My LS El camino's story begins 5 years ago when I sold my last El Camino




Since I really like 3rd gen, but sadly I live in Estonia and there are no 3rd gen El caminos to buy. I got little help from the internet and I found one from California, that looked good from pictures, so I bought it and shipped it to Estonia. I only saw the pictures. I did know that the engine was buicks 430 thats all. I did not know if it runs or what transmission was in there.

Transport guy said it takes 1 month to ship it here. So six months later I got my new old car.



I was happy as hell until 6 minutes later



The engine just didn't turn over.

So I disconnected the driveshaft and home we went



At home I tried to yet again to turn over the engine, but no luck. So I pulled of the heads and then the swearing started.



I was pretty mad, so I sold that boat anchor next day and started to look a new one. Luckily my friend had LS1 lying around, so I bought that




Then I thought the 350 hp's would be not enough from that engine, little bit thinking I got this little thing.


(Not the baby we had her before that)

When I looked little closer at the frame I noticed something wrong. First the back axle was not chevys. Thats ok I thought, but the front end was weird to. Steering box was on the wrong side of the front axle




Then I crawled under the car and noticed that the frame is all wrong.
More swearing and searching in the internet, I found out that my El Camino was El buick. It had 61-64 Buick X-frame. With its aluminum drum brakes.
That broke my budget. Since my car was only one in this country I just could not buy another frame, and shipping one from USA was to expensive.

So I thought what the hell lets try to make this work.

I tried to test fit the Ls1 on the car.




If it had been original frame it would been ok, but since buick had steering box on the wrong side there was a problem.



I decided to throw that steering box away and replace it with BMW E36 steering rack.

Right now the engine is in the shop being bored over
Engine gets in new mahle powerpak pistons with -16 dish
New compstar h-beam connecting rods
I'm keeping the original crank because I read it can handle around 1000hp

 

Wow - interesting story. Sorry about all of the bad luck.
Good luck with the rest of your swap.

 

A little off topic, who or what service do you use to locate, buy and ship cars from the US

 

There are some dealers in Estonia. They take your order and search the cars in US. They have one or two people in US for sending the cars to Estonia