Good to see you making progress. Slots will be quick and easy on a mill. I must have missed something - what are you changing to/from with the pan?

Your car is going to be a beast. I hope I can get up there some day to check it out.

 

Oil pan swap is for a couple reasons:

1) bottom of the Holley 302-3 oil pan is same height as my modified truck pan, however the sealing face for the oil filter is about an inch closer to the block (like an f-body pan). Because my pan is a truck pan, the filter feature on the pan is quite a bit lower and I was forced to run a super stubby oil filter in order to get the filter to not hang below the modified bottom of the pan, so the Holley pan will let me run a bigger/longer filter while keeping the bottom of filter slightly recessed from bottom of pan

2) the Holley 302-3 pan also comes with dual turbo oil drain ports (1/2" NPT) already tapped in it, so I don't have to screw with welding my existing oil pan and the resulting possible distortion and impure welds

3) new pan's turbo oil drain ports are also about 1-2" further forward, which gives more clearance for the turbo drain fittings at full steering lock to the relocated locations of my inner tie rod ends, where they mount to the drag link. This wouldn't be an issue if I hadn't customized my drag link to minimize bump steer

4) new pan has a clearance hump in the front half of it for a 4" stoker crank.. at the time I got the pan I was throwing around the idea of stroking my engine in the near future, but now I'm more inclined to leave the engine together for a while. Because my modified truck pan also had a rework on the front half of it, with thick-wall aluminum plate used, I was doubtful that the mods would clear a 4" crank

5) the welds from the original modification of my truck pan (in the front half above the subframe cross-member) are super gross and porous, and have misted out oil over time which really pisses me off

 

Looks like a win-X5 situation to me!

 

That's what I thought!!

 

Thanks for the rundown. #5 would drive me crazy Hope it fits without any issues. Be sure to double check the pickup height and use one of those fancy metal-reinforced OEM gaskets for more better sealing.

 

ls1tech community, 2008

ls1tech community, 2009

ls1tech community, 2011

ls1tech community, 2013

ls1tech community, 2015

ls1tech community, 2018

 

LOL yeah Joe and his meticulous documentation spawned a decade of Nova LS swappers. I'm one of them. Crazy to think I was browsing this forum back in '07 trying to decide if I should just rebuild my small block or go for one of these newfangled LS engines.

 

Haha oh wow.. so there's been that many iterations of the car eh. The irony in all this is that I'm probably the youngest out of most here at only 31. I started this build thread when I was still in university and didn't know anything!

Clint I have a new GM aluminum-and-o-ring pan gasket on the way, and plan to confirm/measure the pickup height relative to the pan just to be sure nothing funky is going on. The nice thing is that the Holley pan comes with what I believe is a [new] GM f-body pickup, and an assortment of plugs and gaskets including an oil cooler bypass cap with a port to add an oil temp sensor, as well as a new o-ring for the pickup at the pump end. Pretty well sorted oil pan kit if I've ever seen on!

 

Yeah, Do you have any regrets doing the LS swap NOW? LOL. Way better than SBCs IMO.

 

Got some nice progress over a couple hours yesterday. Test fit the trans x-member and confirmed that the exhaust clearance is good on both sides, and there is plenty of room on the passenger side to clear an oil line hooked up the the drain port..





Then yanked out the engine. I figure for the clutch/flywheel swap, oil pan change, heads change, etc it's just easier to do it out of the car. I might even give the block a quick respray while it's out, haven't decided on that yet...



I could swear I had some beefy chains in the garage, but I didn't. Luckily I had copious straps and shackles in the "emergency kit" in my daily driver truck haha. A bit ghetto but it worked fine, just needed to throw a jack under the trans tailhousing to adjust engine/trans angle.









Managed to get the clutch off but the flywheel was jammed on there, and I ran out of time have a go at it. The flywheel had some hot spots on it, however it's mated nicely to this Centerforce clutch which still appears to have good life on it without any chatter or anything. I ordered a new flywheel to mate with the fresh McLeod Twin Street RST clutch I'm going to put in, and I'll keep this flywheel/clutch/trans as an extra assembly for a possible future project, since it all works flawlessly as-is.

