LS1 Complete Rebuild

welcome back everybody today we start a new project and it's going to be this engine right here to my right your left and it is an ls1 engine so this is our next project I'm going to walk you through the teardown and then we're going to talk about what we're going to do this thing but this is a 5.7 liter LS all aluminum engine I know I started the the 5-3 build at one point I did a teardown on it and I was gonna do a 5-3 build I still may do that in the future but that particular 5 3 that I tore down the customer actually backed out on that and I don't have that engine anymore so we made you a 5-3 I've done tons of LS builds but I've never actually done a video and people keep asking so I'm just gonna go ahead and do this LS one walk you through the disassembly and we'll talk about how we're gonna build this thing and make some decent power so here we go first of all I kind of want to walk you through this you guys this is the tool kit that's made by GM this is the General Motors official kit that they have for building disassembling and reassembling the LS engine and we have tools that we use for installing the rear and front main deals we have this as part of the rear crankshaft installer when you have the puller to get the balancer off we have front seal installation tools we have the jigs that are designed for getting the front cover and the rear cover centered on the block we have the this is the tool that if you have the flex plate on the flywheel you can use this to hold the engine in place where you take the balancer off the some of these other pullers for the C ones and so forth and that the German protectors the gear puller for the front so it has basically everything you need for doing the LS now you can do an LS engine without this kit you don't have to actually have the OEM tools I'm fortunate enough to have really good connections with people that not only work for GM that also do training for GM and so I was able to borrow this I did not buy this kit so I am going to use it I'm going to show you the way that the OEM wants this done but like I said there are other ways to do this so that way you can see the options that are available to you all right well let's get started so we'll start by removing these about center bolt valve covers nice thing about the LS gaskets is they have a the captured gasket manufacturing design it makes a really good seal really good gaskets so get your valve covers off some inside also have this cooling system crossover - some of them have an assembly that goes runs from the front to the back on this particular application they just block the two back off and they have a tube running across the front what what these do you guys is this is kind of like a vent steam system and they cross over from bank to bank and what it does is it keeps air out of the system it helps to bleed air out of the cooling system so you don't get air bubbles and so forth in the top of the engine you're gonna want to rip remove this and these have a seal and an o-ring that goes on them there's an o-ring in here this one actually stuck on the block you're gonna replace those so you can just go ahead and either pull that out or leave it there we'll get it out when we clean the head but take the bolts and make sure you set them aside you're gonna need to put this back on alright so that brings us to our rocker assemblies and our valley pan here now in order to get the valley pan off you have to take the the knock sensors out the knock sensors are down in here and they simply take a socket when you take the oxygen sensor out I would recommend not using any kind of a power tool on them take them out by hand because they they have a tendency to strip out if you do that so basically you break him loose you just run these guys out and you can actually get the right that one there's got some corrosion on it which is normal we'll probably going to replace these so once you get those out of the way next you have your valley pan here and these are just a ten millimeter bolt you can get some kind of screwdriver or something but you don't really need to so though those are your oxygen sensor seals down there on the bottom and then of course there's a valley pan gasket that goes on there and that exposes our valley here now this is an earlier engine so it doesn't have the variable cam timing pedestals in here all right now at that point we can look at our rockers so the rockers the nice thing about the rockers is they are their roller rockers now one thing that I would really stress here is if you're going to reuse these parts it is imperative that you keep this stuff in order we can't we can't mix up valvetrain parts because it could cause if you mix them up they have wear patterns there we're mated and it could cause premature failure and where if we reuse this I don't know that we're gonna reuse these but just as a precaution you definitely want to keep all the valvetrain parts in order I like these magnetic trays which seem to work pretty good [Applause] these are a non-adjustable valvetrain there is no adjustment on these they do have after my adjustable rockers you can put on here but now the one nice thing about this is there is a rail underneath the rockers that you can use to organize these you can just keep it they just sit in the in there and I'll just set them in a tray like this so that I don't have any issues and I'll just make sure I know this goes with this head I'll just take a piece of cardboard and punch some holes in it and I'm gonna put F up here for the front and this is the right head so we're gonna say right hand and that out also if I put that that with these it'll tell me where those rockers came from and then I just take and I set the push rods each one in those holes and make sure that we