Slow Roller

[Orpedcrow]

That color and the back window are really slick. I like the way that looks better than the Toyota tundra power window some guys have done.

 

[someotherguy]

It's no surprise there are poor quality spring tools out there these days. 20 years ago NAPA carried a good one in their Balkamp brand (#7703818, no idea if it's still a good quality tool today but it's gone up in price by more than $10); I still have mine, used many times and no signs of wear at all. Nice to know that today, Dorman makes something that is actually useful.

LMC is a whole 'nother story and I'm sorry you had to learn the hard way. I do hope that window beltline trim holds up for you but I'll bet you'll discover soon that it will begin rolling up with the window. The good news is that quality beltline trim IS available; I got mine from Rubber The Right Way (after several shipping f-ups I did get an undamaged pair) and someone else noticed you can order it from Summit and it appears to be the exact same parts, slightly cheaper. https://www.summitracing.com/parts/pqp-wfp111288

That slider looks good - looks like they solved the problem of it being just big enough to crawl through, by making the slider portion just a bit smaller. I like the OEM apperarance of the fit to the cab, too.

Richard

 

[Scooterwrench]

It's no surprise there are poor quality spring tools out there these days. 20 years ago NAPA carried a good one in their Balkamp brand (#7703818, no idea if it's still a good quality tool today but it's gone up in price by more than $10); I still have mine, used many times and no signs of wear at all. Nice to know that today, Dorman makes something that is actually useful.



Richard

I wonder if one of those scissor type valve spring compressors could be used to compress door detent springs? I think I still have one of those in one of my tool boxes.

 

[nineno]

Thanks for the heads up on that spring tool. I'm going to have to replace the rollers in my door detents in the near future,they pop like double tapping a .22 short.

Sure thing! The spring install was waaay harder than I thought it would be. Installing the 2" drop springs on the front suspension was less difficult and only seems slightly more dangerous. (Compressing springs of any significance for R&R is one of my least favorite activities...in case that wasn't obvious.)

I wonder if one of those scissor type valve spring compressors could be used to compress door detent springs?

In my heavily biased opinion, I would say that it's worth a shot since you have one already. I will say, the amount of room you have to work in is deceptively small. The spring is buried in the door jamb. We all know this, but it's not until you actually try to mess with the spring that it becomes really apparent!

I forgot to mention this: Make sure you have the proper size 'ratcheting wrench' or 'gear wrench' (pic below) available if you're using the conventional spring compressor.

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Good luck, and keep us posted!

That color and the back window are really slick. I like the way that looks better than the Toyota tundra power window some guys have done.

Thank you, kindly. I think the color worked out well, and I also think the black bits (door handles, cowl trim, weather strip, etc) contrast nicely.

I do have rear power window envy! I considered the Nissan Titan rear power window setup. In the end, the cost of acquiring the window piece-parts, seals/weather strip, and (ideally) the Titan sheet metal around the window to make the install as clean as possibly was going to be expensive. Beyond that, I'd have to fumble my way through the installation (specifically the body work) or pay someone scads of money to do it right.

You mentioned a Toyota Tundra rear window mod. Not sure I've seen that one. Have a handy link on the forum, etc?

The modern power window mod is pretty sweet.

It's no surprise there are poor quality spring tools out there these days. 20 years ago NAPA carried a good one...

Napa has become a bit of a mystery to me. Even 10 years ago I generally accepted that their parts were solid. Sure, they sourced them all over creation and put them in their own packaging, but they seemed to do a pretty good job of vetting the parts they sold under their brand.

Within the past 10 years, in my experience, their products have been hit or miss. Sometimes the price is outlandish; sometimes the price is fine but the quality is suspect; sometimes the price is good and the quality is, too.

This problem exists across the board with car parts (and tools, and...), but it seems very weird that it exists within the same retail branded products. (Napa's proliferation of house-brands is also odd.)

LMC is a whole 'nother story and I'm sorry you had to learn the hard way. I do hope that window beltline trim holds up for you but I'll bet you'll discover soon that it will begin rolling up with the window.

Oh good. I'll look forward to that!
Kidding aside, thanks for the warning.
At least I know exactly how to rebuild the doors, now.

That slider looks good - looks like they solved the problem of it being just big enough to crawl through

Yes, that, and Majestic offset the latch (like others) so you can't just slide a credit card between the sliding pane(s) of glass and unlatch the window.
The original 4-panel slider that was installed (and is still living rent-free in my basement) was hilarious in that regard. It was like someone designed it to be opened from the outside.

