LS1 Swap

[98blackbeauty]

like the pic's of the parts and progress keep them coming! Looks like your doing a great job.

[ITSSLOW]

I like the update and damn was it a nice update!

[ktl711]

Andy's in my neighborhood, so now I have a good excuse to ride my bike over there and either "consult" or perhaps even help on occasion! He's starting out with a real sweet Bright Rally Red coupe -- his car will make a nice addition to the Friday night Woodward scene!

[Emulsifide]

Thanks for the comments guys. Alrighty. Here's the latest:

First, goody update:


Sam Strano lowering springs. Now if I could only stomach the fact that I need to cough up $850 for the Koni Yellows I need to run these springs properly!


Stock 00-02 Camaro SS 17"x9" rims. I got these for next to nothing and plan on doing something like this to them (picture shamelessly jacked from ls1tech.com):

I will probably leave out the red stripe, but we'll see.

As far as the car itself goes, EVERYTHING has been stripped from the engine bay to the rear of the car:





Now begins the rigorous cleaning and sanding that should put me well into next week. I have a week off from work starting April 30th, so I'm going to try and crank out all of the painting between now and May 7th. Once that's done, assembly begins!!! Oh and in the meantime, I'm also cleaning up a bunch of parts I took off the car. I've been successful with getting POR15 to work properly with rough surfaces, so I'm going to use it to coat everything that bolts up to the underbody (brackets and such).

One more thing. I went to a garage sale and nabbed all this today:


There's a rough estimate of just over 200 taps that I got. I bought them all for $80. They're all in outstanding condition and super sharp.

[Emulsifide]

Update:

Still sanding like mad in the engine bay. I wasn't able to source Peel Away 7 locally. Home Depot carries P.A. 6, so I settled for that. It takes a really friggin long time for it to eat through the wheel well coating. To conserve time, I'm only going to be doing this to the front wheel wells for the moment. I'll do the rear wells when I tear the car apart again this upcoming winter.

I've also been cleaning and painting a bunch of parts. Things seem to be going smoothly, but May 29th (the day of J-Body of Michigan's 10th annual BBQ) is approaching quickly. Weather.com is reporting really good weather for the majority of this upcoming week, so I need to be done with prep probably half way through the week. Spraying paint will happen thereafter with assembly immediately following!


Quick question. Does anyone have any suggestions for some really good cutoff wheels for a Dremel? I need to reluctantly hack off a chunk of my engine block for the LS6 valley cover to fit:



Any ideas?

[Gottork]

WOW awesome, keep up the good work..

[Emulsifide]

Mega UBER update:

A lot has happened since I last posted. Let's start with the first batch of parts:



We've got a bunch of summit tubing bending tools, stainless steel brake and fuel line tubing, new strut mounts, Moog tie rod ends, Moog strut isolators, Moog upper ball joints, Lakewood drive shaft safety loop, and a BMR HVAC block off panel.

I got the block off panel because I accidentally destroyed part of the HVAC box during tear down. I figure I can block it off for now and leave 100lbs of A/C equipment (and the heater core) off of the car. If I miss it, I can always pick up a complete HVAC box off of eBay or something. The HVAC box is still in the car controlling vents and allowing for fresh air to circulate in the cabin.

Here's what I did to get that working properly:



As you can see, there's a couple gaping holes in the center that need to be plugged up in order for airflow to properly push through the vents.

The solution was to take a piece of old dryer vent tubing and chop it up into this:



The gaps between the plastic and the tin were then sealed with household silicone/latex caulk.


As I said previously, I'm taking all the small parts for the car and treating them with POR 15:



Treating the wheel wells with the Peel Away 6 worked pretty well, but took a really long time to strip:


If there's ever a next time, I'll make sure I get a hold of Peel Away 7 like I initially wanted to do.

I finally got the car bundled up in it's Type-R cocoon for painting:




I debated about pulling off the rear bumper and painting up the backside of the car for a couple days. I finally decided to do it and I'm glad I did. I found this underneath:





Yuck. By far the worst rust is on the backside of the car. For the moment, I tore out the bad metal/rust and treated it with Eastwood's Rust Converter. It's pretty neat stuff. It turns the rust into a neutral state and turns it black which shows you that it successfully converted. I went ahead and did this all over the car:




After sanding the entire car one last time, it was time to finally paint the car today.

