gstubbz's trucks

[GarrettGmc]

Poor moose mirrors, picked myself up another ram finally so now really none of my other rigs have been touched either. Ha with all ur projects you'll be the type to have a shop 2-3 times bigger then a house, then agian u might just end up with a shop an a loft for the bedroom .

 

[gstubbz]

Story time!

Durango is all done and the plan was to have the owner drive up in the Suburban and exchange it with the Durango. Also, never working on another one again one was miserable enough!

So he makes it 7.5 miles away from my house and the Suburban dies and won't run. So I came down in the Duramax with another battery and jumper cables, and we were fighting it to make it run and it really did not want to run at all. Ground wire was getting hot and it was just all bad. Also when switching the batteries we broke one of the top post pieces that go over a stud, and luckily the guy who lived right next to where it broke down happened to have one and helped us get it going.

So the suburban broke at the base of this steep hill, and after we were able to barely get it going it died halfway up the hill, so I had to jump it again so he would at least have power steering and then I flat towed it probably 2 miles until the blue smoke cleared up and then he was able to drive it the rest of the way to my house.

Here it is, it seems decently clean although not perfect. I'll probably start ripping into it here soon I don't want it long term or forever.

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Also some other news. For quite some time there is this 2 door blazer that is on an old back road out here that I've wanted for a while that I have a photo I took back in summer, and talking to this guy today who helped us actually brought that thing up because we were talking about gmt400s (this guy is a huge fan himself, has a early 90s RCLB 4.3/5spd truck and a 90s topkick with a 427) and he said that he was going to go drag this 2 door out of a field in a few months when the weather was better. He wanted the bumpers and then was going to scrap it. So I got his phone number (Eric) and when April hits I'll see about pulling this blazer out and getting the shell (as it's really clean) and he can have the bumper.

Funny how some things turn out due to other odd events!

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[gstubbz]

Poor moose mirrors, picked myself up another ram finally so now really none of my other rigs have been touched either. Ha with all ur projects you'll be the type to have a shop 2-3 times bigger then a house, then agian u might just end up with a shop an a loft for the bedroom .

Another 4th gen cummins or what did you get??

And yes totally on the shop size! I want something massive with radiant flooring and lifts haha

 

[GarrettGmc]

Another 4th gen cummins or what did you get??

And yes totally on the shop size! I want something massive with radiant flooring and lifts haha

Yea and a big ole wood stove to heat it up there in the winter months.
Na skipped the 4th gens and went to a 5th gen

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[1ton-o-fun]

Funny how some things turn out due to other odd events!

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I had a 2-door 4x4 with a stick shift. I don't have sense enough to own a 4x4. I can't pass up a mud puddle to save my life, lol!

 

[gstubbz]

Time for a good ol' GMT400 serious wrenching post. I have not had one of these in a long time!!

My plan was going to start out with a compression test, however since I had such an issue with completing the power circuit the poor ol thing only had enough juice to barely crank and then start and then it would run (barely) so I didn't get very far with that.

So I proceeded to remove all of the spark plugs, and the spark plug from cylinder 2 actually had an anti-fouler which I have never seen used before until now (I knew they existed, just had never seen one in person) but the PO told me he did this and it actually helped a lot to keep it going a while longer.

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Next I spent a good portion of my afternoon just picking away at it stripping it down until I had the cylinder heads off, and along the way I had an exhaust manifold break and I have yet to look into it but I'm hoping it comes out easy, looks like the bolt has been broken for a long time then I finally broke it the rest of the way.

The intake manifold gasket didn't look like it had any bad spots but I knew I wanted to keep digging down because I felt that it was a valve stem seal.

Turns out, it was the intake valve stem seal and in the image above you can barely see it seeping out, and there was actually more oil there but I wiped some away with my finger to see really how much was there.

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Now I'm not really sure if this engine has ever been rebuilt, I'm going to lean towards no and it's the original with 220,*** miles on it and had all the exhaust heat shields and the stupid things that hold the bolts together and you have to use a screw driver to fold a piece of metal over to get the socket over the exhaust manifold bolts. The cylinder walls don't look crazy great and it seems like everything has a fair amount of corrosion.

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So my final determination is that the engine is coming out and I will rebuild it. Honestly if I knew it was going to look that bad in the cylinders I would have just pulled the entire engine out and then tore it down, that would have saved me so much time today rather than trying to pull the cylinder heads off inside the truck.

So now the next question is how crazy I want to go with the quick rebuild. I really would like to go with vortec heads but I can't justify spending the $500 on a proper intake manifold for something I won't be keeping for a while. So at this point I'm thinking just your regular rebuild kit and maybe a rv cam. The first engine I swapped in the army truck had one and I liked the way that truck ran. Always so hard for me to justify what I want to do lol

 

[gstubbz]

Yea and a big ole wood stove to heat it up there in the winter months.
Na skipped the 4th gens and went to a 5th gen

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I like the fact that the updated trucks kept the column shifter for the cummins, really wish they would have kept it with the Hemi as well!

I had a 2-door 4x4 with a stick shift. I don't have sense enough to own a 4x4. I can't pass up a mud puddle to save my life, lol!