 

[someotherguy]

The original 4-panel slider that was installed (and is still living rent-free in my basement) was hilarious in that regard. It was like someone designed it to be opened from the outside.

Years ago my work truck was a '98 3500HD with a 4 panel slider. For whatever reason you couldn't unlock the doors from the outside but we frequently needed to lock the truck while on property (people you've towed don't take kindly to seeing your truck unattended, plus this is Houston and there are petty thieves/vehicle burglars everywhere) - so we'd lock the truck from inside, and when we came back to it, hope that nobody saw us reaching in through the slider to poke the unlock button with a long reach tool.

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BTW that truck was a perfect example of "not my truck" because at 200K it was completely worn out. Everyone that drove it before I got hold of it had beat it to within an inch of its life. I swear it spent more time at the mechanic than being used.

Richard

 

[Erik the Awful]

Napa has become a bit of a mystery to me. Even 10 years ago I generally accepted that their parts were solid. Sure, they sourced them all over creation and put them in their own packaging, but they seemed to do a pretty good job of vetting the parts they sold under their brand.

Within the past 10 years, in my experience, their products have been hit or miss. Sometimes the price is outlandish; sometimes the price is fine but the quality is suspect; sometimes the price is good and the quality is, too.

I worked at NAPA back in '94 before I joined the Air Force. I could see the writing on the wall back then. O'Reillys and Autozone started opening stores locally and underselling NAPA. We had a handful of old guys who knew the parts business forwards and back and got paid a professional wage. Autozone had computers and minimum wage workers hired right off the street. O'Reillys was somewhere in between - they hired from the Vo-Tech (and still do). If you called your local Autozone store your call got transferred to a prison in Kansas where inmates looked up your parts. There was no way NAPA could compete.

Within a year of joining the military, the NAPA distributor I worked for had shrunk significantly, and five years later they got gobbled up by a national chain. They're down from 14 stores to just 6 in the area.

 

[nineno]

Alright friends, time to discuss the real (at least as of today) powertrain.
While the truck was in the paint shop last fall, I realized it was time to get serious about a powertrain. Craigslist to the rescue again.

It took a couple of months for the stars to align, but in the fall 2023 the engine out of a wrecked 1995 Chevy Corvette with 35,002 miles on it was posted. The owner of the Vette was building 1 good car from a few different wrecked C4s. He also had a built 383 that he intended to use in the patchwork Vette. So, the oddball "Gen 2" LT1 motor was a mere annoyance to him.

He originally had the engine posted for around $2000. I went out to look at it and hear it run. Here are a couple of pics from the original posting.

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The engine ran but after about 20 seconds of running there was a mist of water coming from behind the water pump. It was nearly impossibly to see the origin, but my guess was the shaft drive on the water pump.

I thanked the seller for making time to meet with me, but explained that what he needed to get for the engine was more than I could spend for something with at least 1 known problem, and an unknown (at best) history.

A couple of weeks later the seller got back in touch with me and asked what I would pay. I said $500, but I'd need the computer, the accessory drive and the engine harness. His response was...well...not favorable. I tried to be polite, and explained this was pure profit for him; he had the engine he intended to use and I was taking something with a very limited market off his hands. The engine may or may not be functional even if the apparent problem (water leak from the vicinity of the water pump) was addressed.

He insisted that he needed the accessory drive for his 383 and he couldn't extract the engine harness from the chassis electrical system. I explained as best I could via text that the Gen 2 accessories were not at all compatible with an other generation of small block, certainly not his early 1980s 383. I also tried (unsuccessfully) to explain that the powertrain wiring harness and ECU didn't really do anything for the rest of the car.

Eventually - perhaps after a bit of 'research' on his own - he said he'd let the accessory drive go with the engine; he'd give me a PCM and some engine harness scraps from a 1996 F-body for $1000. I passed.

A couple more days went by. He came back to me and said the engine was out. We haggled and eventually agreed on $800. (For those keeping track, yes, over 3 full years after I bought the craigslist truck for $800, I was buying aan $800 craigslist engine for it.)

Here is a quick aside on why I decided to take a chance on the LT1:

On one hand, a conventional (Gen I) replacement small block or a Gen III/IV/V engine swap would, of course, make sense. All of these options are well documented with good aftermarket support. Nobody here needs any further convincing of those facts.

I even thought long and hard about a BluePrint crate motor, but decided I wasn’t willing to spend that sort of cash on an $800 truck.

