Hi, my name's Edward and I live down in Louisiana. I like to go to car meets and play video games when I'm not hanging out with my wife or wrangling my kids. A while back my grandfather gifted me his old hot rod since he's mostly blind and can't see to fool around with it anymore. My brother and I were super stoked the day we went to pick it up (still are too) and we rode on cloud nine all the way back from Alabama. Long story short, though, the rod isn't so hot. It was running a SBC 350 and turbo 350 behind it, but the trans is worn and the engine is running smogger heads off of some old truck. I'm not sure where he got the heads but they don't make any power. After digging into the drivetrain and figuring out what we had, he and I were looking to pick up some aluminum heads and we set out to get them from a guy on Facebook. It was a few hours away in the direction of my parents so I decided I'd pop in and take them out to dinner and just wait on him to respond. If I never heard back we'd fish around for some others since they live in a larger city than we do. Unfortunately, while we were eating the guy messaged me and said he wasn't home, was an additional 2 hours away, and had the heads with him. I got to work, looking on Facebook at every other option for other heads for the SBC and found, instead, a gem of an LS1 shortblock. My brother (and general cohort) and I did some dirty math and figured out that going EFI on an LS vs swapping everything over on the 350 to make it work with an EFI system was actually a wash as far as money went. If I sold the existing motor/trans combo I'd actually come out ahead with the LS. Numbers don't lie (especially when they're telling you to buy an LS), so I messaged the guy (who was at the strip that day) and he said he'd wrap things up and head home to sell me the block. Met him late at night and he gave me the hookup. Got the 5.7 aluminum block, 241 heads, truck intake with fuel rails, injectors and TB plus a few other parts for what I consider to be a very low price. Since then, I've ordered everything that I need to make a complete longblock and am watching parts trickle their way in. We have the replacement trans (200-4r in case anyone is wondering) disassembled and are about to start rebuilding. We're going to beef it up to handle some power. Once both engine and trans are assembled we'll mate them up to each other and start mocking up motor and trans mounts. I'll probably start a build post if there's any interest. I think it's going to be a wild ride.


The '39 Deluxe Coupe the day we picked it up from Gramps.

 

Welcome to LS1Tech! Cool car and cool story as well.