Easy LS Cam swap without pulling the heads!

you alright folks welcome to stews garage today we're gonna be working on the drift box again I know we haven't worked on this car in a while but it's time forward to going in the knife a little bit so pretty much for today's video we're gonna be changing out the cam the reason I'm changing this cam is because right now the car has a cabinet that I don't actually know what it is it's a long story behind that but it is what it is I'm not very happy with it and I'm going for another version of the cam that I had originally in the engine that was originally in this car I have this cam sitting on a shelf for a long time I'd kind of made up my mind that I really wanted to focus on driving this year the car is finally solid and stable and I just wanted to drive it and be able to drive it since I missed out on a lot because the car was down for various reasons last year but since everybody's afraid of the boogeyman there's no events going on and I don't know when the next event is gonna be so I might as well start working on the car again so I've been psyching myself up for this very intense cam swap job that could have been a lot of work for me as some of you may know if you work on engines for an LS engine the lifters reside underneath the heads so in order to change the cam normally you would have to pull basically the entire top end off you got to pull the rockers out you got to pull the heads off then you got to pull the front end off you know pull everything out from inside the front end change your cam then put everything back together and that's that's a lot because you're essentially stripping this engine down to a short block taking everything off of it and then putting it back on it's just a pain in the butt but that's the way it is on a Ford engine it's not quite as bad because your lifters don't sit underneath the heads they kind of sit underneath the intakes so you can get those out of the way without pulling the heads off and without doing head gaskets but anyways while I was buying Parts I kind of saw clues that you could actually do that without doing most of that work so today we're going to show you a shortcut of how you can actually change your cam without pulling your heads which means the only thing we're gonna have to do is just pull off our front accessories and we'll be able to accomplish that with very low risk now I'm just because this a short cut doesn't necessarily mean we're cutting corners this should be a safe way of doing this and I'll explain the nuances to that as we get to it so normally if I had to pull the heads off and everything I'd probably take an entire week just to do that with me doing this short cut method I could really accomplish this job in one night I'm probably not going to do that I'll probably stretch this out over the weekend just because I don't want to spend 6-7 hours here in the garage working and rushing and things like that but that's my choice so before we get into this I'll just summarize what needs to happen in order for this job to get done at some point you're probably gonna see the intake come off of the car it's not necessary but while I'm doing this I do actually need to change my intake gaskets so the intake is going to come off we're gonna need to pull the coil packs we're gonna have to pull the valve covers and we have to pull the rockers out because the rockers pressed down on the push rods which press down on the lifters which are going to be in the way so anyways we got to pull all that stuff it's very minimal we're gonna have to pull all of our front accessories we're going to disconnect the intake we're gonna have to drain the radiator and we're gonna have to pull the radiator out and the purpose of that is just because the cam is pretty long and we just we need to have space to actually be able to pull that out all right ask for supplies that we're gonna be doing on this job these are my intake seals you're not gonna see me do that because there's no point this is your cam thruster plate right here this is a twelve dollar part folks most people don't change them but I highly recommend changing these these have a seal right here that can actually go bad it's a one-time-use part and if this piece goes bad on you because you reused it you're gonna lose oil pressure and that could cause catastrophic failure in your engine so go ahead spend $12 to get yourself a new can thrust plate whenever you're going in there messing with the cam or anything like that as you can see here we've got head gaskets I purchased these before realize the shortcut method so we're gonna go ahead and put these on the shelf I'm probably gonna end up using those on the spare engine but who knows I mean any time if I have to work on pulling the heads in the future I'm gonna need these so I'm gonna put these on a shelf got the new cam sitting right there and these guys are the specialized tool that's gonna save me money from buying head gaskets and other things and doing a whole lot of work head gaskets head bolts all of that stuff this right here is the reason why the heads don't have to come off so I'll show you how to use those as soon as we get into this thing all right folks so we've gone ahead and we've pulled off all the front accessories that we have to on this particular set up we didn't have to mess with the alternator on this one all we had to do was pull off the water pump and as you can see the water pump contains a thermostat and the idler pulley that's just on this particular setup other setups may differ if you have a power steering pump or other things but mine is as simple as possible and I didn't have to mess with other stuff as you can see I've already done the intake gaskets I didn't show you guys that but for the purpose of this video the intake is still in there the next thing that we're going to do is we're gonna have to remove our rockers the reason why we're removing these rockers is because whichever valve is being pushed down is actually putting pressure on the lifters which is putting pressure on the cam and you know these things are like 500-pound springs so if I was to try first of all I wouldn't be able to pull the cam out with it but if I did somehow managed to pull the cam out it would just shoot the lifter down into the block and that would not be good because then the engine would have to come out and come apart so in order to relieve the pressure off of the cam we're gonna pull all of these rockers off so one of the cool features about the LS motor if you guys haven't seen this before is the rockers all ride on