with DOT approved tires and for bracket classes we have 11.0,10.0,9.0,8.5,8.0,and 7.0 plus 7 Money classes I.E open door slammer, easy street, modified and so on. For a Stick car and stock engine i didn't think a 2.380 60' was bad on ICE! The fuel injected 5.3 and auto should be quite bit faster i hope.

OEF14vette

Okay so for the swap itself I used ICT Billet brand motor mount plates they fit excellent and were under $50 and I just bolted my sbc motor mounts to them and dropped it in. My headers are from speed engineering their the 1-3/4" stainless f body ones since they were cheap and I knew I would have to chop them up. The passenger side collector hits the floor board slightly so I just need to drop the tubes about 1/2" and the driver side has the same issue plus the #1 primary hits the steering box which no big deal take care of it when I'm
Modding the rest of them. And for the thermostat housing it's a Jegs brand straight with sbc t stat like $45 and clears everything. The car will be on a progressive wet kit of nitrous all controlled by my MS3Pro. I'll post a nice pic of all my standalone stuff the guys at DIYAutoyune/MS3Pro hooked me up right and when I received my stuff even had a shirt, hat, and some decals in it so score kudos to them awesome customer/tech service. Anyways I wanna turbo it just didn't have the cash this year before the season so nitrous it is turbo in spring and hopefully a 4L80E controlled by the standalone. Any question for me or advice please share it I'm willing to let anyone know anything I've done so far.

OEF14vette

Okay so looking at my previous posts i rambled a lot... i will break down in sections what i am using and what i have done some of this may be redundant to those of you who have read the above posts.
THE ENGINE: 2002 5.3 LM7 from a local salvage yard $325, I tore it down and looked at everything and decided i wanted to hone it and replace all the bearings, all machine work was done by RPM Racing Engines in Wausau Wi. I used ACL bearings and Hastings rings gapped to their hot street/nitrous specifications cant remember off top my head. I re used my main studs and bolts but replaced the rod bolts with ARP's as well as the head bolts with ARP's. When i put the rod bolts in i had them checked and they were dead on to spec and did not need sizing. As for the Cam i called upon Martin at Tick performance and they set me up with basically a max effort cam for my displacement while retaining streetability and the springs are their .660" dual springs with titanium keepers and chromoly pushrods. My heads are 862's thaat i had .010" knocked off and had the intake valve seats cut for LS1 spec 2.00" intake valves as well as bowl cut exhaust valves are stock just had a VJ done, hand blended, and port matched. The valves themselves the shop chucked in the lathe and polished the faces down removing any sharp edges that could cause detonation and finished them off with a swirl polish. For gaskets i used all Fel Pro minus the head gaskets which are GM 5.7/5.3HO MLS from summit for like $37 a set. I hand ported my oil pump and port matched where the pressure hole meets the block and took a carbide bur to all sharp casting just to clean it up as well as all the oil drain back holes in the valley area. The intake manifold is just a shaved truck intake as well as the fuel rails and throttle body. and to wrap it up its an F body oil pan with cut down truck windage tray. The intake is before i sanded and body fillered it. Im open to any and all feedback let me know what you guys think so far or if you have any advice to share i would love to hear it.

Project GatTagO

iTrader: (7)

Only in Wisconsin...Bless all y'alls hearts :-)

Andrew

OEF14vette

Lol, It seems crazy but it is a blast. The track record for 5.431 ET at 141.6 MPH!! What else are we going to do in the winter? Something has to motivate us to work on our cars 365 days a year. Our club website is merrillicedrags.com and you can Youtube it as well. We were also in the September 2009 issue of Car Craft Magazine.

OEF14vette

For the Transmission in my swap i went with a TH400 since it was a FREE score off craigslist. Also a bonus to it was that the driveshaft from my Super T-10 used the same yoke and length was only about 1/8" difference. I had to route my Speedo cable to the driver side since 4spd was on the passenger side. I turned to Jake's Performance out of Texas for my internals he set me up right with a 4L80E 4 friction intermediate pack using all Borg Warner High Energy frictions and rollorized some other stuff. Since i want to street drive the car as well i decided to keep a forward pattern Valve body and bought the Trans-Go 400 1&2 kit. The Torque converter is a Summit brand 10" nitrous converter we will see how it works and ill post a review also it is a 3400-3600 stall. For my shifter i am using a TCI Blackout edition Outlaw with side grip button for my nitrous or two step. I rebuilt this trans myself so if anyone has any questions ask. I have torn T10 4 speeds apart as well. The pictures are before, after, and during as well as a handy holding fixture i made to go into an engine stand to make life easier. If anyone wants dimmensions or a material list for what i used to make it just ask. Enjoy

