CHEAP, JUNKYARD ALUMINUM 5.3L LH6-WHAT WENT WRONG? COMPLETE TEARDOWN AND INSPECTION...PLANS TO FIX!

it's always so exciting finding an aluminum motor at the wrecking yard you clean it off get it back to the shop put it up on the dyno and find out it doesn't work let's take it apart and find out why hey what's up guess what I got some good news and I got some bad news what do you want first how about the bad news that fancy 5.3 L all aluminum junkyard V8 guess what what it's broke but the good news is we're going to take it all apart find out what went wrong and then I'm going to tell you how we're going to fix it but first i'm Richard holdner welcome to the channel I'm at West Tech performance so everything is great let's tear this thing apart and find out what went wrong okay guys I was very excited we got our l86 from the wrecking yard it's always good to find an aluminum motor we got it all cleaned off and as you can see I put it up on the dyno the reason that I do that is I'm checking two very important things right off the bat I want to make sure that it has cranking compression which this one does and I also want to make sure it has oil pressure so we have the Holly hooked up to this I don't even have the water hooked up but we got our oil pressure line hooked up to the dyno and we've already started this thing and it does start up and run but it has very very low oil pressure and we now know that there's a problem so let's take a walk over to the oil pan and I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about after dropping the oil pan unfortunately we saw lots and lots of bearing material not a good sign okay going to pull this thing off so take it apart okay guys there's obviously something wrong with this l86 so what I thought is I'm going to do a video on taking aart and finding out how bad it is it's not really a problem I have a forge rotating assembly that we want to put in anyway so I'm just hoping that the block is okay but there's only one way to find out let's tear it all apart as you can see I already have removed the damper used the big gun on that actually worked out I have also removed the rear cover and I did that when we were pulling it off the dyno and the reason I did that is if we are going to take the crankshaft out this has to be out of the way and the only way to get it out of the way is not to have it on the engine stand so little preemptive the other thing I did here I've done baggies and I've marked them all for the bolts that came out so when we go to put this thing back together it will be very very easy so I've got oil pan rear cover front cover valve cover all the stuff labeled so it goes together and then also I got some of these so we're going to put all the parts in here so that they're all together so that when we put it back together we know where everything is it's nice and label let's tear into the motor so the first thing I found on this rear seal is this seal is obviously bad so that would have had to been replaced anyway let's pull the intake so we're start off by pulling the intake on these ring Motors as you can see it gets pretty dirty in here it's a good idea to take a back and clean up all of this stuff sometimes you have Roden droppings and stuff in there that's not good to play with obviously and I did that all ahead of time in fact we took and uh steam cleaned and hot te this thing off so it was all pretty clean when we were starting out with cuz it wanted to we wanted it to look good and didn't want it to get a mess all over the dyno so before you do that make sure you clean up all that area but now let's take off the valley cover so everything we take off we bag up throw over in a little bin so we'll take all the hardware out of here cuz we're probably probably not going to reuse this since this is a do Valley cover not going to use that in fact you can take a look up on the channel I also have a how to replace the dod how to eliminate the dod that video is up so we're going to take this and these bolts put it over our in next up we're remove the coil packs and valve covers everything actually looks pretty good on the valve covers there's no broken Springs no broken rockers no bad push rods or anything everything looks fairly clean up here so I'm going to pull the exhaust manifolds and then we'll work on getting the heads off now pull the spark plugs out I I like to do that easier to rotate the motor if we're going to rotate it and then I'm going to pull all the Rockers off I like I'm doing the ratchet first and then and then Buzz them off of the [Music] gun go ahead and pull the stock push rods out we'll check those if I find anything on those I'll show you we're looking for shiny and then we're looking for the little football shape to see if there's a bunch of wear on any of the push rods there we go there's one I'll be showing that pull these out as well get an idea if any of these look like they're running made without enough oil yeah so I'll show you so here's what I'm talking about and one of is nice and round the other one yeah not so I've seen some that are worse now what you have to do is look at the rocker for this one and see if the cup inside the rocker is all worn out the rocker might need to be replaced but something to keep an eye on now I'm going to pull off the water crossovers the 10 mm bolts for the heads and then the front cover since they're all using the same now I'm going to break the heads free get these 50 mm bolts okay let's take a close look here flat top pistons we expect that