lizs head/cam swap

[my95z28]

O noes cancer!!!

[JoeliusZ28]

Liz im really quite surprised how much rust your car has for how clean it is... and being a 2002. mine didnt have anywhere even close to that ammount, and I know it got driven in some salt at some point.

[TSTONE]

meh - seen worse

its michigan - sand it and por15

[meissen]

Yeah, make sure you follow up with some POR15 or some other rust stopper.

[MORNINGSTAR2101]

it doesnt have a whole lotta rust. but, what youre seeing is the rust that i have uncovered. gotta clean that out next. yeah, i have some rust stopper. then im just gonna coat it. i do not want to have to deal with that again

[TSTONE]

typical michigan scale - it's really not that bad

[b.lee]

That rust isn't so bad.

[MORNINGSTAR2101]

sooo, put in a little bit of time today and installed the timing chain. although ive been very happy with the information on www.ls1howto.com , they made it sound much more difficult than it actually was:

Thread your old crankshaft bolt back into the crank and with a wrench, turn the crankshaft until you see the small black dot pointing straight up. See picture on the left for reference. Next, in your hand, orient cam gear so dot is on bottom and hold it up to the front of the cam....see the smaller 4th hole in the cam gear? That is where the cam alignment dowel goes in. Spin camshaft by hand so dowel looks like it'll line up with cam gear properly to align the dots. Put the timing chain on the crank gear, and then put it on the cam gear, holding the cam gear up with your hand to keep tension on the chain. Carefully try to get the camgear to seat on the front of the cam. If you don't get the hole and the dowel aligned just right, you're just going to push the cam back into the block.

If you are having trouble aligning it, try threading a cam bolt through the gear into the cam to grab it and line it up like that. Most likely you are going to have to keep moving the chain on the cam gear until you get the dots lined up just perfect, and you'll have to get lucky and have the cam oriented just perfect so the gear seats on like it should. If all this sounds complicated, just look at the picture on the left and make yours look exactly like that. Don't get mad if this part takes 20-30 minutes of trying until it all looks correct. Once it's all together, make 100.000% sure the dots are lined up exactly. You can't be off by a few degrees due to the sprocket/chain setup, you can be off by one tooth at the minimum so if you are off you'll see it. If it looks off a little bit, turn the crankshaft by hand again to see if the 2 dots do indeed line up when they are straight up and down...sometimes if your crankshaft is 5 degrees too far, the cam gear will look like it's off 10 degrees or so and you'll think there's no way they'll line up exact...when in actuality you just needed to get the crankshaft straight up.

knowing that it was important that the dots on the gears matched up correctly, i just made sure that the dot on the crank was facing up before messing with the cam. i then mounted the cam gear by threading one of the bolts and turned the gear til i got it in the right spot. then i took the gear off and put the timing chain on it. making sure to keep the dot on the cam gear facing down, i took the gear with the chain and installed that. after mounting the cam gear, the dots lined up perfectly. unfortunately, i wasnt able to get a good close up of the dots, but i tried.

[Kwazrollinz28]

I think i recognize this build are you on another forum as well?

[Virtue]

nice job liz your doing what most females dare not to even think about attempting

LIZFTW!

[my95z28]

Soooo, when is that trans gonna get picked up?

[JoeliusZ28]

we need a LIZ FTW smiley

[MORNINGSTAR2101]

we need a LIZ FTW smiley

lol, i belive that rolo is working on a ms ls1 smiley but thanks!!!

[02redz28]

Its moving along!!!

[TSTONE]

looks great liz - keep up the good work

it is surprising sometimes how hard we can make things out to be