My paint mixing/prep station and air compressor setup:



The air compressor setup consisted of a TP Tools coalescing air filter that was plummed entirely with HVLP compliant fittings. The hose is a brand new dry 1/2" line. Between the hose and the gun is a throw away air filter and a digital pressure regulator. Adjusting the pressure at the compressor outlet is not accurate enough to get proper pressure at the gun. Overall, I'm very impressed with how the setup performed. I've been told to throw an oil separator into the mix, but since the air compressor is brand new, there's hardly any blow by with the cylinder rings. I'll eventually end up adding one in the future.

Since this is my first painting experience outside of using rattle cans, I expected this to be somewhat of a mild disaster. Amazingly, setting up the Eastwood Concours HVLP gun was uber easy. After mixing my paint properly and setting up the Devilbiss DeKups liner system, I initially started out halfway between the widest and shortest fan pattern. I did the same with the paint flow setting. I took the first few spray hits out on a nearby box and was stunned. The spray pattern was perfect and the coverage was fantastic!

After a couple coast of Eastwood's Rust Encapsulator, here's the results:







There's a couple of spots that need touching up, but nothing serious. I will be doing that with eastwood's rattle can version of Rust Encapsulator.

Here's what I looked like after spraying for a couple hours:



Stupidly, after getting excited about the perfect spray pattern I nailed on the first try, I totally forgot to put on my head sock! My hair was covered in paint. I had to take a scotch brite pad into the shower with me and literally scrub my hair to get it all out. Not cool, but I've definitely learned a lesson.

If you recall, I was going to topcoat the Rust Encapsulator with Eastwood's Extreme Chassis Black. I'm deciding against doing this because a lot of people on Eastwood's forum have been having issues with the product lately. The Rust Encapsulator does not have to be topcoated and should be able to stand up to the abuse. Therefore, I'm deeming the painting complete!

One more thing regarding the paint:

When painting, make absolute sure you get a hold of a proper respirator. This is the overspray buildup that occurred after two coats. Imagine that going into your lungs. Yuck.

Now that the painting is done, I can finally begin assembly. However, there's a few more parts I need to nab.......more specifically, parts needed to install these:





We have here the entire valvetrain off of a brand spankin new LS6!!! I nabbed these off of LS1Tech.com by chance two weeks ago. I got the complete heads, cam, pushrods, rockers, rocker guides, timing gear, and timing chain. The parts literally have zero miles and the assembly was never turned over while bolted to the engine. I'm actually going to go ahead and sell off the cam since it's a little small for my power goals. I'm thinking about going with a custom EPS cam that a guy on LS1Tech.com used to fake his wife into thinking her car ran stock...until she jammed on the pedal. The car ended up making 430hp/415tq with a damn near stock idle thanks to a high LSA.

Well that's it for now. Assembly should start shortly!

[Gottork]

gratz

[ktl711]

Epic post! Thta's some great progress! At this rate, you'd better make a reservation for a spot on our caravan out to the Meet & Greet!

[Emulsifide]

Quickie update. Not too much has been happening with the car this past week. I've actually been trying to figure out what I want to do with the wiring for the car. With the body and engine bay harnesses being set up for a 98 3800 and the engine harness being a 2001, there's some MAJOR re-pinning of multiple connectors that needs to happen. However, I do have on hand complete 2001 body and engine harnesses. The advantage to swapping all of the wiring is that I don't have to re-pin anything and everything works right off the bat. This means, it's impossible for me to screw up and then spend months trying to get the damn thing to start or to get a single gauge on the dash working properly. The other advantage is that the body harness I have has all the provisions for all the "finer" things I'm missing on my bare bones base model camaro (power locks, power mirrors, power windows, motorized seat with lumbar support, keyless entry, keyless trunk popper, fog lamps).

With that, I began stripping the interior out of the car today. I got everything out except for the actual carpet (I wanted to save this for last while I wrestled the dash out so I didn't bust up my knees on the metal floor). Here's what I have left to deal with:



Here's the new body harness:



It all looks pretty daunting, but after reading over all of the wiring schematics and pinout guides from GM's 98 and 01 service manuals, removing the harness and putting another one in place of it is cake compared to re-pinning.

I will probably have it all finished up in a day or two...more like a week given the rate I work at but I could care less at this point. I just want it done perfect and I'm willing to take the time to do so.

[JSTALT1]

good luck getting it all in, looks like its coming along good

[meissen]

Looks great so far!

