CattleAc

iTrader: (7)

These will work great for your application.



I think this is a common thread among the LS crowd...I have it bad...

Cheese Weasel

Yyyyyyep, here too. I probably could have had my swap done two or three times by now if I didn't get hung up on stuff like that...

BrandonHall10

LOL Okay, okay. To be fair though, I really only obsess about cleanliness. I was merely concerned with my spring selection. I'm not losing any sleep over it.

That's what I'm looking for. Thanks!

I believe it was new. My guess is, some green night shift guy packaged it without a proper cleaning, and the water based grinding coolant caused the rust. Pure speculation though. I gave it a healthy coating of WD-40 and put it on the shelf. It may be salvageable for a future "low-buck" build.

Great! Thanks for the feedback!

For me it's just the cleanliness thing, but for good reason, I think. I have 3 little kids and a wife, and the garage is our main point of entrance to the house. If I send my kids through the garage with ANYTHING greasy in it, they will be wearing that grime.

I fought this HARD when I was building my S10. I kept it mostly under control. Only took me 9 months to finish. From the day I bought the donor truck to the day I got it registered.

onebadbowtie86

iTrader: (13)

Nice work, Following this one!

BrandonHall10

Great! Thanks!

...Waiting on the cam...

In the meantime, more cleaning. Focused on the intake manifold. Looks like my plan is working. Long soaks with occasional position changes. You can see the waterline on the top of the intake tube.





Couple more days and it should be clean as a whistle. For anyone wondering, this Sterilite container from Walmart is about the perfect size.





I think once the K10 is done and I tear back into the S10, I'll be doing this to that intake manifold as well. I got it kind of clean, but nowhere near as clean as this one will be.

BrandonHall10

Replacement cam came today. Looks much better. There's a proper coating of rust inhibitor all over it.





I promptly took the old cam out. I let gravity hold the lifters "up" for me.



Everything looks good from here.



Not sure how well you can see, but I wanted to get a side by side of the lobe profiles.



New cam going in. I took the oil pan off to see what was going on. The old cam put up a fight coming out. Got hung up hard on the second journal. Wasn't sure what was going on at the time. Looking back, my guess is that it just got hung up on that thick layer of carbon gunk buildup.



New cam retainer plate. I've seen guys reuse them, but it's also recommended to replace it. For $18.60, I decided to just get a new one.



All buttoned up and rolled back upright. Tomorrow is oil pan gasket.



I did notice after torquing the rockers down, there was still a gap in there. Probably around 0.035" just going by eye. I'm assuming this is because the lifters need to pump back up?

BrandonHall10

Looks like nope. Turns out the base circle on the new cam is 0.0375" smaller per side (0.075" on the diameter) than the stock cam. Stock/old cam base circle diameter was 1.550". New cam base circle diameter is 1.475". I guess I'll be buying new pushrods. There's $100 I didn't want to spend. The question now becomes, do I buy the pushrod length checking tool or just order some 7.440" pushrods. Something tells me I should drop the $20 on the tool and wait the two weeks to get right length. I can't be the first person this has happened to. I wonder what other people have ended up with for a final length. I'm going to make a separate post on LS1tech...

Stock cam base circle diameter.



New cam base circle.



Stock pushrod. I'm calling that 7.4" on the nose. (Scale is "Zeroed" at 2" on the other end)





More cleanup in the meantime.









Well, I got this clean at least.



Gotta do some Googling on those pushrods...

truckdoug

iTrader: (26)

send that cam back and buy something thats not a regrind?

BrandonHall10

Why would you say it's a regrind? I mean... I pulled it out of the box myself. I don't understand.



Didn't get much done today. Spent all morning running new wire for the lights on my tow dolly.



Took the time to run the wires through the frame. Drilling holes and fishing wire... Hopefully this lasts longer than the last rig job.



I did get the windage tray put back on.



And the intake put together.





Going to let this simmer overnight.

BrandonHall10

Harmonic balancer is back on. I "rented" the Autozone installer and it worked great.