keep them in order a lot but like I said I don't know honestly on this bill before even going to reuse these push rods we may or may not but nevertheless you know you never know at least that these parts are still good this is actually a pretty low mileage engine so it may come to pass that we reuse this stuff you definitely don't want to mix this stuff up could cause rapid wearing it also cause valve train noise if you get wear patterns mixed up alright so we'll get the other side off and keep them separate and everything in order and then we'll get these heads off here next we look at the cylinder heads now GM recommends that you remove the bolts in reverse order of torquing in a circular pattern so in other words we're going to start on the end and then you're going to go in a circle to the other end you want to alternate from end to end going in a circular pattern that's what General Motors says to do and they designed it so we're gonna do what they say so as we come around right we'll go to the next one here and we're just we're just making a circle the detour procedure is pretty important because you can actually cause head distortion and I recommend removing these keep breaking them loose anyway with a breaker bar not a not an airgun well once you break them loose then of course you can take an air gun and remove them once you get them all loose now remember you've got inner bolts up here to the head bolts on the LS the bigger bolts are torqued to yields they're one-time use only these inner bolts in here there's several small intervals make sure you don't forget to get those out those according to General Motors can be reused if necessary we may go ARP with this whole thing I don't know we'll see these inner bolts up here are ten millimeter start in the middle and work your way to the outside to get this I'm gonna put all of my head bolts and fasteners that go on the head in the magnetic tray with the right hand stuff well now that we've got all the bolts broke and loose is perfectly acceptable just take your power tool and run those out we're gonna hang on to these in case the customer wants to see them but we're definitely not gonna reuse them you'll notice that the head bolts in the LS are very very long and the threads are down toward the bottom later on I'm going to talk to you about why that's important and the engineering philosophy behind that at this point we basically just kind of pry on the head a little bit and pull it off of there should come right off I just take the end of my breaker bar put it in the intake port and just gently pry on it it doesn't take much to get this thing off of here no definitely don't want do any damage to it then we can take a look at our our tune here so we had going on looks pretty good actually doesn't look too bad pretty typical nothing crazy it looks like the head gasket was sealing up good but it does have quite a few miles on it so and that exposes us to our cylinders is it's very typical when you take the heads off of these things that you can still see the crosshatch in the bore I can still see some of the crosshatch there these things they they they hold up really well these cylinders because they're nicosia coated take our gasket off now the next thing we have is we have our lifter retainers here these lifter retainers here are made out of a nylon type plastic I highly recommend that you replace these I've seen these break on more than one occasion when they were reused take your bolt out you just slide your lifters your lifters a lot of times will stay in there sometimes they don't but it's real easy to fish them out now the nice thing is this tray and of course the LS is a factory roller this makes a really good organizer organizing tray that we can put our lifters into if the lifters don't stay in the tray just get a magnet these should come out fairly easy pull each one of them out and put them in the tray [Applause] you can also try to tip the motor this way a little bit and sometimes if you do that if you can get to lifters to slide out with the tray not always but sometimes see we got 50% of them there so we got two of them to come out and again we're using this as our organizer lay this in here we'll get the remainder of those out with the magnetic or the the magnet or the pick and then we'll move and that's really all there is to it you guys taking the top end off of one of these as a snap now also you you have a cam sensor here you want to make sure you don't forget to take this off and you want to set this aside all right so the balancer has a BF B and a big freaking bolt these things are tight you're gonna have to use a pretty good air or battery operated impact to get this out either that or you can take it out by putting the tool on the flywheel and the ring gear and holding it but this is a really effective way here you can see I'm turning that engine that thing is tight but you got a good impact you'll get it out of there all right so now we look at the front of our crankshaft now one thing that I would make a note of here that's really important you guys if you're doing the Corvette ls1 the Corvette balancer has some some weighted down pins pressed into it now there is no like on the early small blocks and big blocks and other motors there's a key a Cotter key on the balancer there is no key on this balancer it is simply pressed on with no key and it's a neutral balance on most of these you don't really have to worry about which way it goes on it might not be a bad idea to market I mean you can I'm going to I'm gonna put a yellow mark here just so I know I'm gonna put it back the way it was even though it's neutral I just got a habit of doing that on the Corvette now that has the balancing pins in it you have to make sure that you mark it it's imperative because