So due to recent life changes, I'm about to have a bit more money to play with on this project. Immediate plans will no longer involve a 305, and my saved ebay searches now include LS swap parts. If anybody wants a cheap 305, mine will be out of the car and available for sale soon.
I was bored and left unsupervised. I got thinking too much. So I realized the 4.3 Caprice block actually moves the passenger side mount back by flipping it and adding a 4th hole. The 3rd hole you need for a standard mount is there but used by the AC compressor bracket. Now you may be asking. Why the berk is this in the GTA thread?
That's why.
We might be needing a T5 and some pinout diagrams for the '87 Firebird and '94 Caprice bulkhead connectors.
Items of note:
- Driver side Caprice exhaust manifold aims at the crossmember and doesn't really leave room for much of an exhaust.
- belt tensioner bracket is unreasonably close to the steering idler arm.
- AC compressor definitely will not fit in it's normal location even if we didn't have to remove it to use the forward position motor mount.
- usable f-body V8 T5 might be tricky to find
- if I kept that 4L60E that came with this engine we might have been somebody here
Right. So half hearted attempts to sell this thing haven't worked. I never listed it publicly because It needs a lot of work just to be put back to a roller so I can list it publicly. Frankly I just haven't been motivated enough to do that. The LT motor experiment mostly depended on me finding a decent manual trans and I never could bring myself to pay the asking price for any of the ones I found. So I sold the LT motor to a local buyer. I stole a bunch of parts from this project for the wagon, and as some of you may have seen I just sold the wagon to Spyke383. He has cool plans for that car I'm looking forward to seeing (me being the idiot I am, I volunteered to come down to Indy and help work on it too.} Essentially I did exactly what gearheade30 did. I sold him the roller for the same price but kept all the parts I need for the project I was more motivated to work on, leaving the stuff the wagon needed that didn't help the GTA.
So here's the new plan. Pull the 4.8 back out of the wagon and throw it in the GTA like I was going to do in the first place. The LS swap kit I used most of to mount that motor in that car was originally purchased for the GTA, so now I'm just putting it back where things were supposed to go in the first place. For those that haven't followed the wagon thread up to this point, The 4.8 is a stock bottom end LR4 with an LQ9 cam, 806 LS1 heads and a truck intake. The truck intake won't clear a flat hood in the 3rd gen like it did in the Caprice, but I have a fancy speedmaster aluminum intake that should clear no problem. I mostly didn't use it before because I wanted to use the truck coolant cross over that tied into all 4 steam ports and the bolts on the stock valley cover hit the bottom of the intake and didn't allow it to sit flat on the heads even without the coolant crossover. Looks like the solution is using an aftermarket valley cover with countersunk bolts, blocking off the steam ports at back of the motor, and just running the crossover at the front. I believe that's how things were done with the F-bodies but I haven't dug into one of those deep enough to know for sure.
I'm going back and forth on doing the famous Sloppy Stage 2 cam in it before it goes in the GTA or getting it running with the LQ9 cam first and not bother pulling the motor apart again. I might go ahead and do it since the cam will affect my torque converter choice when I decide to push the cheap easy button for a mild LS car which is a 4L60E with a shift kit. T56 might happen later but I'm tired of that being the biggest reason this car is sitting stagnant.
I plan on using a Terminator X for engine management, also doing away with the awesome but broken digital dash and building a custom cluster with VDO gauges like was done in the wagon.
Overall goal for the car is pretty much just a street car that's nicer to live with than it was when it was stock. The Miata has killed my expectations for this thing being worth a damn at the things the Miata does unless I go full ham on it, which I have no interest in doing at this point. So the chassis plans revolve around bracing things up just so it squeaks/rattles less and a really simple suspension setup.
The car is also getting AC and a decent stereo setup before we're done.
In reply to Daylan C (Forum Supporter) :
That sounds like a solid plan, and I definitely agree with doing the cam now. Once you get this on the road you're not going to want to pull it back apart, and you'll want as much torque as you can get from that engine in an Fbody with an automatic behind it.
I can see why you'd give up on putting a T5 behind an "LT1" (err, whatever this 4.3 is called) for cheap. That's harder than people would think. A V8 T5 costs a lot more than the V6. V6 T5s are cheap, but then you need a V8 bellhousing. And which clutch do you use, LT1 or V8 SBC for the T5? Then there's gearing concerns. At least you wouldn't need a custom driveshaft.
Seeing a GTA at a cars and coffee full of fancy stuff made me slightly more motivated to finish mine and make it nice.
Unfortunately I'm not in the same state as the car and probably shouldn't be spending money on it right now....
Reality is annoying.
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