92 Scottsdale Rebuild

I have posted a bit about my truck before, basically my dad bought it in August of 1991. He drove it a lot, all over to go camping/fishing. For a few years he drove it as his work truck and then at some point he just parked in the driveway because he couldn't drive it anymore. I flew out to California, did a tune up and drove it home to Texas.

Since then I have replaced the dash, seats, wheels & tires (not a fan of the current ones but don't want anything flashy), swapped in an LS, gauges, replaced the column shift steering column with the correct floor shift model, new shifter.

My plan is to make it look as clean as possible.
New exhaust, my buddy and I put in a 3" exhaust from a summit kit. It's awful, so loud and it drones terribly from 1400-2000 rpms. The exhaust was cat back so we had to make our own crossover setup. It also has a leak which we can weld.
So new paint, clean up/replace molding and trim.
Reupholster the seats, new carpet, sound dead, headliner, paint the dash and mismatched panels, sub & amp (just to make it sound nice nothing crazy).


Sometime in late 1991:

As it sat in the driveway 2015:

My son the night I got back from driving it from California:

Couple of pictures from today, paint looks a lot better in these pictures than it actually does.

Some of the engine rebuilding and such. I thought I had more but I guess not.

Install day

And then I didn't like the way the engine looked and getting someone to to tune the GM ECU was becoming a nightmare. Two supposed tuners that were recommended came to my buddies shop and neither one of them could make it correct.

I am sure there was a better way to solve it but basically I have a manual transmission and the truck ECU for Gen IV engines does not support this so what I read from the HPTuners forum was to get a corvette ECU and have it retuned to match the truck. This went badly and the engine would run super rich, the MAF sensor was never calibrated correctly.

So I switched to an Edelbrock Pro4+. Setup has been nice and I need to drive it more so it can self learn. First though is that exhaust leak and or new exhaust.

This is what the engine bay currently looks like. I know the truck intake is probably better but it looks awful. The FiTech intake is supposed to produce power at lower RPMs than other tunnel rams. Does it? I don't know. It starts pulling really hard around 3k. But I haven't driven it enough to get the tune working properly anyways.

It has:
Brain Tooley Racing Truck Norris cam
Holley Mid Mount LS accessory kit
FiTech intake and 35lb injectors
MSD Blaster coils (some say they are awful)
Ceramic boot plug wires

I also need to make the AC hoses. I replaced everything in the AC and left the plugs on the compressor and the lines that are not connected.

I'm getting ready to make the same swap myself, into an '89 Cheyenne. I noticed in one of your pic's that you've removed your truck's ecm harness. Have you removed the entire original ecm and wiring, and are using your LS harness exclusively? I would think, really, that that's all you really need for the power train. I like how you've incorporated the oil catch can. A very clean swap

Yes I removed the ECM wiring and used the wiring service books to rebuild what I needed. Most of what you need is on the driver's side firewall connector, but there are some that go through the passenger side. I put the ECU for the Edelbrock system in the passenger kick panel so those wires along with a few others go through that.

The oddest part of the wiring I found was how one of the 5 wiper motor wires goes through the passenger side, other 4 are on the driver side.

You can see in these photos before I wrapped all the wiring. This is the 2nd go round on the wiring I was hoping to be done but I might have to pull it out as my brake warning light stays on. Hopefully it's just the parking brake switch.

Thanks for the response. Previously I've swapped a 5.3 into my '80 C10, and it wasn't nearly as confusing as my '89 Cheyenne appears in the wiring. But just knowing that I can safely pull out the current ecm/wiring will be a plus. I've got the Chevy truck factory wiring manual which will help in finding what's needed or not. Looking at your pic's is also a big help. Concerning your exhaust, I had built a y-pipe (2 1/2" in, 3" out) with a single stock-type muffler (Walker Quiet Flow) and it was also kinda loud and raspy but it didn't drone

What I had to run from the passenger side:
1. Ignition power and VSS
2. AC Power and request
3. Tach
4. Grey wire for windshield wipers (this is for delay or low)

I used the factory wires on the driver's side to hook up all my gauges to the new sending units (using mechanical autometer gauges so they aren't coming from the computer). I might end up going to the junkyard and securing another driver's side harness and rework that based on what I know now. Mostly being don't cut anything on that side.

I also don't use the DRAC my speedometer comes directly off the VSS.