How to LS swap an old Chevy Square Body Crew Cab Dually

foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign so first things first our donor motor has been stored up on this pallet rack for some time now and we need to clear a path for the forklift to get to it [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right [Music] and now that we have the engine down we can rearrange the last couple vehicles and bring in the square body [Music] foreign [Music] so this is a 1988 Chevy R 3500 it's uh has no motor and Trans in it right now but we're going to be swapping in a six liter with a 4l80 automatic um planning on keeping this one using it to go pick up projects as we get them or you know it's a crew cab so you you can take the whole family um you can see under the hood originally it was a 454 Big Block TBI truck with a turbo 400 this is how I get most of my projects with no motor in them so it's kind of easy to start and do whatever you want but oh yeah here we go so like I said it had a big block with a turbo 400 now we're putting in a six liter with a 4L80E transmission this will be an overdrive so it'll be a lot nicer on the highway that's kind of what we're going for is going for a truck that's going to be nicer to drive so instead of loud exhaust loud intake we're going to put a stock intake on it a stock exhaust um one of the main goals is to keep it comfortable so I'm going to try and add air conditioning which I haven't done on the other ones uh normally the motor sits too low so you have to make room for the AC compressor and by doing that we're going to raise it up so that we can put the AC in these are the original clam shells that I normally use with an adapter plate and this time I bought motor mounts you can see how much higher the motor is going to sit I always Mount the motor if I remember correctly far forward but these should put the motor three inches higher than stock or so higher and further forward so that it'll allow room to put the original AC compressor from the ls truck to Silverado in the uh original location on the motor otherwise you got to mount them up high so we will see to get started we're going to take off the original Silverado motor mounts these would mount it to the Silverado frame rail and we're gonna put on these adapter motor mount plates and these will bolt to the r3500 motor mounts that are still on the frame rails so we'll do that now foreign [Music] plates bolted to the motor we're going to try and set the motor and Trans in see how they line up with the original mounts um I don't really know I haven't done this this setup before so I'm not sure where the cross member is going to land on the transmission whether I have to move the cross member forward or backwards to line up with the Trans amount and mainly to see how the AC compressor clears the frame rail up here they say you wanted to do some trimming on this Frame row where a bulges out here so let's get it in and see what we got to do [Music] foreign [Music] okay the motor is in it's all bolted in set down a couple of things we ran into I believe originally this truck was Hydro Boost and now it's got a vacuum booster I I believe anyway um and the booster is really tight against the coil when we were dropping the motor in not now but so we did end up breaking that back coil uh probably should have removed the coils would have made this install easier um the has a Hydro Boost power steering reservoir on the ls truck motor and the bottom line is really close to the frame rail so that's gonna have to be heated and bent out of the way so that was another issue and it probably would have been easier if we would have removed the transmission crossmember but we did not we just fished the motor in started on a really steep angle and then dipped it down in and that since we had the 4l80 transmission on it you had to really put it at a steep angle and that was not super easy so a couple of things could have been done differently to make it easier but it's in okay to make these stock Silverado LS manifolds fit uh and save 200 bucks this is what we did on the driver's side it hits on this boss right here it hits on the frame rail so as you can see I ground that off and ground some of the flange these fit in without touching though the way they are I am going to grind this a little more because I don't want to grind the frame rail back that far but it fits and then on the passenger side it hits really hard so I actually cut the collector off and then rotated it so this stud here isn't protruding right into the frame I rotated the collector you can even tilt it a little if you want to make even more room with this clears now again it's close I'm going to grind a little bit but nothing's touching um when you cut and weld on cast Steel Cast iron nodular iron whatever these are made out of everybody says they're cast steel but they still crack easily you want to do your homework on how to weld that you got to heat it up and cool it down real slow so they don't crack but it actually came out really well I've done done this on these before and had it like that many many years without them cracking so we'll put them in and show you the finished product when we build the exhaust here are the Silverado manifolds installed they are ground down to clear the frame rail on this side the frame rail is not ground down just the manifold I'll probably do a little bit more grinding it is clearing right now but it's very close in the picture I'm sure it looks like it's touching but it's not and uh on the passenger side this is the one that even in the instructions for the motor