T-Revs comeback 05 tahoe 2wd street truck
 

Just picked this up today. After selling my escalade I bought a diesel Wk grand Cherokee to replace it that my wife ended up loving so I picked up a wj Grand Cherokee to replace that. It was a nice rig, comfy, tows my trailer just fine and I can haul stuff with it but I missed the fuel economy of the caddy, yes the 4.7l gets way worse then my 6.0l did lol. So after looking around a little at yukons and Escalades I stumbled upon this 05 tahoe, 2wd, 5.3l truck. It had a nice kenwood double din in it, super straight body and paint and super clean interior with only 167k miles. Picked it up for $3300. Windshield on it is super cracked so I’m getting that replaced tomorrow. Still figuring out plans for it. Original thought was a 4l80e swap then single turbo but I have a 07 Vette that would be much more productive as a go fast car so I might just mess around with the hoe and do some long tubes, an intake and maybe a doorman knockoff intake manifold And maybe a smallish cam and stall converter. I already reflashed the pcm to firm up the shifts and get rid of the pe delay. It immediately felt much stronger and no longer would it ping at full throttle like it did on the stock tune. Fuel economy on it so far seems really great. I have a hd hood lined up for it, also want to find a z71 lower valance and get the bumpers, grill and hd hood paint matched. Not a super big fan of the wheels but they are all clean and have good tires on them. I think I would like them better if they were painted or powder coated more of an oem silver finish. I’ll probably go with 305/40/22’s for the back tires down the road as it has 275/40/22’s on it right now. Definitely missed having a gmt800 truck and I’m glad I got this to replace the wj grand Cherokee. It definitely feels like it has 100k less miles then the Escalade did. Kbb on it goes from 5-9k lol.
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Good looking hoe.

I think a good blower would do wonderfully on this thing.

Nice find! I agree the gmt800 SUVs are really too heavy to make fast fast especially compared to a vette. Make it a comfortable tow rigs and DD then relapse throw a T6 turbo at it to grenade the drive train and go balls to the wall!


Escalade roof rack is a nice add to a lowered tahoe.

I'd cam, tune, long tube it and rock it. Maybe an intake for the noise, but let her be

Get rid of those fugly wheels, polish her up and do some DEPO lights

You wont keep it long enough for anything else lmao

^^^^^^^ :rotflmao:

lol. We’ll see. Your most likely right. I’ve been leaning towards a basic na setup in it. I took it down to eugene today to go grab a cargo cover from a suburban thinking it would fit but it was about 1.5” too wide strangely enough. I averaged 19.6 on the way down with just cruise control on at 70 and 23.5mpg On the way home doing 60-65 and drafting a little bit. We’ll see once I fill it up and actually calculate gas mileage but so far it seems to sip gas pretty well especially compared to my 4.7l Jeep that averages 13.8 most of the time 😏. Picking up a hd hood for the hoe tomorrow and got a new windshield put in it today as well.

Picked up a HD hood today. Love how it looks. Hoping to get the door handles, mirrors, bumper grill and hood all paint matched to the truck.
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I was thinking, you should electric swap it. It's totally easy and economical! Just ask @adriver

he doesn't like Tahoe's tho, so he might get a little teste, I mean testy. Silly autocorrect

Hey I like my fuel economy lol. its just impressive to me that a larger suv like the Tahoe with a 5.3 gets almost two times as good of fuel economy as my 4.7l Jeep.

Tesla is making an electric crate motor setup for sbc mounts. It’s gonna be 533hp/800 torque. https://www.google.com/amp/s/electre...ate-motor/amp/

Tesla isn't making it, it's just a Tesla OEM motor. And it's a big ole thread here already 😂😂

HD hood looks great. I am a fan. I also think you should stick to NA on this one

Blow-er! Blow-er! Blow-er! Blow-er! Blow-er! Blow-er!

Cam it and get 14mpg like the rest of us.

Now you have to troll in me other threads too? Seriously, you are 100% a pathetic little bitch ass troll.