On the other hand, the Vette LT1 was interesting to me because it was (A) complete, (B) ran, (C) cheap, and (D) had an accessory drive that wouldn’t crash into the bulbous passenger side frame rail the way I believe the more common F-Body or B-Body Gen 2 LT1 accessory drive would. I love carburetors, but functional fuel injection seems like a reasonable side benefit, as well.

Taking my logic a bit further: I do have some familiarity with the "Gen 2" engine. I drove a mid-90s Chevy Caprice for several years with the Gen 2 L99 4.3L V8. While wildly underpowered in that land yacht, the engine was bulletproof and I was more than comfortable doing routine maintenance on it. The Opti-Spark (technically, Opti-Spark 2 since it was the ventilated version) never ever caused a single problem on my Caprice despite almost exclusively living in Wisconsin and Michigan, and being driven through upper midwestern winters. That’s part of the reason I was willing to give this engine a shot. I may hate my decision later, but that’s a future problem.

An added side benefit (and potentially 'curse') to the Gen2 LT1 is that it's still a bit unique. Taking this forum as an example, there are a small handful of posts about LT1 swaps. (You can, of course, draw the conclusion that this is because it's a bad idea.)

Picking the engine up with a rental pickup was a bit of a fiasco, but eventually we got the engine loaded and drove home.
There were a couple of surprises while picking the engine up, but nothing that really mattered. The seller insisted on keeping the flexplate and starter for his 383. I told him that I didn't need the flex plate because I was probably going to run a manual transmission. The seller did give me an enroumous direct drive (10MT) starter as a peace offering for the last minute surprises.

The starter was a bit of an annoyance, but in the moment I rationalized that starters are, frankly, pretty inexpensive. (Spoiler alert: Not getting the Vette started turned out to be utterly irrelevant.)

The same evening that I got the engine home, I pulled the passenger side valve cover (the driver side was obstructed by the accessory drive bracket) expecting the worse. To my shock, the top side of the passenger cylinder head was immaculate. Below is a pic from that night immediately after the cover was removed - no cleaning, wiping, etc. The black 'bits' that are most apparent along the bottom edge of the rocker box wiped away with clean shop towel.

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For the past few months (yes, you read that correctly – Slow Roller, indeed!) I’ve been inspecting, cleaning up and prepping the engine for its future. I stripped the engine down to the lifter galley. The galley and the top of the driver side cylinder heads were both just as clean as the top of the passenger cylinder head, shown above. The same black bits were present in roughly the same concentration. They all wiped up without any effort.

I drained the oil, which was dark, but not chunky, gooey, other otherwise obviously indicative of a trashed motor. I pulled the oil pan and everything looked great looking up from the bottom. Wiping whatever I could get my hands on with white paper towel yielded an oily, but not dirty, towel.

I applied a fresh coat of oil to the rotating/translating pieces on the bottom end and called it good.

I omitted a few unnecessary vacuum lines and plugged the resulting holes with low-profile/hex drive black anodized aluminum pipe plugs (McMaster-Carr p/n 3867T364). I took the coolant/vapor line off of the throttlebody housing and will plumb that into the 'normal' cooling circuit without heating my intake air. I also deep-cleaned the throttlebody while it was off.

The oil level sensor was removed from the oil pan and I found another aluminum plug on McMaster-Carr that filled that hole. If anyone needs to remove the goofy mid-90s GM oil level sensor and plug the resulting hole, McMaster-Carr part number 7919N127 works great! (Pic below.)

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Along the way I’ve replaced all of the gaskets and most of the sensors that I’ve touched in the process. (If you're wondering about the crappy looking knock sensor in the picture above, well, I haven't gotten there, yet.) I replaced the seal on the MAP sensor, but the sensor itself tested perfectly. Since that one appeared to be in perfect working order - and because it costs a bit more than the el cheapo temperature sensors - I decided not to replace it.

After reassembling the intake manifold and oil pan to the engine, and with the sump filled with fresh oil, I hand-cranked the engine until clean oil came out of the oil pressure sensor location (trailing edge of the engine). Confident that oil was moving, I plugged the oil pressure port with an 1/8 NPT plug and cranked the motor over with the starter with the plugs out. (I did not install the oil pressure sensor because they are notorious for getting broken off during engine removal/installation. No thanks.) The motor rolled over very nicely. If fact, with the plugs out I realized I could turn the motor over by hand using the flywheel for leverage.

On the topic of engine flywheels, I learned a lot more about small block rear main seals, 153-tooth versus 168-tooth flywheels, and the various starters required for each configuration. I'll share some of what I learned in a future installment.

