That water logged 5.3 shortblock that Michael dropped off a couple weeks appears to have a salvageable crankshaft. The rings, lifters, cam and timing chain were rusted solid but all bearings look good. It needs lots of simple green and a little elbow grease. I plan to throw this crank in my L33 block and do a sloppy sloppy rebuild.
That is quite amazing, really. I expected it to not even come out.....
In reply to Dusterbd13-michael :
I even did it without a sawzall.
Scooped this drill press from work before it went in the dumpster because "the motor doesn't work". The drive pulley was loose on the motor shaft and the fan blade was rubbing against the metal shroud. It'll work just fine for me.
I'm repurposing some dumpster metal and redesigning the lower rad support so I can push the radiator forward. The radiator will sit straight up and not be angled anymore with this change. Should give more clearance to the intake and give the option for some fancy heat extractors in the hood moving forward.
That Bussmann fuse panel is cool but I don't have the time to sit and figure it out this year. I'll be damned if I don't put more miles on the truck this year than I did last year. So I'm putting the bussman panel on the shelf for now and doing this the easy way so my smooth mechanical engineering brain can figure the wires out quickly. This panel is going to go behind the passenger seat.
So scope creep mcgee back at it again, because why not? So I have a VS7875 sitting on the shelf and an air to water intercooler I bought off of Obsolete a couple months ago. Both of those parts have been talking to me a lot lately. Now I don't plan on doing anything with them right now but I will say all I need to add to my parts stash a heat exchanger, water pump, turbo manifold, wastegate, fuel injectors and map sensor to do a turbo LS build. It's not a long list an I think I have a very GRM way off making a heat exchanger for the A2W setup.
The radiator in my Yukon was leaking from the plastic endtanks over the holidays. So I swapped it out with a fresh GM unit and didn't throw the old one away like any good hoarder. Fast forward a couple weeks and add a couple beers, what if we cut horizontally along one of the rows of fins and made new endtanks out of that cheap aluminum sheet I bought off of Michael? Could that be used as heat exchanger for an A2W intercooler? OEM style tube and fin HEs are pretty efficient and simple construction. Seems to check out, what could go wrong?
Leaky plastic endtanks removed.
Some 1.2mm aluminum sheet practice to make sure my welder and myself are capable of this project.
The core is 34" wide which is huge! Thinking about cutting it down to about 10" tall. If I'm going to use this chopped down radiator I need somewhere to hide it. We will see how this splitter turns out in 3D printed pieces.
The water ports on this intercooler are 1/2" NPT. I hate NPT fittings, they always leak, so they must be deleted.
I have a few -12AN pushlock fittings and a bunch of -12 to -16 male to male adapters from Holley clearance. Bandsaw the -16 end off, sand off the anodizing and it makes a great AN weld bung. I found a couple LS heater core hoses I replaced recently on the Yukon and Escalade but never threw away. The benefits of parts hoarding are starting to show through.
The trouble with aluminum is it doesn't cut well or really at all with abrasive cutters. Toothed blades, both reciprocating and rotary are pretty aggressive for thin aluminum. I found that an oscillating tool and a wood blade make really quick work of of thin sheet and radiators.
I've been looking at this turbo stuff a bit too seriously. The LS3 manifold I got from Garithon fits almost too well for a cross over. It needs a V band and a dent in the firewall but that will play. Plan for the passenger side is to get another stock manifold, chop it up to accept a 2.5" crossover and place the T4 flange where it needs to be for best downpipe routing.
Fender dumps are cool but I'd like to put a full 4" exhaust on this thing if I can. It's looking like I might be able to make that work.
I've been busy being stupid. 3 kilos of PLA later I have V1 of a splitter. It sits a bit lower than I anticipated but I think that can be adjusted. Plan is to use this as a buck to make a fiber mold.
It's starting to turn into full blown spring in SC and this thing is still on blocks. Turbo plans are on hold, full steam ahead on uncobbling. More OEM Corvette parts and chinesium procured on eBay.
Super cool stuff going on here. It's awesome that you can model the splitter like that.
Some uncobbling requires a different brand of cobbling. The PS pump on the truck requires an external reservoir that makes changing the spark plugs difficult. This pump came off of the wife's Escalade because it was leaking from a rust hole, JB weld should do the job until I can get a junkyard one.
I promised more eBay Corvette parts. I recently discovered in one of the Youtube build threads I follow that C6 Corvettes have a hand brake that attaches to the side of the trans tunnel with horizontal bolts. Most cars I have seen have handbrakes that attach to the top of the tunnel with vertical bolts, the CRV hand brake in the background included. Mockup below; I need to adjust the tunnel a little bit to get it to sit lower but it looks like a great option for $60 with the cable.
Loaded up and trucking! Somewhere east of Lexington, KY at the best gas station ever, Buccee's! Uhaul V10 turd is averaging 6.2mpg which is real fun to fill a 60 gal tank.
more details later once we are back in Wisconsin safe
Welcome back to the upper midwest! Hope the rest of the trip goes well for you, and that the U-Haul has good A/C.
Safe travels and happy trails. Interested to hear why you guys headed back to WI after a short stint in SC.
If you have to move back to the frozen tundra, it's always good to arrive during summer. I swear that's how my wife tricked me into moving back to Pittsburgh.
