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I will be honest I was kinda nervous about the trans. I had been into one or two before but never 100% on my own before. Really once you break it down it's not near a side bad as I was thinking it would be.
Well sorry for the huge delay in updates, got real busy over the winter and lost my phone with alot of my pictures. I will try to buzz through and get everything updated to how the truck currently sits!
So after I got the trans buttoned up I started throwing the motor together, plans were stock block and crank with some good rods and pistons, blocked cleaned up really nice and everything looked great inside. Wanted to try the total seal break-in powder since I am running a stainless top ring. Turns the cylinders a green after it's applied.
For rods and pistons I got with lil john and got a set of compstar rods and his custom wiseco pistons. They were designed to use a 1.0mm, 1.2mm, 2.8mm ring pack which opens up a lot of options for rings over a shelf 5.3 piston and also uses a Tool Steel .200" wall S718 pins.
Got the bottom end all put together, everything went smooth, had to buy 3 extra sets of feeler gauges to get enough to shim the oil pump.
Figured why I had it apart I would clean up the heads a bit, kinda got some ideas on what others were doing and decided to give it a shot. I decided to leave part of the swirl ramp, no real reason why or why not. Just figured without a flow bench I didn't really know how much the extra work would be gaining me. Over all I think it came out pretty decent.
So unfortunately this is where I lost a lot of my pictures, so the rest of the documentation of the build up to its current point got lost but I will post what I have!
Just for a little bit of motivation lol
Decided to clean and paint the frame while everything was out, the wax was horrible looking. What a royal pain in the butt.
I decided that is wanted to do a manual type valve body since I had one in my old camaro and loved it, didn't wanna pop for the real valve body so I just picked up a shifter and black box from jakes performance. Whipped up this shifter mount to clear the console and look half decent since I only have the half console
Picked up a set of ridetech coilovers and modified lower control arms from a member here, should go well with the rears since I am relocating them as well, what a huge difference in size and weight. Anyway cleaned everything up and here is some before and after pics!
Couldn't stand the "as cast" look of the intake anymore, I picked up some VHT black crinkle paint and hit the intake and valve covers, the stuff is awesome! Looks really good and holds up really well. got the intake all mocked up and motor set in.
Picture of how I built the crossover, I hate when they hang down low so I built it up as tight as I could
Intake, gates and everything almost all together. I decided I would start and break the motor in without the turbo, that way if I had any metal or break in material it wouldn't go through the new turbo. I built a little stack that you can see in some later pictures and used that to get the exhaust out of the engine bay
Here you can see the little stack lol, this was the night before I planned to start it
With all the driveshafts I have seen coming out from under trucks I wanted to play it safe, I built this loop for the front and have plans to build a rear one here shortly. Hopefully the shaft will say put and won't decide to take a vacation. But if it does hopefully this will keep the damage to a minimum
sooooooo then I started it, and the thing fired instantly and idled awesome right off the bat. Checked over everything, all fluids, made a couple small tweaks in the tune and everything was good. That is until I put it into gear. Reverse was super soft engaging, didn't want to pull the truck at all. Dropped the truck into drive and had nothing, didn't even feel like it was going into gear, tried manual shifting in all forward gears and nothing.....great.
So we push the truck in and pulled the trans. I ripped it apart and for the life of me couldn't find anything wrong. Going over the power flow charts I knew that it had to be something with the forward clutch pack as that would be the main problem that would cause no forward gears at all.
I had heard of the wave plate getting caught in the clean out grove of the drum and binding the drum. Checked that and no such luck, everything looked great. I could force it to get stuck but unless I was forcing it it felt fine.
Started to get real frustrated with not being able to find an issue, I had got in touch with jakes performance and was about to send this trans in to him to see what he thought. Decided I would go through everything one more time and see if anything new jumped out at me. Since I knew it had to be an issue with the forward clutch pack I made some changes, swapped out to a th400 wave plate since it was a bit thicker and had no chance of getting caught at all. I decided to aircheck that clutch pack , which I failed to do the first time because it was kinda hard to get to when the input shaft is assembled in the drum .
So I assemble to front drum and input shaft, fire up my compressor and give it a shot, and nothing..... can't get the clutch pack to engage at all. I slid that shaft back out and fool around with the clutch pack for a minute till it hits me. I run over to the corner where my old input shaft was laying and bring it back over to the bench, slide it into the drum, hit it with air and bam! Clutch pack works fine. test the new shaft and can't get a drop of air through it.
So I jump on the phone with Jakes and tell them about the issue, turns out the had a bad batch of about 7 billet input shafts that had not got drilled correctly causing no clutch apply in the forward clutch. They send me out a new one, I order some seals, and 5 days later I throw it back together. Get it all back in the truck and trans works great. Took it around the block to make sure it hits all gears, everything seemed good, pressures look good, no noises just as it should be.
So lesson learned, always always check new parts and always aircheck every clutch pack, could have saved me two weeks and a lot of frustration if I would have done it the first time!
Man I was so nervous when I first started it, then felt like dying when I had no forward gears, I'm just glad looking back it was a faulty part and not anything I did. Still sucked but made me feel better
01-16-2017, 02:33 PM