OEF14vette

So as the title says onto the electronics i have more pics ill be putting on later. My swap is controlled by MS3Pro standalone. The harness looks incredible and the quality is second to none. I dealt with Matt Cramer and he is great and best of all knows his Sh*t about this stuff. The nice thing with the pro versus the old school megasquirt boxes is that it has the phone line tech support which has been great. I also ordered two of their Hall Effect sensors to enable the traction control feature as you could guess traction is hard to come by when you drag race on ice... My friend and i designed the trigger wheel i'm using on solid works and then we cut it on his plasma table and it turned out awesome the tough part was where to mount it since the vette has next to zero room so we chucked a bar of aluminum in the lathe and made a collar for the yoke and since the rear diff is mounted solid the yoke wont pull in and out like your typical solid axle car when the suspension squats or extends fingers crossed that will work and more to come on it. my front sensor will pickup off the back of my wheel studs. As for injectors i went with Deatschwerks 60lb hr E85 compatible and their data is going to make tuning a lot less of a headache. My pump is also a Deatschwerks 255 LPH E85 pump. For the MS3Pro harness i needed to get an oil pressure sensor from a 2002 corvette since they are 3 wire where as the truck sensor is a singe wire the vette sender is also shorter for guys with clearance issues. My wideband O2's are from Innovate and are the Blue LC2 kits one for each collector and they plug into my standalone harness. I plan to use the progressive nitrous feature the MS3Pro has so i still need to source a solid state relay to run my solenoids. Any questions please ask and please if you have anything to share or help me with my build share it.

truckdoug

iTrader: (25)

ice drags! so awesome!

80/TA/LT1

iTrader: (2)

Nice work, never thought of snow drags, but i gotta admit its pretty cool, although i cant possibly imagine drilling all those f**king screws in the tires, thats insane

OEF14vette

Haha it takes a long time, 2-3000 screws per tire depending on size. And we plow lanes on the frozen lake and then sweep them so it's bare ice making it tougher. It's pretty insane that we have cars out their running 140+ mph and doing 1.4-1.5 60' I'm hoping I can get my car under 2.0 60' with the traction control and power management. You guys will have to make the long haul up here had a guy last year Mike from Ohio travel 650+ miles to race.

OEF14vette

So the intake is done, painted and looks bit*hin in my opinion! Also got the new Deatschwerks injectors in and they fit great. The aluminum plate i made to hole my MAP sensor in is temporary i took a drill bit and opened up the vac. fitting off the back of the intake that typically went to the brake booster but since i have manual brakes dont need it so i opened it up and made a small piece of aluminum to sandwich i between the intake and fitting flange put 4 hole in so i could zip tie the map tight. I am going to figure something else out beside the aluminum though. As for the shaving of the intake i cut everything off plastic welded the holes shut, sanded it smooth then put a coat of JB plastic epoxy to fill imperfections then sanded the epoxy and final skim coated with body filler primed with high build sandable primer wet sanded my primer with 600 grit touched up as needed then shot color and clear it is the same color as my block, front and rear covers and valley cover. For my EGR block off plug i used a Dorman freeze plug part # 555-0931 it is 35.21 MM around light coat of epoxy and pounded it in worked great. The Evap block off plug is an ICT billet piece for like $12 or so. hop everyone likes Enjoy

OEF14vette

Well the car is alive, did a first start and it fired right up have a lot of tuning to do yet. I'll Post a link of the first start once i get it on YouTube.

1964SS

iTrader: (1)

Badass! The intake looks sweet!

OEF14vette

Thanks 64SS I am extremely happy with how it turned out it really didn't take much time either. Now the fun part, tuning its a huge learning curve for me.

Nismo Kid

iTrader: (3)

The car looks killer. As others have said the intake really came out nice. Man I didn't even know people drag raced on ice. Cars trapping in the 140's on ICE has got to be intense. I've officially added something to my bucket list. Thanks for sharing

OEF14vette

Thanks Nismo, we had a guy last year make a 650 some odd mile trip from Ohio to race in some bracket classes its awesome and if someone were serious about it I could find a set of tires they could use to try it out. Its addicting! And we have to adapt and overcome since we don't have any drag strips near by closest is maybe 2.5 hrs. or so. do a search for nitemare 2 mustang Merrill ice drags or something shows the guys car that owns the shop that did my machine work (RPM Racing Engines). His car power wheeling at like 130 across the finish line. Its a mustang with a BBF and a lot of nitrous.