 

frojoe iv been looking at your post of build progression an I couldn't find or figure out what wires from the original engine harness to keep an what ones I can get rid of. I recently got holleys dominator efi to go with my lq4/4l80 any help would be appreciated

 

I'm right behind you, as I just turned 32 in January. Started my build about 1.5-2 years after I got done with college myself.
Taught High School math for about 5 years and now I'm working as a designer/developer/engineer at ICT Billet and back in school finishing the 2nd half of my Mechanical Engineering degree.

It's been a crazy ride. Looking forward to all the future possibilities with my build.

I've been digging your ride for years.

 

What do you want to know exactly? Feel free to PM me so we do not clutter this thread.

You might want to check out my Cougar build, where I use the Dominator. Old cars are pretty basic, so you only need to keep the starter wire (should be the purple wire on a Camaro). I like using the old coil power wire to energize a big relay. This serves to turn on the ECU (white/red wire) (the Dominator has dedicated power wires that need to go directly to the battery). This relay can also be used to power the Holley dash, if you are using that. By using the old coil wire it assures that the ECU is on when the ignition key is in RUN and START.

That is all you need from the old engine harness because the Dominator obviously has the main engine harness included.

Andrew

 

Ryan that's a cool story.. similar to mine. Good job getting back on the school train and finishing up the mech eng!

Andrew, thanks for chiming in there. I would say that the Dominator setup is pretty all-encompassing so really the starter-alternator-battery wiring on the car side is really all that's needed to be kept.

 

I work at a major aerospace company, and we don't even have goodies like this. You, sir, are truly #blessed.

 

Awesome man... all you guys Nova's inspired mine and the other one I am doing now.

Just bought a number of ICT items for the 69 Nova project. The adapters set for oil pressure sender and full kit is a great value!!

 

I commend you on all the effort you've invested in your car frojoe... good work. I'll be following your installation of your Holley 302-3 oil pan to see how compatible it is with your overall set-up.

 

Thanks Toddoky.. I just can't seem to leave good enough alone! I'll be installing the pan this weekend so should be some pics up real soon.

 

These projects are never really done until you sell them and start the next one. I used to have the same addiction to flatbottom boats back in my heyday, so I completely understand how it goes.

 

This weekend was semi-productive, but a bit disappointing to be honest.

I first started cleaning and deburring the edges of the new GM CNC'd LS9 heads, and found that the "wall" at the bottom of the rocker mounting threads was poking thru the intake chambers. This wasn't a surprise since GM highlighted this area in their accompanying instruction sheet... however on most cyclinders there was a very large thin "flap" of aluminum at the bottom of the hole just waiting to be broken off under boost/vacuum and sucked into the cylinder. I was hoping that an assembled head from a maker like GM would've taken care of this by some form of tumbling/finished or QC, but just goes to show that you should always inspect brand new parts before install.. always.



Here is the poke-thru hole, this cylinder didn't have the worst/biggest flap.. I never took pics of the HUGE flake of aluminum slag that I peeled off..



After flake removal....



Just a couple of the deburring tools I used to try and snake into the intake port and smooth out the edges of the thru-tapped hole..



Then I tried to do some Friday post-work head assembly to get ready to slap these on the short block this weekend and confirm the pushrod length is the same. The new springs I got are Brian Tooley 0.660" lift "Platinum" dual springs with Ti retainers.. seem to be one of the best around, good price and supposedly no reported breakages. 150lb seat pressure @ 1.800" and something like 405lbs at 0.660" lift...



...buuuut one cylinder had an exhaust valve with a HUGE gouge in it. It was at ~0.600" from the Brian Tooley valve seal... unfortunately my cam is 0.620" lift and I can only imagine this would end up leaking. Thanks GM.. brand new high-performance assembled head with a **** valve. I'm REALLY curious if this passed some sort of QC because the imperfection was technically above the valve seal "as the head is assembled" (max rated valve lift of 0.570" with the LS9 springs that came with the heads), or if this was simply a **** up on GM's behalf and slipped thru the QC. Ohhh well. I have a single exhaust valve on the way, hopefully here for next weekend.