those pins have to go back in exactly the same spot if you're replacing the Corvette balancer with the pins you have to have new pins installed into the new balancer in the exact same location and of the same weight either that you just get the whole engine rebalance which is probably something that's going to happen anyway so but just keep in mind that you do have to on those applications keep track of where this thing came off okay so I'm gonna put a mark on this just because that's what I always do even though it's really not necessary on this one now this puller has an end piece to it the end piece goes right on the end like that fits into the crankshaft now some of the cranks have threaded holes out here and you got to be careful not to put this in there you got to use the big end on the end of the crank this one here doesn't have threads out here so it just depends on the year and the design of the engine so you just go ahead and put that in there and then you put your three jaw puller on now GM tells you to put this tool this goes on to the back of the motor and these teeth here grab the flywheel and keeps this thing from turning well unfortunately I don't have the flexplate of the flywheel for this engine they also tell you to do this by hand without a power tool well they tell you not to use an impact on these but I've been using an impact on this type of puller on the LSS for years they're they're not on that type man they come off pretty easy so if you just take your impact that's here you're always polar now at this point I always take the front cover bolts out you don't want to take the front cover off you're here first you want to get the pan off first and we'll flip it over and also another thing I would recommend there may be deck school or antifreeze in this I push this over outside we dumped it upside down or we did get a bunch of decks tool that's cool that we dumped out of it into it into a plastic tray of course so yeah so next thing is the cover bolts the cover bolts are ten millimeter now this cover has to be centered on here in order of this not to leak and when we put it together I'll show you how we do that but for now we're just going to take the cover bolts out now remember there are some pan bolts that go up into the front of this cover up here which you don't want to do is try to pry that cover off first let's it's it's always a good idea to get the pan off first so at this point we're gonna rotate the engine upside down you always want to make sure that you have some kind of a tray under here because even though we've drained the oil and coolant and everything there's always some residual so we just turn this guy upside down we'll start looking at this oil pan oh yeah there now the oil pans are pretty straightforward on these you guys one thing that's notable is the oil filter housing is incorporated into the pan here and that's going to come off with it also there's a couple of long bolts back here that go on the back and they're a lot smaller they're fragile so be careful with them and this basically is just an extra retaining bolt on the back of the pan here there's one on each side and they are ten millimeter as well at this point we just take our panel off so gently remove the pan there's our pan gasket doesn't look too bad the pan gaskets from the factory are riveted on they riveted on that's just for ease of installation you don't really need to rivet these back on we break these rivets off and with a new gasket there's no reason to rivet it they do that at the factory because they they're there on an assembly line and they have these pans all ready to go and they're just slamming them up there so that's just a factory assembly deal next thing is you got your pickup tube and your windage tray that's got to come off [Applause] so these windage tray nuts that are on here a 13 millimeter now that you got your pan off your you guys also your front cover is since you took the bolts out of it it's basically just dangling up here in order to get the oil pump pickup tube off we can just very gently there's your front cover comes right off we got a bolt here that is holding the pickup tube on the the nuts holding the windage tray on or 13 millimeter yeah a little 10 millimeter bolt here and over this there's a retaining clip that goes on here that holds this on and then of course there's an o-ring in here you're gonna want to replace that when you put this back but that's gonna be in your gasket set so pull your tube and your windage tray off and we can look at the bottom and the LS engine uses a crank shaft mounted oil pump it's a G rotor type pump it just has four bolts holding it on it's pretty simple to get off of there 410 holding this pump on just kind of gently work that off the key and there's your oil pump will definitely be replacing that the below that is going to be your timing chain set you can take the three bolts out of the cam they're also 10 millimeter that are holding this single roller chain on take the chain and set it aside there's also a cam plate on the front of the engine that holds the cam in and again if you have a ten millimeter with a an LS motor you own the world everything that was true about the old small-block Chevy as far as a few tools to pull it apart all the parts being interchangeable all that stuff they continued that tradition with the lt1 you guys I mean it's just it's an amazingly easy engine it's actually one of the easiest engines you'll ever build in my opinion it's actually easier than some of the early v8 engines just the ease of design and the incredibly good design that they have here is phenomenal once I get this apart I might I might just kind of walk you through all the design features of this engine and why it's so good that way before we assemble it you'll kind