That's the combo I'd love to have, just for the fun running around truck where the big truck isn't necessary! I wouldn't put it past me to have some fun too, although the mud in my eyes for the next ten years of working on whatever changed my mind on mudding in anything lol

 

[gstubbz]

Well I missed out on that blazer... by a week! I was able to get the owner's number through an employee and called him the other day to find out that he just sold the entire thing a week prior and someone gave the guy an unbelievable cash offer for it. So axe that idea!

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So I pulled the engine out and started working on it, and I ended up buying an RV cam. Outside of that I didn't buy anything crazy performance wise but I have ordered many new parts such as a distributor, wires, ground strap, lifters, valve springs, head bolts, etc. I spent quite a bit of time cleaning things as I go so it should be presentable when complete! I did pick up a set of vortec heads (2 sets actually) which I'll explain in my next post but I won't be using them on this build.

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Here is how it looks at the moment but I'm waiting on other piston rings to be delivered since the first set I ended up with was wrong then I can resume reassembly and continue cleaning and painting parts.

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I gave my coworker James an option, the 5.3 we pulled out of the 1999 Silverado sitting in my shop was his and we were going to swap it into the Pinecone, but I gave him the option to trade me for this 350 and cash on his end since I am putting so much into it and he decided to trade me so now I have a 5.3 in my shop for a project. The determining factor for this was that we can swap the 350 into his truck in a weekend, whereas the 5.3 swap would be a much more time consuming project.

Now that I have the 5.3 I'm stuck deciding if I go through the effort to swap it into the suburban, as much as I wasn't into the Suburban at first it is growing on me. What I'm indecisive about is that I wouldn't probably keep the Suburban very long and it would be a stopgap until my next project so that is why I'm iffy on doing all the work, or just to keep an eye out for a running 350 TBI to just put back into it.

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Also I had to make another dump run and looked down into the pit to see what was there. I'm shocked that some of the trucks still in the hole have been there for a while, I think that square body two tone has been there for over a year now but always seems like a hot spot for GMT400s!

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[gstubbz]

Two weekends ago I made a trip to Pinehurst Idaho on quick notice because I saw a Craigslist ad for someone parting out a 2003 Avalanche that was in the blue ming color just like my duramax and I had been on a hunt for a driver's door since buying that truck so I told him I was interested in quite a bit of stuff and made arrangements to be there on Saturday morning so I made the 4 hour drive there.

I wanted all four doors, fenders, grille, some interior pieces, and a bunch of other random stuff but since I wanted all 4 doors I needed to come up with some contraption to haul them, so I took two pallets and some scrap floor joists from work to make a system where I had 4 cubbies for each door to stand vertically to avoid being scratched and this idea worked very well actually! The drivers door that I wanted so bad actually has a decent scratch in it but it's better than the existing major dent I have in mine. Another bonus was that this had the same color interior as my truck and I totally forgot to grab the two tweeter pillars, one of mine is broken.

The seller was awesome and I came home with my backseat full of stuff (including the center console for future projects) and a bed full of a lot. I ended up coming home with 2 sets of vortec heads and a 350 vortec block along with many other parts from it. I paid $450 for everything so I felt that was actually really fair for everything I came home with.

He was a big LS swap guy and was in the middle of swapping a 6.0 into a 1981 k20 with a SM465 that was pretty neat, I probably should have taken pictures. He was also big into toyota rock crawler stuff.

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Not sure when I'll get around to swapping the doors but it will be in the future when it's warmer outside and I have some of this engine stuff out of my shop.

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[gstubbz]

Then the most recent thing as of this weekend, totally did not plan on running to grab this but it was way too good of a deal to pass up.

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So I had seen the posting was listed 3 minutes prior and I messaged the guy and I was second in line if his friend didn't want it, and he told me his phone was going crazy over this and he said it was mine so I was on my way and made it to his house at 9pm on Saturday night to grab it. Paid $400 for the engine and trans combo and got some extra stuff with it including some LQ4 iron heads that who knows what I'll do with them. This same seller I have bought a ton of GMT800 stuff from in the past for the white truck (leather seats, rear bumper, interior pieces, etc).

I was told the engine actually ran but not great. They bought a parts truck and just swapped the engine and trans so this was sitting around in his shop.

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I got home fairly late (have a funny side story, to make it short I have been looking for drywaller guys like crazy to no avail here, so I was talking to one potential guy and told him I was on my way to Kalispell so we met at a bar to discuss potential work) but I went to unload it, and it spun freely then I saw coolant come out of a cylinder and also hit a rough spot so that made me take the cylinder heads off immediately.

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I found coolant in some of the cylinders, not sure why maybe it was when I was hauling it home and somehow that happened, I don't know but no biggie no cylinder wall rust so I made sure to clean it out and oil the cylinders but what I found next was funny.

A bolt was wedged in the #1 intake valve and that's why it wasn't running so good. Had burnt leave chunks in the other cylinders too so who knows what happened there. you could see it hit the top of the piston a tiny bit but nothing that would concern me from reusing the piston in the future. I also managed to get the bolt out of the valve too.

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So now I have these two components for a future project, and I'm aiming to get the 91 K1500 ECSB 4.3/5spd truck out of Cali this summer and that is what I have planned for this engine and the Suburban would be kind of my LS swap trial run before I go all in with that truck. To be determined!