Drilled and tapped the oil bypass thing for the K10's oil pressure sensor.



I just used some random S10 fitting to make sure I had the proper thread depth.



With that done I could get the oil pan put back together.



Pan is back on waiting for the final torque.



Probably slap the intake on it tomorrow. Hopefully the pushrod length tool gets here early in the week. I'd like to order pushrods before the weekend.

Smitty454

I hope you remembered to take out the MAP sensor before soaking your intake. I recently cleaned my truck intake and wondered why its been running like crap ever since... yep I forgot to pull the MAP lol..

BrandonHall10

LOL. Yeah, it was fully bare. Right down to the throttle body studs.

Intake gasket surface all cleaned up.



Started bolting on the bigger pieces.



I did drill and tap the WP for the steam port while it was off.



Just waiting on the pushrod length tool...

BrandonHall10

Pushrod tool came today. I checked probably 75% of the rockers. Turns out 7.415" puts me at zero lash, give or take a couple thou.



From all the research I've done, it seems like 0.060" is a good preload amount. So if my math is correct, 7.475" should be perfect. Math is tricky for me, so I wrote it out.



Originally I was kinda bummed I had to spend extra money on pushrods, but after looking at them closely I don't feel so bad. Some of the tips were very worn. Not sure how well it shows in the picture, but it was pretty well egg shaped.



Also, I checked the length on a half dozen of them. Most were 0.020" short. A couple were as much as 0.030" Short.



Looks like I can get a decent set of 16 for around $100. Probably order them tonight.

BrandonHall10

Pushrods are ordered. Should be here Thursday. More reassembly in the meantime. Made a trip to the hardware store and grabbed some plumbing supplies.





I didn't plan on buying a new thermostat but...



Next step is to get the harness laid out and cleaned up. Might have this thing running again within a couple weeks.





I think the only thing I'm missing to make an engine stand run is pushrods. EGR blockoff, and headers. I'm sure I'm missing something.

LilJayV10

iTrader: (39)

all that work and you didn't replace the oil pump and timing chain on a 200k+ mile engine?

BrandonHall10

Correct.

Thermostat came today so I slapped that on. Got the harness laid out and started thinking about it...



This should be a lot easier than the S10. I think I'm going to use the truck fuse block. Probably only remove a couple circuits/connectors. The fuel, EGR, and coolant level sensor are all that come to mind right now. I'm going to keep all the AC stuff just incase I want to add it to the truck in the future. Also, since this truck has to pass a sniffer test I'll be running cats so I might as well keep the rear O2's.

G Atsma

Hey, if you know the engine is making good oil pressure and you don't hear the timing chain slapping, it should be OK, though with the mileage involved, I would have changed both. But that's just me...

LilJayV10

iTrader: (39)

Right..cause cam timing isn't important.

Had the pan off

Had the front cover off

Installed a different cam...

You see where I'm going with this?

I'm pretty sure you do.

BrandonHall10

When I drove the (donor) Yukon home, I want to say it was over 50 PSI at operating temp while warm. Can't say exactly what it was, but I remember being okay with it.

I think I get what you're saying. You may be right, I might have hosed up. Or it may go for another 150K. I did look at the chain and it didn't seem any worse than what my LQ4 had at 154K. I've also seen a bunch of posts where guys with brand new chains had just as much slack as mine at 228K (or whatever it has). I dunno.

I'm just trying to get the most I can out of my budget. I'm sure it's happened, but for all my researching I've never seen anyone have a problem with a stock timing chain or oil pump.

G Atsma

The problem isn't a stock timing chain or oil pump, it's the fact that those components have the mileage on them that they do. The LS2 timing chain is actually the std. replacement piece anyway for now. And a new oil pump is just good insurance, like the chain. These 2 components are the most likely to give any trouble at this stage of the game. I was trying to be optimistic and give the benefit of the doubt above, but LilJayV10 is right. As long as you had it apart that far it would have been good to replace those parts.