of get an idea of what we're working on all right to get your the bolts out of your plate that plate comes off of there and then we start looking at our six bolt mains we have six bolts and the main caps on these we have four bolts here and then they're also cross drilled on the side and there's bolts going in the side so you want to make sure you get those out as well there is a seal on the inside of the plate the plate actually blocks off the front oil gallery plugs and that's what that seal is for so that's a captured gasket type seal we're gonna want to replace that when we put this plate back on at this point we could actually pull our cam out but we're not going to do that we're gonna pull the crankshaft out because it's easier to get to the can do it if you look you can see that there are bolts on the sides these are cross drilled I usually take those out first and you guessed it they are a ten millimeter they're not really torque very tight they're just basically the Miss basically added these so that the structural integrity of the skirt here actually is kind of incorporated with the the main cap and it seems to work out really good these things can take a lot of power all right so we got to cross bolts out on that side we'll get the other ones out and we start taking our piston rod so moving our piston and rod assemblies you can actually use the balancer crank bolt in here it works pretty good to rotate the crank and then you basically want to put your piston and rod assembly as a bottom dead center always check and make sure these rods have clearance they're moving here and they're not burnt black that's an indication that there's something wrong with the bottom end of the motor this one turns really good and the connecting rods are not burnt or anything so we got it looks like we got a good short block here this was a running engine so we're just gonna bring our piston and rod assembly to bottom dead center here it's good idea to number these these are you want to keep these in order just for inspection purposes we'll probably won't reuse these but I was taken number of these now later on once I get them out if I end up cleaning these will engrave the numbers on these because paint markers are great but if these go to the bat tank those paint marks are going to disappear so we got to make sure we I don't like the number stamps where you stamp them because it shocks the the rod so I always use paint markers or an engraving tool and we'll get three and four here before we start taking them out with number all of these all right now like I said bring that two bottom dead center the ls uses a powdered metal cracked cap rod and it has an 11 millimeter cap screw they wanna get these loose and remove that cap and you'll notice that if you look closely at this the parting line is a break here it's not a it's not a machine surface sometimes the bearing will stay in there make sure you get that out of there so there's our bearing it looks really good with our cap we want to keep all this stuff in order just for inspection and possibly assembly purposes now we have a couple of tools here GM provided this you can use anything that threads in there that's soft or aluminum but the these are the GM tools and they're just going to screw in you don't even have to screw these in all the way they're basically just going to screw in and this keeps the rod from damaging the crankshaft or the cylinder wall and then you just gently tap that out of there we're gonna use a dead blow and just tap that out now the one thing you need to make sure you do is you got to catch this thing on the other side then it should come right out of there so there's your there's your stock LLS piston rod assembly this is a powdered metal forged rod and these are cast pistons though one of the weak spots on this engine is the Pistons they're actually when I say weak they're not that bad they actually are good up to seven or eight hundred horsepower it's been proven many times by a lot of people that these pistons brake around 1,000 horsepower but they weren't designed for a thousand horsepower they were designed for like five six hundred so for that level they're perfectly acceptable always take the cap that you took off of this particular connecting rod and put it back with the rod can't mix these caps up the other thing here this is real critical you guys since this is a fractured or a cap that's been broken off they didn't machine this they made it as one piece and then they broke the cap so the parting line is a break it's really important that you get this cap on right if you flip the cap on and torquing on backwards or tighten it down you'll actually ruin this connecting rod the bearing notches here there's a bearing locating knotch they go to the same side of the rod and also if you look you can see there's a rounded side to this and there's a flat side it's pretty obvious if you get it on there backwards if I were to put this on like this you can see that the the flat side of the rod and the rounded side they don't match up that's a big mismatch there so the flat sides are going to go to the same side and then of course the other side is rounded like that that's going to go to the same side and the notches again that the bearing notches are going to be on the same side of the rod and that's basically it so you're you're gonna you're gonna repeat that seven more times I'm not going to film every single piston rod being removed out of this engine I've told you this many times on other engines if you really have to see all eight of these come out just rewind this video rewind this upload seven more times and watch me take this one out seven or eight times and if that makes you feel better but I don't really think that's necessary so I'll get two Pistons out and then