this rail I don't know what this rail is called but it's similar to like a pedestal rocker setup so you don't have to tighten these things down and shim them and make sure that you no clock them and all that stuff you just you slap them on there and you bolt them to the correct torque spec and they're good to go so pretty much installing these things is super easy alright now that we've got our rockers pulled off the next thing that we're gonna do here is we're actually going to time the motor do the cam timing or whatever you want to call it you could do this before after it doesn't matter but I'm going to go ahead and do this beforehand basically there's a dot right here on this timing gear and that's gonna point to another dot down on the I think it's actually on the crankshaft it's gonna be pretty much impossible for you guys to see with the oil pump on here normally you would do this with the own pump off but in order to remove the oil pump you actually have to pull the oil pan and that's impossible to do with the motor in the car so I'm gonna go ahead and turn this thing over until I get these dots lined up and then we're gonna go ahead and remove the timing chain and sprocket alright so I've got this thing timed it's really difficult to see but you actually can see it if you know what you're looking for so this is the mark on the timing gear and then right down there the little dot that you see right above my finger is the mark on the crankshaft sprocket thingy whatever you want to call that and those two just have to be pointing at each other that way when we pull the cam out we know exactly how to put the cam back in so at this point we're gonna go ahead and pull off our sprocket let the timing gear just kind of fall down like that alright folks so this is where the cheat code comes into play what you see they doing right here is I'm actually inserting a couple of screws into the cam this is the cam right here and the reason I'm putting these screws in is to help me get a better grip because what we're gonna do we're gonna spin the cam over a few times to try and push all the lifters up so hopefully these lifters am and pushed up into the lifter trays that's actually one of the purposes of electric razor supposed to hold the lifters in place so that you can do this but that's not very trustworthy because if I was to pull this cam out right now one of those lifters would go right into the oil pan and then we have to take the whole thing out of the car so in order to prevent that from happening we've got these two holes right here and this is actually what supplies oil to your lifters that's where you get your oil pressure from so basically these run straight down the engine so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take our dowels which have right here I've gone ahead and rounded off the edges which you can't see because the camera will not focus but and I did that to help it to be easier for them to insert down into the engine without snagging so basically what these are going to do is they're going to put pressure up against the sides of the lifters and keep the lifters from falling down into the engine actually a really tight fit I would absolutely hate to break one of these off inside the engine that would be that'd be absolutely horrible okay now we've got the lifters locked into place so the next thing for us to do is to get the cam out there now there are companies to sell a nice special tool that will help you to do this but today we're just gonna use a big fat screwdriver I'm gonna put it in here gently pull cam out actually I'm gonna pause while I'm doing this and actually prepare the other cam because we want to put this other cam in here as quickly as possible just in case something was to go wrong we don't want one of those things to fall into the engine so I'm gonna go ahead and glue the other cam and get that ready to go into the engine I have to do this very slowly carefully so that you don't knock the cam bearings out of place a little bit tight you just have to be careful not to force anything especially when you got the lifters hanging by a thread you really don't want one of those going into your oil pan all right the new cam was nice and slimy ready to put this thing all right the most difficult part of this job is over the most critical part we've got the cam in there everything's pretty much safe at this point only I do is reassemble so I'm gonna let my heart get back to a normal heartbeat and I'm gonna go ahead and finish this job all right folks we're all wrapped up at this point we got new seals in the intake we got the cam in we've got the crank bolt all tightened down we've got all our fluids added back in so at this point we're pretty much ready for our first start all right folks that's gonna wrap up this video I hope that you guys enjoyed this DIY this is probably the most exciting time saving and money-saving DIY shortcut that I found to date working on cars like I said in the beginning of this video this ended up saving me probably a week's worth of work I went ahead and knock this thing out in about two nights a leisurely pace and it probably saved me about $400 worth of materials so this is a like I said probably my favorite time-saving DIY that I found I want to go ahead and do a video dedication I'd like to dedicate this video to Steve cash I did not know him personally he's a fellow youtuber and musician my wife and I have been watching his YouTube videos for years he used to make youtube videos with his cats and his dog they're just pretty funny videos and it's last couple of videos he let on that he was having some issues some mental health issues he did take his life via suicide and that's really unfortunate so my condolences go out to his family if if you get a second I would definitely recommend that you go check out his channel maybe drop a few likes a few comments and let the folks know that he left behind you know if you appreciate his work suicide is a really unfortunate thing that's happened in these days if you have friends might be going through something or that are showing you some signs some irregularities you know something is up you know make sure you reach out to your friends and you know check on folks and you know do the best that you can to look out for one another on that note we're gonna go ahead we're gonna wrap up our video and we'll catch you guys on the next one [Music] [Music]

Channel: Premium Fuel Mag

Views: 27,401

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Id: J51Mpms33v0

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020