[phoenix_rising]

Wow Andy! I must say that the car is coming along superbly. Looking at these pics is really cool because I can see all the effort you put into this as well as what the car looked like before I saw last week.

[Emulsifide]

Thanks for the comments guys!

Alrighty. I had to be at work this morning at 4:45am. Because of this, I got out of there at noon and was able to work on the car for about 6 hours straight. After finishing up becoming acclimated with the original body harness, I took a deep breath and pulled all of the carpet out. Here's what I found underneath:



Holy crap! My 103,000 mile 12 year old car has solid floors!! However, if you look in the picture where my right foot is, there is a golf ball size patch of rust popping through. I chipped away at it and didn't find much bad metal, so I'm going to just hit it with some rust converter and then rust encapsulator just like I did to the rest of the car.

I was very pleased to find a full set of pioneer 3-way speakers in all 6 speaker positions in the car:



Once I got done investigating, I got to work on swapping the harness. I read somewhere on LS1tech.com that the Firebird body harness is exactly the same as the Camaro body harness, except that the fog lamp switch cable is a little short. My replacement body harness is from a Firebird. I also took a crapshoot when purchasing the body harness and managed to get it from a convertible Firebird for dirt cheap. I said to myself there's no way in hell GM made sixteen different versions of the body harness (camaro/firebird, auto/manual, convertible/hardtop, ls1/l36) of which are two choices per four required options (2^4 = 16).

Turns out, I was right! My 2001 Firebird WS6 convertible body harness (with every power option GM gave the f-bodies) has LOTS of extra cables, but nothing is really missing from it....except for one thing. I did find one thing different which I figured out after a little bit of research tonight. My 98 base model Camaro has door switches (to turn on and off the cabin lights when you get into the car). I did not see these wires on the Firebird body harness. Turns out, the anti-theft alarm equipped cars have the sensors built into the door lock mechanism. I just hopped onto eBay, found out that TA Creations has plenty of them on there, and purchased a set of lock mechanisms that work with my body harness. Problem solved.

The only real pisser of the night is that the tard who I bought the Firebird body harness from promised me he wouldn't screw up anything on it. Well, he damn near broke every clip that connects the harness to the body. Because of this, I had to bust out the electrical tape and painstakingly cut off all of the body mount clips that were taped to the original body harness and then re-tape them to the Firebird body harness. Annoying and very time consuming.

At this point, the original body harness has been completely removed from the car and the Firebird harness is about 75% installed. I have to remove some rivets on the fuel pump connector assembly and then rivet the new one in place of it. I also have to wire the doors still (which is going to take me some extra time since I don't have a reference to go off of thanks to have no power options at all on the car originally). Lastly, I have to modify the speaker connectors on the harness to interface properly with the Pioneer speakers. No big deal.

One more picture of my epic mess:


I'm thrilled that I went this route instead of re-pinning the engine harness. All of the power features I get are well worth the work.

With that, I have some great pictures of a box I received in the mail today:


Yikes!



The box is of course a full set of Koni struts/shocks. Here's the puzzling part:


Who the eff ships car parts padded with a purple baby blanket??


Oh and that paper bag around the shock is going to do SOOO much to help cushion a hit. Un-friggin real. Thankfully, none of the shafts are bent and all of the shocks/struts function properly. I lucked out big time.

That's it for now. I'm very satisfied with today's work considering I was expecting to take a week to get even close to where I am today. Next up will be engine bay wiring, some touching up of the paint job where I missed a few spots, some stainless steel line bending for the rear brake line and fuel line.

Stay tuned....

[Emulsifide]

One more thing I forgot to mention, I stumbled across a problem. ALL of the connectors for the air bags and the air bag controller are different between the 98 and 01 harnesses! The air bag controller connector is completely different with a total of 9 pins coming out of the 98 harness and a total of 8 pins coming out of the 01 harness. Not good. The connectors are the only difference between the air bags and the two harnesses. I can essentially take the old connectors off of the 98 body harness and re-pin the 01 harness with them to make them work, but that's only half of the puzzle.

I'm not sure what to do about this one yet. I've been punched in the face twice by airbags in the past and it sucks, but I can honestly say they do what they're supposed to do.

I may just buy a good 01 air bag controller and re-pin the body harness to use the old connectors off of the 98 body harness. Any suggestions/ideas?