:D :lol:

It's a little newer but this one is pretty quick.

love seeing that thing. It gets a lot of street miles as well.

yep... didn't figure that jeep'd last more than a couple months.

the Jeep was great for what I bought it for. Just a backup suv that I wouldn’t wanna mess with. I was really really trying to not build anything till I bought another duplex or triplex but I can’t seem to stop myself. My buddy just picked up a 2011 ford raptor and after riding in it I was super unimpressed by how fast it wasn’t I really wanted to pickup another gmt800 to beat him with lol. I’m definitely going to stay Na, ordered some 1 3/4” long tubes and a y pipe for it to throw on. I scaled the hoe when I first got it at 5150 with a half tank and my 12” jbl sub in it. Took the spare off as well as the spare hanger and rescaled it at 5000lbs flat with a little under a quarter tank. The headers should drop a little more weight, and I’ll trim off what fat I can here and there. I’ve been making double payments on my triplex now and saving all the rental income from it so I feel pretty broke which is gonna make me take my time instead of going all crazy and ordering all the stuff I want for it. I don’t mind doing it that way gives you something to look forward to instead of a pile of parts sitting around giving me anxiety about not having the time to put everything on it. I also ordered a corvette servo and band push rod or what ever it’s called. The second gear definitely slips in this 4l60 so I’m hoping that will help. If not I’m gonna hope to find a core trans that I can build on the side for it. I would like to do it for the experience and hopefully learn some more about a/t.

So I figured out why second gear was having issues. Someone had installed a corvette servo but when they did the 2nd gear piston return spring must have fell off its perch while putting the servo back in place. I pulled the servo off and found the return spring broken into 3 pieces. There was some marks on the servo from it hitting so I’m assuming the pieces stoped the pushrod from applying the band properly. I installed my new corvette servo and found a similar spring from some of my th400 parts I had laying around. Got it all together and trans shifted nice and hard, I’m gonna dial the line pressure back down in the tune some but when I got back home the trans was leaking because the servo cap retaining spring had popped off. I had a hell of a time trying to pry that cap in enough while getting that big c clip in. After about 30 minutes I ended up squeezing the c clip together some and I think that’s what caused it to pop out either it wasn’t fully seated or didn’t have the seat pressure it should have. Gonna get some trans fluid tomorrow and see if it stays in place and how the Tranny acts now.
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Wow good catch, hopefully it drives like it should now. I realized all the different builds you've had on here not once have I seen a burnout video. :hmmm:

Lol I’m rarely hard on my stuff. Gotta make it last to work with my penny pinching mentality. I can totally see how that return piston spring could come off. Filled the trans up with fluid and so far it shifts amazing! Super happy with it. Headers should be here this week so I’m excited to throw those on. I wanna tune it on the stock manifolds first to see how much of a difference they will make. Same for the intake manifold. Also spent a little time buffing out a few of the small flaws in the hoe today and the paint cleaned up really nice for already being in great shape. Can’t wait to get the hd hood painted along with everything else. Should really transform the look of the truck.

Tuned the Tahoe today, I’ve definitely learned allot about tuning the maf in the last few months, it didn’t make much sense to me before because I’ve always tuned speed density cars for the last few years but it was actually quite simple. Tuned it on regular as that’s what I plan to run in this truck. The Tranny is shifting awesome and feels like the truck has a new trans now. Had to pull a couple of degrees of timing out after 3400 to 6k at wide open but overall its a huge improvement over the super fat target afrs on the stock tune.

#200whp

Lol it definitely picked up a good amount of power over the stock tune. Its not fast, I’ve had plenty of fast shit but not at least it feels happy at wide open vs the stock tune file felt anemic. Headers are coming in tomorrow, probably won’t have time to put them on till next week as this weeks been super busy for me with tuning. Pretty sure I wanna do a cam in it as well as the trailblazer stall converter for now, if I decide to get serious about making some power I’ll do a th400 swap on it and single turbo setup. But for now I’m super happy with the hoe and I’m looking forward to slowly modding it and making it into what I want.

May as well tune the ve tables too if your running dynamic airflow. Should give a snappier throttle when the tune transitions from maf to ve and back to maf etc.