mounts it says it hits severely which it did so I actually cut the collector off and rotated it so that the bolt doesn't hit the frame world again it looks close I'm going to pull this back off and do a little bit more clearancing on the header flange not on the frame rail but it actually isn't touching right now it just looks like it is [Applause] let's talk about the AC here for a minute um the original frame has this boss here that protrudes off and I wasn't able to slide the compressor into its location so I trimmed off this bulge here it doesn't look like it really isn't going to do too much of rain I don't like to trim the frame but uh that allowed me to get the AC compressor in and it is clearing once you tighten the bolts down there's not much room for clearance for things to move around which the engine moves a little so I drew a line here I'm not going to go that deep I don't like to grind into the frame but that's where I am going to just grind the frame a little bit to get a little more clearance all this is in front of the suspension Mount locations and all it's basically just supporting the front rad support of the truck all that it's not going to weaken the frame much but that line right there we're going to grind not to it but that's where we're going to grind so we'll do that now okay let's see if it fits any better now with some more clearance foreign definitely have clearance now I don't have the lines on yet I may have to trim some of the boss and the lines but now it's no longer against the framer although it's a good 3 16 of an inch up to this point on these Square bodies I've been using the stock square body radiators uh this is the first truck that I'm gonna use the Silverado LS style radiator that way it can use the expansion tank and should be all of the stuff that came with the Silverado motor so it'll be a complete Silverado cooling system down here I drilled two holes to hold the Silverado radiator mounts so those grommets will go in there and then a new radiator from a 2500 HD fits into the comets we're going to do electric cooling fans um there's you know multiple reasons to use these you gain a little power they're pretty efficient there's more room because we have the engine pretty far forward and these are from the junkyard from uh uh you know I think they came out of an Escalade or a half ton Silverado but they fit right into the radiator and now we just need to make a bracket to hold all this up top I'm going to make some type of c-shaped bracket that will bolt to the square body rad support and then hold these two grommets for the Silverado fan and radiator so that's what we're going to do now so it's not just flopping around foreign foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] for the fuel system this is the original tank out of the R30 it's a TBI tank and truck with TBI which means it is a fuel injection tank so it should have a baffle in it and send there but it's a low pressure pump so uh it's all rusty we got new stuff over here so this is another as you can see in there there's a tray for the fuel pump and we're gonna put in a sender and the fuel pump this fuel pump's from like the vortec trucks like a 96 fuel injected truck so it should make you know whatever 50 or 60 PSI instead of the 10 to 12 or 15 at TBI runs so we'll put the pump on the sender sender in the tank and then we'll hang a few feet of fuel hose that we can work with when we get it up in there this has got to be fuel injection hose now not just regular fuel hose it's got to be rated for high pressure fuel so we'll get it put together and then we'll get it up in the truck foreign [Music] now we're back inside we got the car in the air we're gonna put the fuel hose on the fuel tank and spray it up a little bit with some Rust prevention and then we're gonna put the straps back on and put it in um these are the brackets that held it on we just cleaned them up real quick and painted them and Salvage some of the strapping this insulation that goes between the bracket and the tank and we'll get it sprayed and get it up foreign [Music] foreign let's talk about the oil cooler this is the oil cooler off the six liter Chevy truck motor it had rubber hoses on here I cut the crimps and took the hoses off and then this these are the lines from the original truck oil cooler on the radiator so we cut those off and the idea is to put the hoses from the from the square body oil cooler onto the ls truck oil cooler Mount so the lines are up here we already cut the ends off they're just draining I kind of Flushed the lines quick so I'll Mount up the oil cooler and then we'll put the hoses on as you can see this engine is really dirty we haven't cleaned it just the gasket surfaces doesn't need to be clean to go down the road foreign let's show a little more about how these air conditioning lines are going to go in so you have the original LS truck air conditioning lines on the compressor and they come up and now you see they're going into the square body dryer and the square body condenser and what we did was we cut the ends off the square body lines and we cut the ends off the ls Truck Lines and welded them together so take this back apart and show you so this is the line off of the Silverado goes the AC compressor and I cut off the fitting from the Silverado dryer and welded on the fitting the end of the line from the square body same with the high pressure here Silverado line cut off this piece of pipe from the square body and then had them welded together so that I can just use these lines instead of buying them did buy a new dryer as you should always