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Hey guys, I haven't posted much on here and this is my first build thread so I'll start from the very beginning. I bought the truck when I was 15 and did a full wet sand & buff and a 3/5 drop. It's a 99, 5.3, 2wd
Before
2" lower control arms
1" coil springs
3" leaf springs
2" drop shackles
after
The year after that, I decided my GU6 3.42s were a little too high of a gear and the G80 was a ticking time bomb, so I picked up some Yukon 4.11 gears and a Detroit TruTrac. My brother and I were able to get it done by ourselves on our homemade axle stand.
Last edited by 99.RCSB.LM7; Sep 4, 2017 at 11:55 PM.
Reason: error
I was happy with the new gears and limited slip, but wanted more power and a chance to learn something about these motors. So I got a very mild cam from a friend of mine out of his S480 ls1 foxbody. It was a 206/212 comp cam, beehive valve springs, new lifters, etc. I swapped that in and cleaned everything up while the heads were off.
Before getting it tuned, I did a TBSS intake swap. I deleted EGR and the EVAP purge solenoid for convenience. I cut my fuel line crossover and my brother welded steel -6an bungs on each end so I could use AN line to make the crossover. Also, at this time I installed a racetronix fuel pump hotwire kit to ditch the factory pump harness.
This is the only picture I have of it, one side of the crossover line
It was tuned by Josh at Performance Dyno in Loudon, NH and made 290rwhp/305lb/ft and it ran awesome! I drove it all summer, did a few burnouts and again wanted more power. So this past winter, I got a 76mm turbo, KBracing t4 manifold and my brother and I built the kit at home.
Cool project-I had a 2000, 2WD I bought from a rental place, they used it to go take someone to pick up their rentals, had 29K on it when I bought it.
It was kind of a plain Jane truck, but seemed to have great pickup-turned out it had a 6.0, somehow it got ordered with that engine, like the old COPO
stuff-I hurt some cars feelings with that truck, lol
Sadly a tree fell on it, crushed it, and the ins Co wanted $2900 to buy it back, wasn't worth it.
Just FYI before you get to far in your build thread none of your pics are working. Don't use Photobucket. Either upload them directly from your device or use a different (free) hosting service.
Here are some pictures of the making of my cold side, fabbed up by my brother from scratch using just U-bends and our homemade U-bend cutter for the harbor freight vertical band saw. It's made of a pretty rugged set of drawer sliders and two 3/16" steel plates with MDF board cut to fit in the U-bend, giving us perfectly square cuts every time. What's everyone using to upload pictures? Photobucket didn't work, these are straight off my pc and some are upside down and I don't know how to fix it lol
When I started this, I wanted to try to retain the factory bucket without cutting it apart too bad, but that didn't work haha. I haven't been able to drive the truck yet, but I think I'll be alright as long as I don't run less than 1/4 tank or so. What do you guys think?
clean truck and great progress, really like to see the Fabrication and Talent being shown on builds, looking forward to a fun Ride!! What size did you go on the turbo?
clean truck and great progress, really like to see the Fabrication and Talent being shown on builds, looking forward to a fun Ride!! What size did you go on the turbo?
Thanks! Yeah it's coming right along. It's just a cxracing T76 turbo for now. 76mm
I found a junkyard 4L80E out of an 03 2500 work van that supposedly has 120k miles, so I hastily bought it as 2wd 80e's aren't overly common here in new england. Thanks to Matt Happel's Transgo HD2 install video, I had the confidence to give it a shot. So I ordered the kit and it went pretty well, considering it was my first time opening up a tranny. I went with a Circle D low 3k stall, Multi-Disk, Billet lockup converter and although I haven't driven the truck yet, I can tell you it's a really high quality, well built converter (as many of you know.) The crossmember extension was done utilizing my stock crossmember, by cutting the center out and moving it back with 1"x2" steel. I picked up a chromoly driveshaft safety loop and it is integrated with the back of the modified crossmember.
The crossover is 2.5" 304 stainless and tucks right up close to the passenger side of the block to make room for the 4" stainless downpipe. It was done by me and my brother with just U-bends from vibrant. There is a 3 to 4 inch reducer right off of the 3" turbine outlet and the exhaust is 4" all the way back. The kbracing manifold is a nice product and made it possible to do a 4" downpipe. Here's some pictures, sorry if any come out upside down
I got a used set of e-fans on ebay for like $100 shipped out of an Ls1 f-body and the Nelson swap harness. Great customer service and good instructions from Nelson performance. To mount the fans to the radiator, I have a friend who happens to have a CNC plasma table, so he cut out steel brackets that sit in the radiator tabs and bolt to the fan shroud. Came out pretty nice
So this time I went with the LJMS stage 2 turbo cam (like everyone else) lol. With it, I got BTR .660" double valve springs, BTR chromoly .080" wall pushrods. I pulled the heads again even though I really didn't have to, mainly to clean them up and to make it 100x times easier to change the springs. Here's some pictures
Although my current goal is only 500whp, I got a set of Siemens Deka 80lb'ers. That way in the future when I want to get a nicer turbo and maybe a forged rotating assemblly I'll have the injector for it. Since I have a TBSS intake (similar to NNBS) my rails were already spaced, with stock truck injectors. So with tall ones, I needed to add more spacers. I think I used 1.5" of spacer on each tab and got longer bolts. I also cut my mini-delphi plugs off and soldered EV1 pigtails in place of them.
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