I definitely will. Headers are going on tomorrow. I’m gonna file the header flanges first before installing them.

took a trip up to Oregon city today from Salem it was about a 50 mile drive. I got 25.0 mpg the whole drive up there besides the last part is all up hill in town dropping it to 24.1 average for the trip. The gas gauge barley moved for the whole drive up here
lol.

also I got lucky and found a silver birch metallic z71 Tahoe at the junk yard and got a full set of matching door handles for my truck. Swapped out the lock cylinder and installed them. I have a full set of abs black handles if anyone is looking for them. Also picked up a set of z71 sideskirts and the brackets for them, there was seriously like 40 rivets that held them on it was ridiculous. Planning on shaving the holes on the bottom of them that are there for the nerf bars and painting them with SEM trim black before installing them. I also got the passenger side rear mud flap or splat from the z71 but I need a drivers side now.
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Did you lean the tune out a ton or something to get 25mpg? Did you hand calculate to confirm that because I've never gotten close to even 20.

Handles look real good, keep looking for a black mirror cover for me :jest:

Its got 3.23’s in the back and I got mad hyper mile’n skills from owning my insight. No lean cruise. Haven’t filled it up to calculate it off the odo but I got 22 round trip getting stuck in some stop and go 5 o clock traffic on the way back home. I used about 3/16’s of a tank to go 102 miles round trip.

you needed a driver side mirror cap right? They had a black z71 tahur there but I can’t remember if it had mirrors still on it. I’m gonna go back and grab one more side skirt to cut up to use as filler pieces to shave mine so I’ll check when I’m dur.

I have been in a similar dilemma trying to figure out if I want to na, turbo, leave stock, or sell my LQ9 AWD 05 Escalade.

Do you have E85 near you? My original plan was to build a ultra-high compression 6.0 that would be purpose built to run on E85 only. I have heard thermodynamically there isn't much benefit after about 13:1. I have been trying to do some cam simulations in DynoSim too but I can't find the stock port taper angles and true stock cam seat to seat timing (although with DynoSim you can estimate it).

I get these same unmotivating feelings that why bother even trying with how heavy these things are, especially when some kid can "supposedly" go out and by a Tesla for 30k and be twice as fast as you. The GMT800s have always surprised me with how light they are, but compared to the trucks and single cabs we have a big disadvantage.

What maximum cam lift you think you would run? Let me know and I can plug it into DynoSim and let it spit out some cam timing numbers. Also let me know what rpm range you are shooting for, like 2000-6000 rpms, I can optimize it for area under the curve instead of just peaks.

I can tell you from my experience tuning a few little things. Totally different engine/ platform but same concept; Honda crv’s, 2.0l 4 cylinder engine, they are about 2900-3300lb suvs, I’ve tuned them with two main engine combinations, one is a high compression 2.0l with a dohc vtec head, generally speaking due to the weight of the vehicle they overall just feel like turds with a higher comp b20v in them. They can make around 200-220whp and about 140ftlbs, for naturally aspirated engines to make more power there’s two general ways to make that happen, either increase torque output overall or carry torque further in the rpm range. to increase torque output overall the best methods are larger engine, more efficient parts that work well together and sometimes compression ratio which the Escalade has a pretty good start at. For carrying torque further in the rev range you have camshaft/heads/portwork are the big main three, although with only one cam profile as well as a single intake runner manifold when you change these to optimize carrying torque further out in the rev range you almost always sacrifice power down low.

The other option would be turboing the stock engine, it ends up being a lower revving but very torque happy setup, generally you can make around 300whp reliably and somewhere between 260-280 torque at the tire. For a heavy pig of a vehicle I think that forced induction is definitely optimal for overall performance as well as fuel economy if the cam is kept stock or mild. I’m just doing kind of a basic bitch build on my tahoe because for one, I’m pretty happy with it as is. It runs great, is comfy and fuel economy is pretty ridiculous for what it is as a vehicle. And for two I have my c6 if I need more speed. I also get to live vicariously through my customers cars on a regular basis which some of them are as gnarly as 3-5lbs per hp.

the other problem with the Escalade is the big limiting factor is gonna be that 4l65e handling the power you can make with forced induction along with the weight of the vehicle. I wanted to do a budget single turbo setup on my 04 escalade but never did for lack of 4l80 transmissions in my hands. My tahoe has pretty tall gears so if I ever did wanna go the turbo route I would just throw a turbo 400 in it and a decent stall converter and just live with 2400 rpms at 65 on the freeway.

