Once the manifolds were done and bolted up, I used some 2011 OEM Camaro stainless exhaust pipes, donated by my boos at work, (also used to mod the outlest of the exh manifolds) to build a Y pipe to a single 3"


Driver side;




Passsenger side;



I'm about 90% sure everything will clear the front diff and suspension but need to compress fully to be sure......

After this I installed the Dipstick tube, a real PITA, mounted the P/S reservoir and mocked up the PCM mount;




That was it for Saturday.

Sunday started with the goal to fab up a throttle cable and kickdown/TV cable mount amoung some smaller items I'll ad later. Since this engine was originally a drive by wire unit there was no cable mounts of any kind, in fact I had to replace the throttle boddy and PCM with drive by cable models.....Why Cable and not wire? Well I didnt have the reostat gas pedal and mainly I NEEDED to be able to hook up the kick down/TV cable for my 700r4 trans which without the cable hooked up the trans doesnt last long at all and I didnt want to go with a manual valve body.....So a day of fabbing up a bracket for both cables was in store.....



I had to stop for a while to take my nephew to the airport but when I got back I hooked up the fuel lines and trans dipstick tube, hooked wiring to the starter, not tight yet as I need to add a cable for the winch power yet and hooked up P/S hoses to the pump...... Still alot to do but I felt it was a productive weekend.

Sunday night and time for another update...... This weekend was dedicated to the dash, since the old motor had 6 plugs I could run a factory Toyota V6 gauge cluster..... Now with 8 plugs and less places to hook up sending units I swapped out the factory Toyota gauges for some aftermarket gauges...... I went with the normal set up, Speedo, Tach, volts, water temp, oil pressure, gas gauge along with a trans temp gauge that I have been running since I built the Syota..... Water temp gauge will be the center temp gauge since this is the one I will watch the most.


The LED indicators are as follows:

Left Blinker (Green)...............Check Engine (Yellow)... High Beam (Blue)... Low oil pressure (Red).......................Right Blinker (Green)
.............................................................................Cooling fan low (or off, not decided yet) (White)
.............................................................................Cooling fan High (Red)

Once I got them all mounted I had to wire them all in.......


Once wired with pig tails for 12v key power, tach lead, speedo signal, dash lights, gas gauge signal, LED's and ground I loosely mounted in the dash;



I did a few more small odds and ends to end the day Saturday

Sunday I worked on hooking the gauges all up where they belong....... got that all done and then I added the battery cable between the starter and the winch solonoids, tighted up the wires at the starter hooked up the winch and tried it out...... had a short some where cos I blew my 12v key power fuse....... 3 fuses later I figured it out and we're in business...... While the battery was hooked up I plugged the winch remote in and let the air out fo the air bumps and sucked the winch down to compress the front suspension to see how much I have to change my pretty exhaust.......



Angle doesn't show that there is about .200" of clearence at the exhaust. Since I've had the air bumps I have yet to compress them this far.

Fully bottomed out;


I had to shorten the mount for my front brake hose too to clear the oil pan;

Wow that is looking sweet Sy, that is a ton of work and some serious clearancing on that exhaust. The guages look great as well.

Bill88xj wrote:Wow that is looking sweet Sy, that is a ton of work and seriously clearancing on that exhaust. The guages look great as well.

Thanks......The pipe is 2½" diameter so I dont think the restriction will be too bad.

No, may cause some weird turbulance up towards the front of the exhaust and some extra back pressure but I wouldnt worry about it!

Wow, another weekend come and gone....... I got alot done and am very happy with progress........

I wanted to get the spare tire solidified and radiator/cooling fan mounted and plan the routing of the radiator plumbing from the engine to the radiator........

Got the fan mounted to the radiator;


Started playing with location and mounted so the spare tire wouldnt crush it.....



Gonna have to add some protection here;

Got that done at a decent hour Saturday afternoon so I started messing with plumbing;


The 2 rear tubes from the radiator to underneath the bed;


Mounting bracket;

I was able to get these 2 mounted Saturday;




That was where I called it a day Saturday.......

Got the intermediate tubes mounted;


Never thought I'd say this but my 2" body lift really paid off here;



Another mounting bracket fab'd up'

To finish it up was the hard part..... the last 3 feet to the engine, the lower tube, also the lower radiator tube went easy..... too easy...... the upper took me 3 tries to get it where I wanted it...... As you can see I went from a side by side path under the truck to a over/under patter once in teh engine compartment, this is why it took me 3 tries on the upper tube....



Here's the connection between the intemediates and the fronts, I will build a little protection for this once its ready for the trail;

I was happy and surprised to be this far this weekend, still had some day light left so I thought I'd try to get a bar on the spare tire carrier to protect the fan shroud;


Of course this was gonna be close to the upper radiator hose...... EVERYTHING is close in this thing;


Thats it for this weekend....... way ahead of schedule so far.......

It's looking very good!

All that tubing reminds me of this

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;)

So another weekend has come and gone, 5th weekend of the project and I opted to take a day off of work Friday to get some more work done on it and I figured since Cristina and I are not taking long weekends to go away right now, I could burn a day to work on it......

Thanks to a friend who wheels (sometimes), fabs all his own junk and who's opinion I respect, I took his advise and decided to re-design the radiator mount a bit..... The upper ones at least.... The first version had the radiator mounted solid at all 4 mounts, well any variation between the bed and the tubes, the radiator will not like it so my solution was to rubber isolate the upper mounts which allows for movement side to side and fore & aft if needed......




I also had an idea for draining the coolant system if needed, had to remove all the tube work any way to clean out the inside of all the tubes of shavings and metal dust from fabbing them up..... I removed the tubes and cleaned them up and the rear 2 I also added a couple of drain valves;


got these all re-assembled and put back in and went to the next project.

Fabbing up a mount for the engine computer;



Next was actually laying out the wiring harness to start the install on the engine..... That was it for Friday.

Saturday started with a trip to the parts stores for some necessary supplies for the plan for the day....... I wanted to get the coolant system bleeder in and the computer harness installed, hooked up as much as possible. I got it all done and hooked up along with all the connections to the chassis except the check engine light and fan switch. It has fuel pressure and the starter works so in theory its ready to try to start BUT there is no O2 sensors yet as I need to get the bungs to weld into the head pipes, no mass airflow sensor yet as I need to finish the air inlet yet too, no exhaust, and no coolant yet as I have yet to hook up the heater hoses as I am waiting to locate a heater control valve from a 1st gen truck for this install...... this week I hope..... Why a heater? Well any of you who know, I wheel in cold climates occasionally (Yes they exist here in AZ) and like my heater and there's no way Cristina is comin out in the frost or snow without one...... No pictures of the wiring cos lets face it..... its messy.

The coolant system on these motors has a tendancy to trap air in them because there are water jackets in the heads that are higher than the path to the outlet the let them bleed out...... GM's remedy is a crossover tube between the front of the 2 heads with a line off of that that, from the factory went throught the throttle body to prevent icing up and then back the the catch bottle. Well I eliminated the throttle body portion of this and my catch bottle is 10' feet away in the bed so I added this bleeder with a schrader valve to help bleed the system.


We'll see how it works..... It is the highest point in the system so it should be fine...... I hope.

That pretty much wrapped up Saturday.