To wrap this post up, here's a picture of the engine with it's new 168t flywheel and some EGR block-off plates installed. No, I didn't buy a fancy billet `wheel. There isn't enough power or a high enough redline to justify that.

Clearly, we're headed for a manual transmission, so I'll get into those details after I cover off some other the other engine clean-up details.

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As always, thanks for following along and all the feedback along the way.

 

[Supercharged111]

Sounds like you're keeping the opti? 95 is at least vented, 1 year only timing cover. You can 24x it with a 411 or do like I plan and run a 96-97 timing cover, 4x reluctor, and matching crank pulley hub. Gotta get the crank key from the general too. I'll run it without a cam sensor and it'll be in batch fire mode. Opti will exist only as a distributor and cease to be problematic. My last AC Delco opti lasted 9 years but they're not making them anymore. I'm running my spare AC Delco opti now and will be caught with my pants down if this one takes a crap. The engines themselves are pretty bulletproof, my rotating assembly went together in 2015 and it was all used stock stuff that lives in a road race car.

 

[nineno]

...we'd lock the truck from inside, and when we came back to it, hope that nobody saw us reaching in through the slider to poke the unlock button with a long reach tool.

Well, that's one form of keyless entry, I supposed.

Everyone that drove it before I got hold of it had beat it to within an inch of its life. I swear it spent more time at the mechanic than being used.

No shock. We're all guilty of it to some extent. Does anyone drive a rental car the same way they drive their own car? Probably not.
I dated a woman that bought a 1 year old ex-rental car. I didn't know that when she bought it, but she casually mentioned in a few months later when it needed some minor work, covered under warranty. I was convinced that car was going to be a maintenance nightmare. Happily, it seemed to be running along just fine the last I knew.

I worked at NAPA back in '94 before I joined the Air Force. I could see the writing on the wall back then...

Yeah, it's crazy to think how much the retail landscape has changed in 30 years.

Rock Auto sells the same parts as the local brick-and-mortar retailers for approximately half the price and has 2x the selection. For anyone capable of doing a little digging, and that has the time to wait for the package to arrive, it's an amazingly cost effective way to buy service parts.

For performance parts, Summits service has always been good. The fast and usually-free shipping is top flight. The search functionality on their site (and some of the stuff they sell) is questionably. Both of these appear to be due to the extreme over-abundance of choices. 25 years ago they didn't try to sell parts for nearly as wide an array of vehicles. Now they're offering straight-up service parts, like Rock Auto. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

I hate to see the brick-and-mortars disappear, but the service is fundamentally awful most of the time, the prices are high, and the selection is low. The best and most common reason for me to enter the Advance Auto in my neighborhood is because they provide a convenient place to recycle used oil.
The last part(s) I bought there were a multi-pack of rubber caps to cover an un-needed vacuum port on the LT1 mentioned above. The same exact package (by part number) was 20% cheaper on Amazon and 40% cheaper on Rock. Now, to be fair, we're talking about $7 locally, $5.50 on Amazon, and $4-something on Rock. In that case, I was willing to pay the premium, but when it's 5x the cost, I'm generally taking the lower cost option or better product selection.

 

[nineno]

Sounds like you're keeping the opti? 95 is at least vented, 1 year only timing cover. You can 24x it with a 411 or do like I plan and run a 96-97 timing cover, 4x reluctor, and matching crank pulley hub. Gotta get the crank key from the general too. I'll run it without a cam sensor and it'll be in batch fire mode. Opti will exist only as a distributor and cease to be problematic. My last AC Delco opti lasted 9 years but they're not making them anymore. I'm running my spare AC Delco opti now and will be caught with my pants down if this one takes a crap. The engines themselves are pretty bulletproof, my rotating assembly went together in 2015 and it was all used stock stuff that lives in a road race car.

Yes, keeping the stock Opti...for now.
I know that it might come back to haunt me, but I factored that into my decision making as best I could.

The timing covers are a mess, for sure. The cover that I have (the "big hole" in front of the cam for the Opti drive, but without crank position sensor) was used in 1994 & 1995 on the Vettes. I don't know about F- and B-bodies. Still, not a common part. EFI Connection offers a package with a billet chain cover with the crank sensor provisions, so as long as they're offering that, I've got an easy (if sort-of expensive) path forward.

I'll begin documenting my options for a future-state when the Opti craps the bed. So far, I have at least a casual familiarity with the EFI Connection 24x system as well as the Lingenfelter / Bailey LTCC (product page / instruction manual).

Do you happen to have a list of handy links that outline any of the option viable options?

Glad to meet a fellow Gen 2 owner!