Does anyone have the port areas for the stock 4.8/5.3/6.0 truck intake manifold? I found a old LS1 article where the engineer mentioned the port taper which I calculated about a 1.5 degree taper angle, but not sure if that's in the heads or the intake runner or both? Also not sure if its the same between a LS1 and the truck engines. Also if anyone knows the stock exhaust manifold sizes too I could use those.

I may just have to take my intake off and measure it, not sure if its worth it to try to pull the exhaust manifolds given how rusted everything is, I can't even get the flange nuts off the studs.

I have a stock intake manifold and stock exhaust manifolds I can measure when I get some free time.

put some eBay 1”7/8 headers and a y pipe on the Tahoe today and retuned it this evening. Needed somewhere around 8-10% more fuel at wide open and it was able to take 4 more degrees of timing over the stock exhaust manifolds without any knock count. Also it sounds way better. I should have taken a video of it with the stock manifolds and cats to compare to it but I spaced it. Next thing I’m gonna try is the 615-183x manifold I got for it. I need to figure out how to mount the map sensor on it and Shave it first. If it doesn’t make any more power I’ll take it off and throw it on my shelf or post it for sale but I got it for cheap on a eBay auction so it’s worth the shot for the learning experience.

What is the total advance you're now running? I've been sneaking up little by little and now at 27* total. I'm sure I can get a degree or two more but I'll get a random KR at a steady cruise rpm/tps. I'm sure it's false knock cause it's not the typical stair step you usually see on the scanners "time/graph" layout. Plus I've used Boostane for higher octane and see no difference. I guess I need to lower the sensors sensitivity then add another degree or two.

That manifold is the doorman OE replacement for the TBSS/NNBS truck intake correct?

I used the dynomation iterator to try to back calculate the intake dimensions assuming GM tuned the intake to peak at the peak torque at 4000 rpms. I put everything else to stock LQ9 6.0 specs. It gave a surprising result at 525 ft-lbs at just under 4000 rpms. This is stock heads, stock cam, stock compression, just optimized intake dimensions. You can also see how HP drops off very early as well.
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I am hoping to get all the correct dimensions so I can create a setup that will bring the most out of stock or nearly stock/ported components. For example, if I put 706 5.3 heads on my LQ9 and thinner gaskets to try to bump the compression and optimize it for E85. This way I can just optimize the setup with the cam specs and not have to spend so much money.

24-26 at full throttle. Be careful with cruising knock count, it is a real thing and it could totally not be the knock sensors reading wrong. I’m tuning Honda’s I’ve seen too much low load timing kill rod bearings.

It's like a random KR blip then gone. It never happens with TPS changes or transmission shifts nor any wot events. I've boosted the octane to 103+ and killed the spark to 5* and it still shows up. In the retard histogram I'll see at the most 0.6 of timing pulled during a KR event. I set the knock sensitivity tables back to factory settings when I did the heads that upped static to 11.4 out of an abundance for safety.

Gotcha, sounds like some sort of electrical interference then possibly unless you set your knock tables to be super sensitive.

Got some new headlights for the Tahoe yesterday. They had one broken tab where the adjuster attaches but it was easily fixed with some Jb weld and feels stronger then it did before. I was reading reviews on these headlights and people were saying that’s a common problem. The seller said they would give me a partial refund. Also got my hd grill in the mail yesterday. Can’t decide on what to have painted on it or if I should leave it unpainted. Might have to fit it to see what looks best first. Also started shaving the z71 sideskirts I picked up. Already painted the front and rear caps with sem trim black and they came out looking awesome. I’m cutting filler pieces to fit from a spare z71 skirt I got at the junk yard then Jb welding them in place and using a little filler once they are cured to smooth them out then they will be painted with sem trim black as well.
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Waiting for a link to those gorgeous headlights my round eyed brethren! Looking super clean!

I like those style of headlights too. First saw them a few months back when FreddyLSX installed a set with matching corners on his Silverado. His have the extra LED that makes a "U" shape instead of an "L". I have a set in my wish list for my GMC.

Shows the lights on at the 3:10 mark in the video.