Riggs - My 2000 Chevy 3500 4x4 CCLB work truck and family play machine

Supercharged111 said:

Weird, mine has never gotten hot enough for that and I tow a lot heavier than you do. I've been stuck foot to the floor in 2nd gear about 50-55mph for a good 15 minutes. The fan did its thing but the temp gauge never went past 210. Do you have the thick radiator? If not, get one for a dually.

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Radiator is a reasonably new aftermarket unit of some sort, it's probably 3" thick. doesn't look dirty or blocked. It wasn't hot out either, maybe 75-80.
Now I'm wondering if the cats are kinda bad and that caused some sort of heat issue? I want to get rid of them anyways also. They've been replaced at some point in the past, likely with something cheap...

How about an update?

Old pics, but here's from replacing the front brake pads at the end of summer. I didn't replace the rotors, just threw a set of pads on "for now" until I can figure out what to do for a front brake solution, maybe some form of GMT800 swap... but that costs $ and things are tight. So for now, good enough....





Front balljoints are shot, no surprise there, add it to the list... nope, they were already on the list!

On to current timeline-

Got the 0411 swap going.
The wiring isn't bad, it took me 4 hours, including unpinning the OE 0411 connectors that I just hacked off at the junkyard, and splicing one pair of wires the Lextech sheet called for. Not to brag, but I didn't make any mistakes in the my pinout, pretty happy there. Go slow, take your time, triple check each one and obviously go one at a time!




Little knot here, Russ.. the dangly black wire there is to ground out when doing the crank relearn...


We'll get to my 0411 tuning experience shortly, but let's say while doing the crank relearn - which involves bouncing off the rev limiter - I had an excess of steam coming from under the hood. Hmm what's up with that?



Well there's your problem... oh well wanted to replace the water pump *at some point* anyways.


I'd never seen a water pump crack like that before, but my buddy told me a story of doing a burnout in his '91 camaro, and when the wheel smoke didn't stop he discovered the same thing happened.... back in the day of course, we would never behave that way now, lol....

The belt and/or idler/tensioner had started squeaking, and it was on my list to replace anyways, plus delete the AIR pump - I'm still scarred from when the vacuum pump in my old suburban seized one night and could have left me stranded, so those kind of accessories do not agree with me.

So got the new water pump and tossed out the AIR pump. Not a simple swap as I thought, the AIR pump has a specific style tensioner, and the non-AIR pump style, which is much more common, will not work. Ebay has OE takeoff brackets that would allow for the standard tensioner, but the idiots running those stores want way to much for a 20 year old rusty piece of steel. So after some trial and error I figured out a solution.

Ordered the AIR style tensioner from Rock Auto - there is only one - and found this Gates belt fits. It's listed as for a few applications for a Top Kick 8.1 truck, but just plug in this number to google and you'll find it. Gates K061000
It's tight getting it on but works perfect. I did have to space out the idler for some reason to get it to line up... 2 washers under each bolt. I dunno...



Cleaned up my wiring a bit while I was back and forth to parts stores/google finding the exact right belt. Still want to loom it again but here it is for now.


FWIW I like that cloth wiring wrap, its kind of self sticky, rather than velcro, and doesn't make you hate life like electrical tape will, if you ever need to remove it. Food for thought.

Well with the new water pump and serpentine belt scavenger hunt out of the way, which coupled with the holiday set me back a week, I could finally get back with what I started out to work on, the 0411 swap and tune.

There was a little bit sorting things out I had to do on the initial tune, as detailed here but with some good help from the crew here I am up and running. I'll spare the blow by blow here but there is a bit of good info in that thread if you are going down this road. I have a couple more tweaks I'd like to do to get my tune where I consider it a good "1.0" base to start the actual tuning work, but I'll upload to HPTuners and share a link as I go.

Next up I'll be following this guide to get things really dialed in. Also finally ordering a wideband O2 (I'll need for my project Supra in the future as well, so good to have anyways).

Other big thing on the to-do here, now that I've been doing some driving at night (took the truck hunting a few times) is the headlights need attention BAD. They are almost unusable at night, and the high beams are worse. Rather than screw with the composites, which I've never liked, I'm going to start the hunt for a W/T front end, start checking the yards for trucks. I prefer the 5x7s anyways and it's the look I've decided I want for the front of the truck moving forward.

OK and now we are current!

Reluctanse said:

I'd never seen a water pump crack like that before, but my buddy told me a story of doing a burnout in his '91 camaro, and when the wheel smoke didn't stop he discovered the same thing happened.... back in the day of course, we would never behave that way now, lol....

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Mm hmm.

Supercharged111 said:

Weird, mine has never gotten hot enough for that and I tow a lot heavier than you do. I've been stuck foot to the floor in 2nd gear about 50-55mph for a good 15 minutes. The fan did its thing but the temp gauge never went past 210. Do you have the thick radiator? If not, get one for a dually.

Click to expand...

Been thinking about this... I almost wonder if it's caused by misfire - I don't know the spark plug status, which means they are old, plus there's the alleged issue with the 454's misfiring on the stock .060 plug gap.... I have heard misfires can cause a rich condition which the computer can over-compensate for and lead to a lean condition, which might cause something like this? Just a thought I had.... have a new set of .040 gap plugs and wires to go in but I didn't get to it due to my shenanigans. But that's next up probably even before I get deep into any kind of WOT tuning of this pig.

Reluctanse said:

Been thinking about this... I almost wonder if it's caused by misfire - I don't know the spark plug status, which means they are old, plus there's the alleged issue with the 454's misfiring on the stock .060 plug gap.... I have heard misfires can cause a rich condition which the computer can over-compensate for and lead to a lean condition, which might cause something like this? Just a thought I had.... have a new set of .040 gap plugs and wires to go in but I didn't get to it due to my shenanigans. But that's next up probably even before I get deep into any kind of WOT tuning of this pig.

Click to expand...

Do you recall the exact order it all went down? Something happened, then misfire, then hot? Or maybe it got hot enough to cause a misfire and it snowballed from there?

Supercharged111 said:

Do you recall the exact order it all went down? Something happened, then misfire, then hot? Or maybe it got hot enough to cause a misfire and it snowballed from there?

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under load pulling a trailer up a pass, about 4500lbs. got the misfire code, went into some sort of limp mode, then the temp crept up.

Got around to doing plugs/wires today. A couple of them fought me but overall wasn't terrible job. Did take me about 3.5 hours..
So my misfire hypothesis is likely correct.... look what I pulled out.... its probably almost 1/8" of gap...




they all looked that way. I'm surprised it ran as well as it was. Anyone know if there's a chance these are the OE installed plugs?



Also found I have 3 broken exhaust studs. You can hear the slight exhaust leaks ticking especially at idle. Future me's problem, likely when I ever get around to doing headers.


Found this ground was unhooked, so stuck that on a bolt on the firewall..


And possibly the culprit of my spiking temp gauge... wire was melted into the AIR crossover tube. Re-spliced that in, gauge doesn't peg randomly now, although still isn't what I would call accurate...


With all that, I did get a little progress done tuning. Was able to log a couple runs and get the VE table pretty dialed in. So I'll call that step 2 complete there. I think next I need to log a couple good drives and check for knock retard.