Find an aluminum 5.3L Silverado for sale in nc, purchase, convince a friend to fly with you and follow you on the drive home. When the rotary grenades, swap in LS. Miss the noises, enjoy the power, really enjoy the reliability and not worrying about when you'll be left heartbroken and stranded.
Another vote for fly and drive.
But, it's on my bucket list of things to do some day, so I'm biased
captdownshift wrote: Find an aluminum 5.3L Silverado for sale in nc, purchase, convince a friend to fly with you and follow you on the drive home. When the rotary grenades, swap in LS. Miss the noises, enjoy the power, really enjoy the reliability and not worrying about when you'll be left heartbroken and stranded.
:-)
LS-swapped FDs are essentially impossible to register/smog legally in California unless you spring for the e-rod kit. Also, I'm still naive, I want magic spinning triangles.
mad_machine said: What I am leading up to with this.. get a cheap ebay codereader/interface with Bluetooth and get torque for your phone or tablet of your choice and keep a close eye on the engine temps.
FDs were only imported from 93-95, they're all OBD1. This is a 93.
BTW, lest it seem that I'm pooh-poohing everything, I am appreciating the comments. You've taken me from 90% convinced it's a totally stupid idea to being only 60% convinced. :)
AAA+ membership, GRM list, common sense, done. Do it. If anything it will give you the best idea of what your new purchase is like, and a really cool story to go with it!!
Sheesh. I remember that one guy that drove a 60 year old bus, with NO HEAT, from Wisconsin to South Carolina, in February.
An FD with only 60k should be a cake-walk. 
RealMiniParker wrote: Sheesh. I remember that one guy that drove a 60 year old bus, with NO HEAT, from Wisconsin to South Carolina, in February. An FD with only 60k should be a cake-walk.
Underheating an air-cooled VW is less likely than overheating a 13B-REW! :)
When he said a bus he meant a 1956 Ford Bus!!!
https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/the-bus-thread-1956-ford-b-600-general-questions/109517/page1/
Hm, I dunno if that's more or less impressive than a '56 VW bus. :)
(reading thread now)
Im surprised noone has mentioned the wonderful power of the heater core. Id drive it. But i'd probably cover the whole front of it with some kind of protection before doing so. $30 of painters tape maybe.
MrChaos wrote: insert picture of roadkill driving a vehicle with the hood on the roof because it got to hot.
I say drop in a cooler thermostat, replace radiator cap, and drive it. if it gets hot follow the above instructions.
Or maybe buy an upgraded radiator and throw it in the car when you get there.
Plane ticket, painters tape, 4-5 days of your time.
You should be able to easily cover 1000 miles per day since you'll be by yourself and on a mission. Let me know if you end up on I-40. Depending on the day and time, I may be able to meet you in OKC for some food and beer.
Especially if you can live with killing the A/C for the hill climbs, I'd be surprised if you can't keep it cool on the highway. Just make sure the rad cap is good, rad isn't full of bugs and keep an eye on the temps and you should be fine.
There is absolutely no reason that the car shouldn't make the trip. As long as the hoses are in good shape and you stay out of the boost and stick with the speed limit, the car is more than capable of making the trip.
I'm with the "just do it" crowd. Seriously, if you don't think it can make the drive, you don't want the car. I know that stretch of I-70 pretty well, and it's a lot less of a car-breaker than the stretch between Vail and Denver. I've driven the Utah stretch in a 1966 Cadillac and taken an overheating classic Mini and a 1967 Land Rover over the Rockies passes.
As long as you trust the seller or the inspection report, I'd do a fly and drive without hesitation. If this were a rusted out 200,000 mile car, or had the boost cranked up to 40 psi, I'd hesitate, but not for a clean and original example.
Awesome car.
The trick to making it through the desert is to not use the A/C and crank the heat full on to take advantage of the extra cooling afforded by the heater core.
But seriously, you should do it!
I'm in NC. Let me go get it and drive it around for awhile to make sure you'll be okay.
If it goes off without a hitch, next year you have to try it with a 4G63 AWD DSM
Fly, drive, post pics here. What's the worst that could happen?
If you're unluckly you'll have a boring trip with no photo ops of a cloud of steam where the engine should be!
It can't be that bad. I drove a beat up Caprice wagon with an engine that I had just spent a year building and had 400 break in miles on from Indiana to LA towing a trailer with two motorcycles and a mountain bike on it. I literally wrote the map for the megasquirt while I was driving whenever there wasn't traffic trying to get the thing to run properly. A car has to be incredibly marginal to not make that trip, and I seriously doubt you'll have a problem. When I got back (4500 mile round trip) I discovered that the heater core and radiator were both leaking, the thermostat housing was leaking, one of the head gaskets was leaking externally (bad block surface plus single shim steel gasket equals leak) and I had installed the wrong distributor gear and it had chewed itself to pieces. Additionally, my driveshaft threw a weight off, causing a rear seal leak, I broke every exhaust hanger on the car because the massive increase in horsepower had trashed both engine mounts during the trip, so the engine was flopping around in the engine bay the whole time, and driveline alignment was way way off. I later discovered that, for most of the trip, I had a defective front wheel bearing that had galled away and started to spin inside the hub rather than over the bearing surface, and my custom made in-tank fuel pump (originally carbed) had ripped free of its mount and was just sloshing around with the fuel in the tank, which explained why I would starve for fuel around hard corners regardless of fuel level, and could only use 15 of my 22 gallons of fuel. Oh, and one of the vacuum switches for the electric brake pump got stuck, resulting in a pump that never turned off and an exciting gas station rewire of the system.
Guess what? I still made it, 3 days there, and 3 days back. If I could do it in that car, you sure as hell can do it in a FD that doesn't appear to be janky in the slightest. And if you can't, there are tons of us willing to help you along the way.
I realized, after arriving at the end of my 2000 mile migration in the old Land Rover, that I had never actually driven the truck more than 60 miles in a single journey before, and probably no more than 500 miles total. And it had spent at least a decade in a barn before I got it so it wasn't exactly a proven vehicle.
The trip was not without adventure, but if a 35-year-old British tractor could cross the US via interstate in August then a 20-year-old Japanese car shouldn't have any trouble.
Drive it. It'll be fun and it will be memorable...says the guy with the old bus.
Running warm on a long climb or desert stretch is easily solved by watching the gauge and being willing to pull over and let things cool off.
Why would anyone buy a car that he was SO convinced was such a POS??
Shut up and drive.
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