we'll come back and we're we're just about finished with our disassembly then we can talk more about this thing what we're going to do all right so now we've got all the piston and rod assemblies out we've got all our our main cap bolts loose it takes your main cap bolts out we're gonna replace all these and then we simply remove the main caps I put numbers on these but these are actually numbered over here in this corner from the factory one through five and the next step is to pull those main caps we want to pull them straight up out of there we don't want to like bind this skirted area down here there's a couple ways to do it there's a special tool for it or you can do it the old-school way and I'll show you both [Music] [Music] so the factory toolkit has a slide hammer that goes on here and pulls these off but if you take some decent sized pry bars or screwdrivers and just just kind of price straight up on that they come right out it's not you don't got to make a big deal about this of course the the middle cap is your thrust your thrust caps so it's going to have the thrust bearing in it now here's the tip guys before you take that rear cap out it's a good idea to take the rear cover off because the flange of this kind of hangs over that rear cap and on the other side you got this reluctor wheel here you don't want to damage this reluctor wheel it's real critical that you're careful with this so we don't want to pull this over into the reluctor wheel so take your cover off first [Applause] can be a little challenging to get to all these bolts when you've got the the engine on the engine stem like this you just kind of have to get it if you can't get a socket on you're gonna have to get a wrench in there and get those okay so once you get the bolts out of that rear cover it's just a matter of kind of tapping that cover off of there it's it comes off real easy so that your rear cover there's your gasket and your rear main seal now we have access to this this cap we can get it off without damaging that reluctor wheel gentle so you don't cause any issues with that wheel because if you damage that you're going to be in trouble so now that we've got the caps off it's basically just a matter of lifting the crankshaft straight out of there also you want to store this crank somewhere safe you want to keep this this wheel from getting bent you don't ever want to lay it on this Electra wheel or damage it or bend it so you got to put this somewhere where this is not going to get damaged because if this gets damaged you're gonna have to replace the crank take it straight out of there and that that's basically it so you just got to take just a supplement lightly tap that out of there comes right out now the camshaft the one thing about the cam is there is a there's a cam sensor up top that we need to get out before we take the cam out otherwise we're going to damage it so that is this guy right here so you want to get this thing off of here before you try to pry that crank out or pull that crank out this this should come out of there just like that so this kind of locks into the cam so you want to make sure that you don't damage this by trying to pull the cam out now as far as the camshaft goes the crank out of the way first because that way you can just very gently and easily kind of help this thing out here you want to make sure you don't damage any of these cam bearings like jamming all these journals into it so yeah just be really careful and slow and make sure that you don't force this thing out of the engine should come out we've got to kind of finagle it so it lines up with those bearings and just gently pull it through the make the cam bearings there and that is your LS 1 cam now we're down to the bare block also another thing we want to do is before we take this to the machine shop machine shop I usually do this for you you want to pull all the gallery plugs out of it there is a gallery plug in the back if you just take and you grab a hold of that thing and just pry on it a little bit it pops right out like that and GM tells you that if the o-ring is still good on this it's not broken you can actually reuse this the front covers what holds that in place so that goes in just like that but in order to clean the block at the machine shop we want this out so we can get the the chemicals and everything in for cleaning in these oil galleries there's also another plug in the front of the block you don't really need to take that out in fact I recommend you don't it's a press end plug upfront as long as you get this end of the gallery plug out that's this piece here you'll be able to clean the block but I've taken the front one all and that is it my friends the next thing I want to do is I want to talk to you a little bit about now we're gonna send all this out to the machine shop I want to talk to you about some of the architecture this block alright guys so here's the bare block after the disassembly and basically everything that we just disassembled off of this engine is pretty much sitting right here we got the crank and the rods the pan all the valvetrain parts the heads just a box is some miscellaneous bolts and so forth the front covers and that's really all there is to it one thing you're going to find out as we do this and I'm going to talk about the architecture of this engine next after I get this cleaned up a little bit but the LS engine is absolutely one of the simplest engines to build and it also has yields great power potential so once I get this cleaned up I'm going to come back and I want to talk to you about this engine a little bit

Channel: Myvintageiron7512

Views: 272,416

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Id: KEN-snvdF9U

Length: 38min 41sec (2321 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 13 2020