We made it safe last night at 1:30am and finally got to bed around 3am. Uhaul averaged 6.5mpg over the whole trip, so it was doing better through flatness off Indiana and Illinois. I'll go into more detail on the reasoning behind the move and the whole ordeal in a bit. I have a lot to unpack
So Wisconsin... A year and a half ago I took a job transfer to SC and got a promotion in the process. 2 months later I got bumped up into a manager role, I had 2 engineers and an intern under me. I was leading the design team both in the US and PRC/VNM for a whole generation of new tools. I was spending 50 hours in the office and 10-20 hours a week at home on night calls with Asia or answering emails. I had no life, no friends and no time for my wife and projects.
I finally hit my limit with burnout in March and started looking for new jobs basically anywhere in the SouthEast but we came to the realization that the biggest thing we missed in SC was our friends and family in Wisconsin. So that's basically how we decided to move back to southern Wisconsin. I got a job with a well known motorcycle brand in Milwaukee that is hybrid/remote and we bought a house in our home town of Janesville. On the days I need to be in the office I'll have about an hour commute which isn't bad and worth it for the place we got. 
The move was both eventful and not eventful at the same time. It took us two days to fill the box truck up when we had originally planned to do it in one day, that was ambitious. Here's a preview of the circus.
The roster for the move is a Uhaul 26' box truck, uhaul car trailer, non running half disassembled Ram50, the wife's Escalade ESV with a large Thule and a 5x8 Uhaul enclosed trailer.
So we got everything hooked up yesterday morning, ready to leave at 8:30am for the 900 mile drive up. We go to pull out of the neighborhood hood and I noticed that one of the car hauler tires was low. No worries I have my Milwaukee M12 inflator with me for such an occasion. Fill that up to 60psi to match its friends and find it has a nail in the tread. So a slow leak that went flat over 2 days no worries we'll keep an eye on it. I go to put the inflator in the passenger seat of the box truck and notice the right, rear outer tire is real flat. Great. Hook the inflator up, 6psi. berkeley. It's supposed to be 110psi. There's a nail or screw in that tire too. I called the uhaul place they are not helpful, the wife runs back and grabs the rest of the M12 batteries we left on the shelf for our cleanup trip. I got the truck tire up to 65 psi before the inflator temped out. I guess that's what we are leaving with. 
We got almost all of the way through NC before we stopped at a rest area to check pressures and straps. I got 90psi into the truck tire with a fresh battery while we were stopped and cranked down all of the straps since I40 through eastern Tennessee is pretty rough. Made it to Buccees in Richmond Kentucky no issue and burned about an hour there getting fuel, letting the dog out and eating some chicken sandwiches. We need to talk about Buccees for a minute, if you haven't been to a Buccees before it's some of the best gas station food you'll ever have. However I'm not a big fan of the sauce that Buccees puts on their brisket sandwiches, it's too sweet. They do however make a better chicken sandwich than any other fast food chain in the South and if you don't agree with that you're wrong or haven't tried one.
I topped off the tires again at Buccees, the truck tire got down to 72psi in between NC and half of KY. We made it all the way to Farmer City, IL before we had to stop for fuel again at a Casey's. I missed the Midwest gas stations. Quick Trip on SC is not as good as Casey's or Kwik Trip.
Got some snacks and some caffeine and hit the road again. Pulled into the in-laws place at 1:30am grabbed the keys for the new place and went to drop off the box truck there. We finally got to bed around 3am. We both drove over 900 miles in separate vehicles. We normally do that drive together, I drive the whole way but my wife makes conversation and feeds me snacks so she kicked ass yesterday. Today and tomorrow we get to unload. I start my new job on Monday, ain't no rest for the wicked. Overall this trip went pretty smooth. However if it weren't for my extreme levels of paranoia and tool hoarding this uhaul equipment would have left us stranded for hours or caused a huge wreck that would have cost us all of our possessions and maybe even my life. I expect some level of neglect on rental equipment like this but that's just not acceptable on something like this when you are renting to the general public.
Haven't been to a Buccee's yet. See plenty of people wearing the hats though. I'll have to compare it to Royal Farms chicken. That's a high mark in gas station food for me.
I recently rented A UHaul to move the last of my MIL's stuff from Phoenix and am amazed that uhaul is still in business!!
how bad are all of the other guys If this is the quality of the biggest company.
glad the trip was successful and safe
Glad to hear you're back safe. And yes, uhaul will put you in a horrible situation and not give a E36 M3. There is literally no working road side number. If you call customer service they tell you to wait 4 hours for service. It's a mess.
We will need to see more of that garage--there is envy here. That and always choose Penske. Uhaul is only for the car hauler.
Penske is my first choice too but the trucks that can haul a trailer don't come with the lift gate and the box is 48" off the ground instead of 24ish with the Uhaul.
The new garage is 24' deep 36' wide and has 10' ceilings. I want to add better lighting, a welder plug, a heater and a Max Jax in that order. We got everything out of the box truck except a couch and one mattress today which is about twice as much as I thought we would get done. We will tackle the trailers and rearranging everything tomorrow.
Good stuff with serious envy of that garage.
Is it weird that I want to move also? Somewhere warmer for me. It literally makes no sense. I have a great house, kids are in a great school. Plus it is literally the worst time of my lifetime to move. I guess it's just my nomadic nature.
Some rearranging in the garage is required before any progress can be made. Electric Zero Turn makes a great little tractor.
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