This past week was a busy one for me.
I had ordered a new exhaust system and new mufflers sometime in April, and a Summit Racing Stage III NA cam 231/242 .600/.600 lift 113+3 LSA. I also bought some new valve springs and pushrods.
So on Monday night I decided to install the valve springs.
Pretty straight forward thanks to a friend letting me borrow his trick flow valve spring compressor.
Then on Tuesday, a friend stopped over and helped me with the camshaft install.
During disassembly we had found a peculiar self clearancing situation between the single bolt LS3 cam and the factory LQ4 front cover.
Nothing major, and that cam was coming out anyways. We installed the new cam and fired it up no problem... well except for the exhaust.
You see, when I had swapped the car I pretty much ran out of money and had to cobble the horrible 2.25 inch exhaust that was on the car originally. my friend cobbled the new engine to the old exhaust, creating “the worlds jankiest exhaust” as seen here:
That’s a 3 inch header collector, to a 2.5 inch reducer, booger welded to 2.25 inch pipe.
So with the new exhaust kit we got to work.
The finished product came out awesome, if a little loud...
Then it was time to drive the car, and tune it on the dyno.
You see when it comes to dyno pulls, you can let the car cool down, ice the intake to “cheat” and get the highest number possible (see: Hot Rod Magazine) or you can run the car in the dyno cell hot and see what it will run in real world conditions. That’s exactly what we did.
412 horsepower and 408 ft/lbs at the rear wheels on a Dynapack dyno with a full exhaust with 185 degree coolant. I’m not going to speculate at crank numbers, but this motor is happy and healthy. Considering I have less than $2000 in the whole motor/intake/exhaust, I am extremely happy too.