El S1 Camino

iTrader: (4)

All of my interior parts got reinstalled, it's amazing how much darker it is in there then it used to be.
Shifter Handle and boot needed to be installed before the carpet


Then the carpet went in, along with the shift ****


And the dash pad


Since I was waiting for some parts when i was doing all this I knocked out some little tasks:
Installed the firewall grommet



Put a breather in my valve cover to vent the crankcase


Installed and wired my electric fan


And then made this guy


I took an 1 1/4 hose to hose fitting and drilled and taped it for a 1/8 NPT fitting. This allows me to join the two sections of hose that i had already, as well as giving me a location to run the hose off of the steam vents.

wtf.suv

iTrader: (4)

i like that grommet in the firewall, what kind is it?

celicaxx

iTrader: (2)

This build is awesome!

So did you mount the alternator directly to the head? I'm trying to get an idea on my relocation issue. I really like what you did with the water pump; I'll have to do something similiar with the heater hose lines to convert them to 90 degree fitttings.

Can't wait to see how your belt routing comes out.


D

El S1 Camino

iTrader: (4)

My alternator mounts to the water pump, where the tensioner would normally go.

For my Alternator tensioner, I bought a SBC alternator bracket kit from summit for the turnbuckle. I then ran into the problem of the turnbuckle running into the body of the alternator, so i created this little offset bracket. It is hard to see where it goes, but the bottom bolt of the turnbuckle goes into it, then it bolts into one of the holes to the stock belt tensioner.



Which makes everything look like so




Then I started working on my fuel tank. Originally I was just going to sump my tank and put an Aeromotive A1000 on and run it externally. Then after reading about how loud they were i changed my mind and switched to an intank pump.

I started with two tanks, my new el camino tank and one for an 88 chevy truck. The plan was to take the sending unit and make it fit into the el camino tank.

Step one of that was to cut out the top of the truck tank so it could then get welded to my el camino tank, making mounting the sending unit a breeze



Next, cut the opening out of the El Camino tank and attach the truck portion



Since the truck sending unit had an odd sized return, a -6 fitting got welded to the front of the tank.



Then came the problem of the sending unit being far to long. This got mostly sorted out when i cut it so that the fuel level float pivot location would be in the same location as the stock tank. This left the bottom of the sending unit about an inch deeper then the bottom of the tank.

So i started making a sump for it to sit in




Then i cut a hole large enough for me to get the pump in the tank, marked the location of the sump, then it got welded on.





I will post another update soon.

El S1 Camino

iTrader: (4)

Sorry i missed this. It is a seals it split grommet, but it comes as a jegs brand
here is a link
http://www.jegs.com/i/JEGS+Performan...60777/10002/-1

El S1 Camino

iTrader: (4)

Continuing from my last post, I mounted my Aeromotive 340 intank fuel pump to my modified sending unit



Then i moved to my exhaust system. The Hooker headers that i bought have a lot of ground clearance, but the collectors pointed upwards straight into the crossmember. So i pie cut the collectors to change the angle that they pointed.





Then after 8 hours of lining everything up so that i was happy and they looked similar, my exhaust was finished.





Wideband sensor mounted on the drivers side


Once that was done, i was able to start on plumbing my fuel system.

From the tank to a bulkhead fitting above the rear end.



From the bulkhead fitting to the front of the car



Then the filter runs to the the rail feed while the other is the return.



Regulator mounted on the fuel rails.


Once this was all done i checked for leaks, and of course i wanted to see if it started. So i opened up hp tuners and tried to flash in the tune i had been working on. This caused me problems as it was unable to connect, so after fighting with it for a few hours, all of a sudden it started working. So after about three cranks it fired right up, it sounds and runs awesome, so now im waiting for a drive shaft and a few other small things, then i can start tuning.

camaroboricua

iTrader: (23)

awesome job getting it together. glad to hear you got it running already. Lots of good work you been doin'. Lets get an Idle vid!!!

El S1 Camino

iTrader: (4)

So in my last post i said i had the car running, since then i started driving it around the gravel roads on the farm making logs with HP tuners. i was doing this with the power steering just looped together as i did not have the fittings to make the hoses yet. Doing this i must have ran the pump dry which caused the pump to fail. So made some hoses using earls adapters and hydraulic hoses and fittings and changed the pump and i was ready to really start driving this thing.



Then I started to encounter more problems.

Turns out that when i decided to modify my oil pan I didn't realize that the car sat so low to the ground. So after 10 miles of gravel road driving the paint on the front of the oil pan looks like it was sand blasted off



Hopefully i can make it to winter without smashing it on something so then i can change to a shorter pan.

