My LS Swap Mistakes That Cost Me Thousands

these are the top LS swap mistakes that are costing you a ton of money number one is poor planning this is what killed me on this swap um as you can see it doesn't even look like it's complete that's cuz I'm ripping back into everything um I had this car completely running operational look great building boo making power all kinds of fun and I started painting the car the show no room for show just I did not like how everything was kind of thrown together the harness was kind of laid up all over the place uh my PCM didn't have a good mounting location uh the exhaust sucked I was it it was just terrible so we'll start with number one the worst thing you can do is not have your plan built out you need to know before you even start you need to know exactly what what you're going to do you know what transmission you're going to run you need to know all of that stuff this motor I got from a uh from a junkyard off Facebook was out of a 200 like4 Tahoe um didn't know how many miles it had on it or anything like that so when I showed up to the junkyard this thing was um they had the harness all like just jacked up you could tell that they ripped the thing out of the out of that Tahoe in a few minutes so um it was just a mess I'd much rather go to the junkyard and pull it myself or get a donor vehicle that's the best way to do it um so I had this harness that had all kinds of damage done to it all the I had you know sensors and stuff that were banged up and then thrown it on the fork Clift it was just a mess uh transmission I knew I didn't want to run the 4l60 so I wanted to do a turbo 400 here's one my first mistake there I uh found a great deal on a uh turbo 400 on Facebook it was like 300 bucks and um was told it was rebuilt and everything was good with it so I went and picked that up and not knowing any anything about this stuff um I'm still learning as I go um I picked up a Bop and for you Pontiac guys to know what that is it's a completely different bolt pattern from the ls now they do have adapter plates so I ran an adapter plate to make that Bop transmission work problem is that back that that adapter plate pushed the the uh it pushed the torque converter too far away so I had to run these um I had to run these spacers to get the torque converter um to have the right depth and what ended up happening is that torque converter was barely in the pump so um it fried that transmission so fast this is where the torque converter was in the in that pump housing and it was slipping out it slipped out and it tore the pump apart and basically made it to where the torque was no longer locking up with the pumps had no pressure and basically the the whole transmission fried fast forward a few months later after blowing up that Bop transmission I went and got a u a regular turbo 400 case and I took all the good parts out there all it just fried the clutches so I did a rebuild kit learned how to rebuild the transmission myself and finally got all that back together and um car was running great all right moving on to the next mistake and that is making things harder than they have to be so as I was painting the car and doing my body work I was doing the door adjustment and I was having trouble getting to these bolts here for your um your door hinges and I had the door the doors were kind of sagging so um I kept fighting and fighting it and finally I was like screw it I'm just going to take these this these fenders off so I went ahead and took the fenders off which I was avoiding the whole time I was doing the ls swap I didn't want to rip the fend fenders off and have the front end off the car I just wanted to toss the motor in there on a Saturday and be rolling on Sunday and that is the biggest take cuz as I was doing my turbo kit which you can see is being redone right now because I had the fenders in in the way um I couldn't really get in there and properly weld up the turbo kit um I had some like you know flanges and stuff and originally I had the um I had the manifold coming up through here and then I had this giant you know 4in exhaust right here and I could not get the exhaust between the frame rail and the motor over herez there's no room so I was stuck going on the outside of the frame which when I did that I went straight down through here um which limited me on wheels and tires which is going to be changed eventually so I knew it was going to be a problem down the road but for now I was like it'll probably work but what end up happening is since I was going over here I couldn't get that 4in exhaust high enough off the ground just driving down the road it was scraping everywhere every time I hit a bump I was sit in Sparks um super frustrating and um not really good for like a a daily kind of street car just something your toy around the weekend every time you hit a bump I don't want to be hit in the exhaust so um now that I had the fenders off I was like all right now we can now I can go ahead and redo this turbo kit so um I was in the middle of redoing the turbo kit end up having some ankle surgery so um kind of took a pause on this and started doing some of the body work you might seen some of my other videos I was doing the uh the over there so if you're going to do the ls swap go through the extra effort go ahead and take off your side fenders take off the front bumper especially if you're doing a turbo then you'll be able to um you know do your intercooler piping it won't all be in the way everything will be so much better cuz I just I basically I kind of learn as I go I just threw this thing together so now everything's going to be going together the right way it's going to be so much cleaner so the next thing kind of in line with that uh with that planning is know what you want to do from the get-go so um start from the uh beginning I was going to do um I wanted a nice intake I didn't want to have the ugly truck plastic intake so I went and bought this super cool um the Holly sniper LS intake it was beautiful mounted up perfect but I was being a cheap ass so since I was being cheap uh I bought like Deca injectors um cuz I knew you know the stock ones weren't going to work for the uh for the turbo and I could not get this thing to tune at all it would uh I I would play with that HP tuners you know I watched hundreds of videos um no matter what I could do the thing would not build boost I was having all kinds of problems uh I I think it was those injectors I couldn't I could not get them to work so I went another route and I wish I would have done this from the get-go honestly one that's um I can't tune so so After figuring out that I'm not the best tuner in the world and I didn't want to spend $1,000 on injectors and also the uh probably had I had that junk harness and that PCM that was giving me issues too I had it lock up on me once I had to do the little pin trick to get it to unlock um once I got all that figured out so after playing with the uh that Holly sniper intake for a few months and fighting the harness and sensor problems and find the PCM that thing locked up on me a few times where I had to do the uh like it wouldn't read or write from HP tuners I had to do the uh little pin reset trick so after doing that I decided screw it I'm just going to throw a carburetor on there I've always wanted do a blowr carburetor I think it's kind of cool there's some other benefits to it um so I got the uh MSD ignition box and through the this carburetor on there and it was night and day it was better almost instantly I mean the car woke up it was building boost running great so love it the everything was set up perfectly it just the car the engine bay was just not how it wanted it it was just kind of still kind of sloppy I had the battery up here still that was taking up space um with the turbo out I had this fender well on this side was removed and the driver side it was still on there so when you open the hood it just looked kind of funky you had you know you had a fender well on one side not on the other um I'm probably not going to run them I may do a custom one later on once I get everything set up so now I'm going to run the uh the blowr setup and there's so many benefits to that um number one as the air enters through here it's going to pull you know it's going to go right through the fu fuel so your charged temperatures plummet um a lot of people don't even run intercoolers since I already bought one and had it you know everything set up for it I'm going to go ahead and do that I'm going to run the intercooler um right now it's on pump gas I may go ahead and convert this over to E85 which isn't too hard there's a ton of videos out there once I understand it better and feel comfortable I may make a video on that on my own so that is my top LS mistakes um you guys drop a comment down below let me know some of the goofy stuff you guys did um it was a fun process and learning so um hopefully this video gets to you guys and maybe you can avoid some of these mistakes I made and save a ton of money

Channel: Bad Larry Motors

Views: 14,078

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Id: FYAINhCLroA

Length: 9min 37sec (577 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2024