Well I fucked up. Not sure how exactly I did, but I can tell you from the huge billowing cloud of smoke out the back of this thing that I did, indeed, fuck up. LOL

I had some time today to put the truck on the dyno and run it. So of course I did.
Everything was going really really well.
First pull that was anything near a full one made 430 at 130KPA or around 2.5 pounds and 8* timing with a still really rich afr. I leaned it out some and made a cleaner pull that landed around 475.
Bumped boost a bit a few times, left timing alone and pulled a few plugs every run. I ended up at 640rwhp on 12 PSI and 11.2 afr. No knk on the logs so I added 2* to 10 and made 680. Plugs looked really good, strap and timing marks looked great and again no knk.

So OF COURSE I needed to see 700 rwhp. I bumped the controller a bit and a quick spool/boost check showed 2 PSI. I really was only looking to make 700 so i also pulled a degree figuring it was a safe bet and ended up make 723 at 13.7 PSI 11.0 AFR and 9* at 6800 rpm. On coast down I let out all the magic stock LS piston smoke.

Truck still runs ok, does not appear to have a 100% dead hole, but I got a ton of blow by and alot of smoke. So I'm sure I broke a piston.
Good news is, it fucking made power! Every time I changed something the thing picked up 40HP.
Bad news is I'm not sure where I went wrong yet. So this weekend I'm going to tear it down and have a look see.

I'll be sure to post the autopsy picas.

 

Agreed you broke a piston. Being a self proclaimed expert on breaking LS pistons, you've described it perfectly. Ironically, that's also how i got so good at changing them. Last one was about 45 minutes TOTAL including gapping the rings.

Mine were all from too much timing. If you haven't yet, take the time to verify your timing with a pointer. I felt like a dipshit having changed out so many pistons over something so trivial.

 

If the timing checks out I would replace that coil. Did you see the trouble Matt had with 8f8. It all went away when he changed coils.

 

Did you mess with ring gap on this at all?

 

Yeah 30-32 or so.

I may try to change the coils. We will see. Thats not a bad idea really now you mention it.

I'll tdc the thing when I have it apart.

 

You ever get any carnage pictures?

 

Its been awhile. I kinda quit playing around with cars for the last year or so after I got the truck sorted. I concentrated on getting my new shop put together and ready to work in. That project took longer than I thought. As far as pics of broken stuff, yeah I did, I'll scrounge them up. Its really anticlimactic though. I Broke one ring land for all that smoke. Didn't hurt the block or anything. Bottle honed it and stuffed a new piston in it and back on the road.
I was never happy with how this particular truck tuned on HP tuners. This is weird as I have tuned a bunch of super similar ones with zero problems. When the truck would start to run up on boost it would go lean and stay there longer than I was comfortable with. Ecu showed a good target afr, nothing I did to the VE table helped. I tried different injectors, fuel system changes, map sensors, different ecu's, you name it, it never was right. I was really close a few times to just wash it in gas and dry it with a match. Eventually not knowing what else to do I hung a microsquirt on it and stuck it in manual 2 and drove the truck. Ran perfect, did whatever I told it to. So at this point I knew it wasn't any hardware issues and was going to continue trying to figure out what was wrong software wise. I fought it a few more days before just saying fuck it and putthe micro back in the truck in a parallel arrangement. Factory ECU controls dash, trans, cruise, A/C ect and the micro just runs the engine.
In this setup the truck made 750 wheel and has been my daily/work truck since, with nothing except oil and atf changes. Still has the same plugs in it. It tows my excavator (its a small one) and my scissor lift just fine. Along with all my other junk I don't use the tow truck for. Drove it to work today
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In all its been a great truck. Its kinda my favorite thing to drive honestly. Has about 25K on the engine, trans and turbo with no issues to speak of. Only thing that really changed was I installed a surge tank in the fuel system as at low fuel levels slosh was a thing. I run a factory basket in the tank with a single 450 to the surge tank then a pair of aem 380's to the rail. This setup has been awesome so far after a year and a half and fixxed any and all fuel issues I had.

 

Pretty cool truck, I'd like to have a clean 2500 chevy truck but around here all you can find is rust.

 

Is that your shop in the background? Did you swap out pistons and rods when you fixed it?

 

Thats parked out behind where work, which is also an auto shop. The new shop is what I call my personal shop I setup next door. When we bought the house as a rental I wanted to keep the shop space to use. Its nice becausae its literally 50 feet away, and i get more shop space. I keep my original one but now have another 1800 square feet.
When we first took possesion of it, it was full of stuff. Started cleaning it out and taking stock of whats there

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This was useing the 64 pickup for dump runs. Was a good little truck.

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Got the partical board "cieling ripped out and tossed. #ad


After that I wanted to vault the ceiling and scissor the trusses so a hoist would fit in it.
I did my research and my "engineering" and came up with a desighn for thge trusses that would do what i wanted. So I also bought a scissor lift, as doing anything of this scale on a ladder would be suicide.
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After the trusses were done I ran electrical and air, for the panel toffer lights I wanted to use regular plu in wipps so I wired in 2 gang boxes. This would let me service them easy. I'M aware your not supposed to "hide" an electrical box, but I don't care. This will make life easier now and in the futere.
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Originally the two doors were different heghts, I wanted the lift in the left side, more tward the middle of the shop so my back wouldn't be against the wall when working on a car, that meant time to raise the door. I bought two ne doors of the same height, but wanted them to fallow the ceiling line. This would allow me to open the doors with a car lifted on the rack, that and make the whole place feel bigger.
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From there I insulated it, dry walled and mudded it.

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I also cut my openings for the 1x4 lights and got all the electical roughed in for door openers, rack power, compressor power, and everything else i could think of. I wanted 110 and 220 on the hoist for grinders and welders and whatnot along with the power for the hoist itself. #ad


Some paint and accent work Along with finally getting the lights in and working.