Then with 21 miles on the motor i bent my clutch pedal (ended up breaking it in to at the spot welds trying to straighten it)




This caused the clutch pedal to bind on a bracket and not fully engage the clutch

so the pedal came out and got braced to try to prevent that from happening again and fully welded this time.



Now all that is left for this project is working on slowly dialing in the tune

Bowtie316

iTrader: (1)

It doesn't take long to waste bearings if you loose all the oil out the pan. I would probably weld a piece of angle or a pipe split longways to the bottom of the crossmember, something just a little bit lower than the oil pan, to make contact first instead of the oil pan. It can be removed when you swap pans, but just might save the motor until then.

El S1 Camino

iTrader: (4)

Ok, time to update this with some recent progress
I bought a FAST intake to allow my heads to flow to their max potential. It’s a ported FAST 90 with a 90 mm throttle body


Quarter in the throttle body for reference


Motor before teardown


And with the FAST intake sitting on it


Since I had the space on the LS1 intake I wired the injectors facing in instead of out, and due to the different design of the FAST I thought I would need to turn them all out and rewire them

Turns out they will just fit
Well my oil pan lasted me almost 700 miles this summer and is still intact, but the gravel roads sure did a number on the paint, and the oil filter sure took a beating




To remedy this I bought a new f-body oil pan, pickup and windage tray


It did get painted to match but I guess I never took a picture of that
Motor ready to be pulled


And f-body pan installed


During mockup I thought that I might be able to have the pan clear the cross member due to the setback plates, but that was not the case, so up next is cross member notching.

toxik iroc

Nice build man

veltboy618

Great build!!! Subscribed!

El S1 Camino

iTrader: (4)

Started notching the cross member by plasma cutting out the rough markings i made during the trial fit of the motor



then i used the band saw and cut up some flat stock that we had laying around to fill in the hole


the motor was then persuaded into place. oil pan to ground clearance was drastically improved as everything is now tucked behind the cross member




for the fast intake to fit i had to change over the coolant crossover tube from the LS1 style to the LS6 style which has two blockoffs for the rear of the heads


and just the front crossover at the front


I also had to change the valley pan bolts to regular metric bolts to give more clearance for the intake

Since i had easy access to the front of the heads due to the accessories being off, i decided to polish them. Before:


After





the picture actually shows more flaws then you notice in person. up next is intake installation then reinstalling everything to make it run again

quarterstang86

Very nice writeup so far.

ls1_chevelle

iTrader: (9)

Any reason for keeping the engine forward and notching the crossmember? I am using the camaro pan aswell and sat the engine back as far as I could. Clears great.

El S1 Camino

iTrader: (4)

I'm using the Edlebrock adapters, so its not set very far forward. It was really close to fitting with no cutting and i probably could have gotten away with cutting less but i wanted to make sure it would clear and i wouldn't have to do it twice

typhoon1015

iTrader: (5)

any more detailed pics on how you moved up the power steering and bracket to clear the box?

Just read through the entire build, looking good. I like your mentality, if it doesnt work/ fit cut/ weld to make it work!

El S1 Camino

iTrader: (4)

Thanks, that is my mindset really, if it doesn't fit the way that i want it to, make it fit while having it still look original. About the only things i haven't modified are the fuel pump, filter and injectors. Almost everything else has been cut, ground or modified to fit

I don't have anything specifically on the power steering but I can explain what i did. I started by sawsalling off the top of the bracket where the alternator would have gone stock, then i mounted the bracket/pump to the head, from this it was only held at the top. there were then two bolt holes on the block that i was able to bolt a piece of flat steel across. This gave me the lower attachment point for the pump. you can see that in this picture, just to the right of the balancer



after that i cut up the original bracket that attached to the back of the pump and welded it to fit the new location.

Project GatTagO

iTrader: (7)

Have you pulled the trans yet, without pulling the engine?

Andrew

El S1 Camino

iTrader: (4)

Once i set the intake on, it was clear that there was going to be some interference with the crossover tube


but that wasn't anything that a socket and a hammer couldn't fix


Intake bolted on


Fuel Rails and injectors back on, there was mild clearancing on the intake needed so that two on the injectors could fit turned in instead of facing out




Then i whipped up a new throttle cable bracket as the one i used before was ugly and didn't line up as well. The big open hole is for the cruise


And installed


The motor is back to a running state again so now it is mostly just fixing up some little things that i noticed while driving it last summer. But more on that later