'95 K2500 on the wrong side of the pond...

Seems only sensible that I make some sort of build thread. There's not that many of these trucks over in the UK and even less owned by a girl. I do most stuff myself. I also build motors and transmissions for other people... so yeah. I'm kinda most guys worst nightmares

I picked it up around a month ago, in pretty tidy condition considering its age. It was the cheapest one I could find and it does have a few issues that I'll be working my way through fixing.

It's a TBI 350, slow as hell. I bought it for towing my 2nd Gen Camaro to the strip on weekends. I race that with Outlaw Street in the UK...

First thing I did was give it a good service and changed most of the fluids, the only one left is the front and rear axles, I just need to get some oil for those.





Given that it was so slow I gave the throttle body a service, turns out it didn't fix the problem, but hey it's clean, and I did some quick modifications to it as well.






The sound system left a lot to be desired, so I fitted a Pioneer head unit, Kenwood KAC-M1804 amp and some Focal front speakers. It now sounds much better but I think it would benefit from an upgrade to the rear speakers too. I'm just saving up, and getting the courage to swap them.



The transmission started slipping on the 2-3 shift at more than about 30% throttle, so I got some parts to do the rebuild on it. I've done a lot of 4L60/700r4 transmissions now... some minor upgrades while it's out to HEG frictions, a better band, steel apply pistons and a HD2 shift kit. However I'll probably save these parts for my new transmission....




The motor smokes a little bit when you lift off the throttle, did a compression check and all cylinders were at 170-175psi warm. So I'm sure the bottom end is good. I expect it's just the valve stem seals. So with that in mind I priced up doing a top end rebuild and then some upgrades on the motor. Right at that point someone had a 5.3 LM7 and 4L60E for sale, so I bought that....

Plans are to stick a mild cam and valve springs in it, rebuild the 4L60E with the parts I've already bought as I need to convert it to 4wd anyway, and then drop it in. I'm now in the process of gathering parts and information to do the swap. Looks pretty simple right now....

I now have the motor, trans and harness back at my workshop. Pulled the heads off the motor, very minor bit of water damage in one of the bores. I think it will hone out so just a new set of rings needed. While it's apart I'll replace the main and rod bearings too, seems silly not to really.

Other than that it looks to be a good clean example of a 2002 5.3....

The AC pump is siezed solid, and I don't have a mount for the alternator, although I do have the alternator itself! The PCM is the wrong one, has 4 smaller connectors rather than 2 large ones. Hopefully I can sell the one I have and pick up the correct one easily enough.

I started to re-pin the harness as well based on the info from the LT1 swap site which is excellent. Still a lot to do, but it's set to rain for a couple of days, so I might get that finished....

More progress on the harness this afternoon. All of the extra wires have been traced and removed. All that's left to do is put in the wires for TPS and IAC as I converted from DBW to cable throttle. Then I need to fit a fuse and relay box and wrap it all up again.

The connectors for the transmission range switch are damaged, but I should be able to replace them easily enough.

A pretty straightforward job, just needed a bit of patience. I just worked on one circuit at a time and labelled cables as I went, as there are a lot which are the same color....

It's been raining here again - the UK weather sucks!



I've more or less finished the harness off, I just need to finally wrap it up and check the layout of all the connections. I should be able to do that tomorrow.

I then spent an hour working on the motor, starting to strip it down for inspection and rebuild. I know it's had water in it, so I'm going to tear it down completely.

Removing the fan and clutch wasn't easy. I ended up making a holding tool from some flat stock that I bolted to the holes in the front of the water pump pulley, then used my largest adjustable wrench and a large hammer to undo it.

Removed the intake. Need to swap the throttle body for a cable one if I can find one.

The EVAP/purge solenoid is broken, but I won't be using it anyway.

I stripped the rest of the motor down tonight, just the crank and cam to remove now, but the hardest part is done. Getting the crank pulley off. The bolt is done up FT... and the pulley is a press fit on the crank snout at well. Hard to get a puller on it unless you have the special tools, which are hard to find in the UK.

But a lump of wood to jam the crank while cracking the bolt free and a lightly modified puller made getting it off reasonably easy....

I'll get the crank and cam out over the weekend and the block cleaned, measured and checked before honing the cylinders and getting it ready for rebuild.