replace the dryer when you take the system apart and then these will just be scrapped power steering um this is a later model square body so that's already been switched over to mostly metric bolts and fittings if it was an earlier one you would need to switch the fitting going into the high pressure side of your power steering pump but since this is a later square body it's already metric and you can just use the line well I mean this is the line from the Silverado it seems to work just fine in there so I didn't have to change anything that actually just screwed it right on on this truck anyway the return line This truck's been sitting around so long and the fittings on the on the box were really dirty so just made a return line and I actually put an inline filter in I never used one of those before but it has a magnet in it and hopefully it'll get some of the dirt that I'm sure is in this system it was a used pump and a really dirty box so that's it check out this shifter linkage here this is just a cheap 45 dollar Amazon kit as you can see I had to bend it in two places heat up the stainless rod and bend it and uh it took a little bit of adjusting but I got it to get all the gear positions and read on the cluster correctly this cluster has been switched over to an overdrive cluster so it reads each gear correctly we'll go look at that all right we're going to go through the gears and you can see they line up pretty well and it gets them all foreign not bad brake booster line um this is the original brake booster line from like a half ton Silverado and the fitting back here the six liter had this plug in there because it was originally Hydro Boost but since this truck has a booster you take the plug out you put the fitting in from a half ton Silverado and just a half ton Silverado booster line um I think the r30s originally were Hydro Boost but this one has vacuum assist I don't know if somebody swapped it I really don't know that much about it but that's what's better okay so I wanted a driver's side battery tray and all I have is passenger sides so I've already modified this one so much I want to show you what I did it seems like it's going to work flip it over I ground off all the spot welds and took this piece off and then you grind this Edge thin so I was able to fold it over and now it's actually bent the other way I'm gonna just re-run a bead of weld down here and then stick this inside the driver's side fender well there's actually dimples you can just drill the holes in the driver's side inner Fender then this bolt and this bolt will bolt right in so you can bolt this piece in and the holes are there for this and this so you can Bolt the battery tray in and set this right on there and then just weld it back together tack it in place and take it out and weld it here's the battery tray it's all welded now you can see it's folded the opposite way that it was dimple dimple we drilled the holes and here's how it fits in the truck okay quick update I've been doing a lot of work off camera you can see I have a lot of things in I have the Silverado radiator Silverado fan the brackets we made to mount them Silverado intake Silverado overflow tank instead of using the factory computer this time I'm running a fi Tech computer and harness so that's all laid in just getting things ready to start um the manifolds are on but the exhaust is not made yet I'll be doing that later but belts on ac lines are kind of laid in here stuff's just laid in mocked up so we can crank it over and you know get it running before we finalize everything right now I'm just priming the engine I have a oil tank a pressurized oil tank that's pumping oil into the engine through the door port on the side of the timing cover where the oil pump is so this engine hasn't been started in many many many years so I'm priming the oil system and I had taken the injectors out off camera as well and cleaned them I had to switch them over to an ev6 connector that the FI Tech is using so it has different injectors in it I went from a 22 pound EV ones to so I think they're 30 or yeah I think they're 30 pound I don't remember but their ev6 style connectors so once it's done priming I think we're going to crank it over put a little more in there's already enough to start it but we'll just feel a little more in I'm just adding a ground strap from the motor to the chassis you've got to add them every every spot that you can that you know I have one from the motor to the battery and then the battery to the body and the body to the motor and then I have one from the gas tank to the frame so you know the computers they rely on this this fi Tech relies on two different grounds in the harness and I'm just tying into one of those that's here in the back of the cylinder head somewhere here these are the Silverado battery cables that I just cut the side posts off and put these cheap top terminals on so we're going to hook up the battery and see what happens when we turn the ignition on and then if it goes we're just going to give it a little crank see make sure the engine turns over and then I will hook up the computer for the fuel injection and see if I can get that the base setting set the motor size and all that and then see if it'll start okay so I turned the key to the start position and it didn't crank um it's real gummy feeling someone swapped the steering column at some point in this truck I got it with no motor and trans I don't really know what's going on so for the time being I cut the wire going to the starter and I'm going to just jump the thing so that I can get it cranking and then I can't really