I think that this is an aftermarket head gasket this thing might have been rebuilt at some time in its life looks like a newish deck surface too this is not what we normally expect for junkyard Motors my guess is this thing has probably been rebuilt before it looks like in pretty good shape I was taking a look at the cylinder head over here though but look this exhaust valve has got some buildup on it if you look at the others normally they're white clean what do you guys think that is water oil what's going on let me know in the comments okay let's pull the other head and see what [Music] happens okay got the same kind of gas on this side the head took a dowel from that one you can see captured that like to look at the edges to see if it's ready to blow a head gasket take a look here all right let's pull the lifters out now we're going to pull the lifters out see the ultr long dods they even have little guides to stop from rotating we replac this and these when we do a cam upgrade so now we're going to pull the cam shaft take out cam gear not bad get some wear marks this is kind of what I normally see in these high mileage ones they got wear patterns on them definitely but none of the loes are ground down nothing was wearing uneven none the lifter have turned that looks okay I'm going to drop the oil pan so I get access to the oil pump windage tray okay we got the pan off and unfortunately we did find some things it looks like there's some bearing material in there can take a look some ugly sparkly stuff in there so I'm kind of expecting when we take this windage tray off and theno some of the Maine and Rod caps we're probably going to find a scored up crank or something so let's flip this thing over I'll take the oil pump off and tear into the bearings and see what's going on so we take a look inside the pump we can get an idea maybe what's going on and we can see all kinds of bad news in here pumps all worn that plates worn material in there that means this thing was spinning with no oil in it that's a that's a big old divot right there that's bad stuff okay I guess now comes the Moment of Truth this thing doesn't really even want to rotate very much so it tells me something's binding in there I'm going to pull off one of the rod caps and kind of see what's there and then we'll take a look at a main cap and then we'll take all of them off well that one's actually pretty good so we got at least one good one let's keep going oh yeah that one's bad yep that one spun well there's your problem show you what I'm talking about okay this what a spun bearing looks like Spin to Win oh there it goes I like it's supposed to be like that right oh yeah that's some that's a lot thinner than it used to be I think crank look it's offset ground who wants a droker look at that man that thing worn a lot that is not good okay got two sets of spun bearings here see it's enough that it's undiz the crankshaft this is exciting yeah not supposed to be like that also this one not supposed to be like that you can see it's wor that crank down pretty bad certainly not turnable there the thing that concerns me now is that that the crank still doesn't want to spin very well so I'm going to take off these Mains now and we'll see how bad the mains are that one's getting a little bad some grooves in it okay not nearly as bad as the rods are that's the one I was concerned with everyone's got a bit of a trough in it now I want to see how bad the thrust is well thrust surfaces are actually not bad I thought those were going to be worn out some in the middle there I don't know if this is debris or what but yeah not good generally generally not good wonder how it spins now man it's still really draggy wonder what it's hitting all right final step I guess take the crank out well we can rebuild it okay what's the takeaway yes on the bad side I do have a broken lh6 but on the plus side really out of all of this the thing that I wanted most was the 5.3 L Aluminum block you see as I mentioned I have forged internals for that block Summit Racing PRS Forge connecting rods sum racing PRS dish Forge Pistons I'll just grab another 24x crank there a diamond dozen and all of a sudden I have a Boost ready all aluminum combination that can make a million horsepower so what's to worry about I look at it like this I have some other cool stuff that came along with this now I have some 799 heads I have the Trailblazer ss/ nbss intake manifold a 90 mm throttle body I have coil packs I have sensors here are the things that I'm definitely going to get rid of that lh6 oil pan yeah that goes in the trash the crank Chef obviously that's toast that's getting thrown away the dod camshaft same thing that's going away I'm going to separate the flat top Factory Pistons with the Gen4 rods I'm throwing away all the rods at least two of them I know are discolored and I would never use them again I'm going to throw all of them away but if you're watching this and I haven't given them away yet somebody can come by I'll just give away the flat top pistons you can upgrade your lm7 with Flatt top 53 pistons and all of a sudden you got lots and lots of power but armatur holder please make sure to like share subscribe ring the bell that 53 is going back together and yes there will be boost

Channel: Richard Holdener

Views: 30,495

Keywords: HOW TO FIND A JUNKYARD LS, ALL ALUMINUM LH6 5.3L, CHEAP LS POWER, JUNKYARD LS 5.3L, COMPLETE TEARDOWN

Id: CKyFqN9zh8o

Length: 18min 14sec (1094 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 24 2023