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I installed a big 10' fan. Its awesome. i just leave it running on low. Keeps the whole place nice and even temp. #ad


I cut out 4x4 sections of the original floor to poor some footings for the hoist. 4x4x12 with rebar and good concrete. After it dried i got the lift stood up and installed. 324543253 more trips to home depot got me all the parts to wire it and get it working. This was also prepping to paint the floor.
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This is it "finished" Floor painted and before i got all my tools moved in.

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As far as the truck goes, no, I just ran another ly6 piston in it. This engine is just a geniii block with ly6 rods and pistons. The six liter pistons with the two valve reliefs. It runs a btr cam, melling pump, ls7 lifters, ls9 gaskets, TBSS intake, all the super standard easy stuff. Its block of wood simple.

 

How much was the scissor lift? I've had to rent one for everything I did.

 

I paid 1500 bucks for the lift and a little 5k single axle tilt trailer. The lift had a blown lift ram and dead batteries. I scrounged up 6 group 60 batts used from work and then bought a generic ram repair set from ebay. I cut the new ram section to leangth and welded the old clevice end to the new ram. Reassembled it all and now have a good lift. Really easy to do. Only thing I kinda screwed up was the clevice end has a bronze bushing in it that i got too hot in one or two spots while welding it. Took a bit of hand file work to slide the cross pin back in. Technically the bushing is no longer "new" or "perfect" but for the amount of hour usage this will get, it will be more than fine. Also the repurposed used automotive batteries are not deep cycle and so you have to plug it in every night or so. Again, for me, no big deal and free is alot better than 250 bucks per commercial deep cycle. The idea of spending 1500 bucks on batteries made me die inside a little bit.

 

Find it on Craigs list or marketplace? I'd like to have one, that's for sure, also a forklift. Great deal for you tho

 

Through a friend of a friend. It apparently blew the ram at a very critical and inconvenient time in front of important people who did not like the idea of 10 gallons of hydraulic oil blowing all over the lobby of Microsoft HQ in Seattle. Its actually a funny story as its told. Anyway it received lepper status and was left in a storage shed till I mentioned I wanted one. Yay for me.

Here is the broken piston pic. I finallt found it.
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For the amount of smoke you'd swear there would be alot more carnage. The smoke to broken part ratio was pretty certainly misleading.

 

That's quite the 2022 update! Very nice work on the shop

 

I really like how you changed over the roof trusses, that sure opens it up nice.
How did the engineering play into the design? Here you need to take into account snow load.
Did you just make those up yourself or is there really any engineering taken into account?
My concern would be, with no attic how do you keep the roof from icing up in the winter?
I realize you are in a more temperate climate but here I would be concerned about roof leaks caused by ice forming from heat escape under the shingles. Just asking as I have been looking at some shops that I would want to do something similar for a lift but eliminating the attic can cause a lot of other issues.

 

So a bit of column A and a bit of column B.
You raised alot of the same concerns I had when I started planning.
I have a friend who works at a truss manufacturing company. She does all the engineering and math on the truss' they sell. The truss design is calculated for the current building codes that account for snow load and such in the PNW. Not sure what they all are but it was figured in. Basically I told her what I was trying to do and how I thought it should be done, she changed the recipe a bit and I built it. Things like the original design was 10" tall truss but I wanted it to be 12" to save drop and give more room for insulation. Also the design called for no special fasteners, I wanted to screw it instead of nails, and it also didn't call for construction adhesive which I used as well. Little things like that. There are 1200 screws and 110 tubes of glue in that ceiling.

Considering the attic, I agreed with you back when I was kinda designing how i wanted to do it, so when i vaulted the ceiling I didn't do the entire shop. I left the last 8 feet or two "bays" of truss alone. Kinda hard to see in the pics but there is a small attic above one end of the shop. Each truss has a bunch of 3" hole drilled through them ( every 18" if I remember right) from bay to bay all the way back to this small attic. From there its ducted outside and at the eves. There is also a ducting fan that pulls air through the space above the insulation. I kind of think of it like a remote mounted attic.

Last year we got a foot of snow on it before it was 100% finished so its been loaded. And currently there is a freezing rain storm going on so everything has a inch of ice on it and so far so good. Time will tell if I screwed anything up or not. I honestly don't know. this is not my forte, I just wanted a lift in my shop dammit! I don't know if this would work in your neck of the woods, but everyone i talked to about it seemed on board. Now would i feel this comfortable if this was a part of my actual house and not some out building, probably not. Also this building is brick and concrete to the roof so that played into my confidence a bit.

In all I'm currently very glad I did it. It was alot of work and aside from some design help, I did all the work by myself. So if it turns into a house of cards, its all my fault.

 

That’s really cool Travis.
It should work good and sure looks good too! Being able to have a high roof makes all the difference in the world and seeing what you have done opens up a lot of possibilities. Nice job.

 

I finished and sold my 77 K10 about a year ago. Truck turned out great, made 425 at the tire through the th350 and t-case while spinning a 33" tire. I thought that was pretty good for the 4.8. 12* 14PSI 11.5-1. I sold it to a guy who drove it back to Denver. That freed up some time and money for the next one.


So two ish years ago I came across this thing at a local auction. No one really bid on it and I won the bid. I sent it off to a guy to have the car painted before i really tore into it. Once i got it back, I threw a cover on it and let it sit in my garage untill I had the time and money to get on it.
Well, the time has come. After lots of thinking and trying to visualize different ideas, I have finally made up my mind and start moving forward. This one may take me a while.
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I posted the engine and trans for sale, so it was time to pull them. Plan is of course a turbo LS and an 80E

 

I have always liked the look of the split bumper cars