get the doors open on the lift so I can't really work on it so once I get it running and get it off the lift I will try and figure out what's going on with the starter but for now we're just gonna pull this wire out and just go right to power here and either the battery's dead or the starter is not working so here we go battery first okay got a different battery so here's the starter wire again touch the positive cranks over so I am going to hook up this little fi tech computer and then we'll turn the key on and see if we can get some there it is it's on already I guess my key maybe is on already so I've never done this I bought this used so I actually don't know what I'm doing but we're going to go to initial setup I just set the basic information that I know which is like engine size and injector size really don't know what I'm doing just turned it on and I'm gonna hit the start over and see if it'll start well started shut right off I am going to go cycle the key and then try and start it again [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] all right so you can see how it kind of self-learned this is supposed to be a self-learning system it actually did smooth the idle out and idled pretty good the idol I have set way too low I believe it's at like 600 RPMs sounds cool but it's a little low so with the air conditioning and the big trans that's on it it probably when put in Drive won't idle well so I'll have to up the RPM at idle but we'll deal with that later but for now I mean that was the first time this thing has started in a long time but seems to have run pretty well once it learned how to idle so we're going to button up some more stuff and actually you know build an exhaust and get it drivable and go from there but for now it runs all right we're back underneath the truck um now that we got it running we're gonna go ahead and try and build an exhaust so that we can run it a little longer and let it you know self learn self-tune um I have these short you know pipes on the on the manifolds that were from the original truck so we're gonna put these up here and then run pipe all the way out the back of the truck and put two Mufflers on it and two tailpipes and that way we can uh move on to the next thing what we have here is uh what we're going to try and make the exhaust out of these are just like straight two and a half lengths from online that I bought um the mufflers and these tailpipes were off of a friend of mine square body he had them on there and said they were too loud so we're gonna try and use them on the on this truck here's some um used Flex joints I'm not sure if I'm going to use those or not these motors don't move that much and these tailpipes are so long that even if there was some movement it'll it'll not be much so yeah it's all used stuff but we'll piece it together and make an exhaust a lot of these trucks that we do they have exhaust systems already on that we just tie into so this one had nothing so we got to make front to rear there's no hangers or anything this was a box at a flea market all these were a dollar a piece so I bought the whole box it's just all kinds of old hangers and exhaust clamps and flanges but that's the kind of stuff that I look for when I go to those flea markets but we'll just hang this up here somewhere on the frame mock up a tailpipe quick stick that through if I can that's right okay that'll go up somewhere like I can't see back there but somewhere like this here's how I think we're gonna make this work this pipe should rest right about there so you can see that I need to raise this pipe about two and a half inches so I'm gonna try and just take two and a half inches out of this raise it up and see what happens [Applause] thank you [Applause] thank you foreign [Music] foreign [Music] you see that it landed right on this [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] fast forward a couple days we have the full exhaust installed we had it mocked up before but now both sides are in got a thick black coat of paint on there that'll probably majority burn off but we'll uh let it down and fire it up I haven't started it yet so we'll fire it up and see what it sounds like foreign we're going to start it up to see what it sounds like for the first time um I need a new ignition switch I have one I haven't put it in yet so this wire here runs down to the starter so I'm just going to turn the ignition on and then I'm going to power up the starter so give me a second here all right ignition's on and now it'll probably crank for a while because it hasn't started since I hooked the battery up [Music] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hooked up and ready to go let's go put it on the road and see how it does [Music] [Music] ah [Applause] it seems to be driving pretty good um I wired up the converter lockup switch on the brake pedal yesterday so that it's going in the overdrive and the converter's locking up uh it's got 410 rear gears so you know the overdrive the RPMs down I don't know seems to work pretty well tires are a little wobbly probably flat spotted window seals or noise you can hear all the air noise the wing windows are really dried out I mean the trucks not been on the road it's got an o4 inspection sticker so you know 19 years it hasn't been on the road before so other than going through the brakes it drives pretty well

Channel: Pirate Jet Garage

Views: 24,725

Keywords: square body ls swap, ls swap square body chevy, ls swap, gmc, dually, crew cab, camper special

Id: 6OMGX1vj6tk

Length: 42min 9sec (2529 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 26 2023