SDPC Gen 3 5.3L Cam Shootout!

hey guys Nick here again in Skagen Nikki today we got a pretty special treat for you guys in store we got kind of a special project going on for the next about day day and a half now in Skagen think you'll be coming with a lot of ideas for projects but we're just such a busy crew we almost never have the time to run them but you know we're kind of spoiled with having a ratio of a great team of guys and an engine dyno so we're on the way to pick up an engine right now it's me and of course mine one main production team Dan here we're going to be testing some some 5:3 combinations for you guys at a forest everybody knows how much power of five throw make that information is not very hard to find the thing is everybody's testing you know big camshafts turbochargers superchargers everyone to see how much these things can hold and believe me the hype is real they really can't hold a lot of power the thing is is what about us what about what about the normal guy you know what about me in this daily driven Silverado that we're in right now what does it take to make good power but it still has good drivability I don't have to run a big stall converter I'm not building a race truck for the street I'm building a daily driver I actually care a little bit about a gas mileage I care about towing my race car or a boat or pretty much anything and still being able to use it like it was still stock that is what we're going to be testing today which one of our camshaft combinations really produce the best all-around street power as well as a couple other tests to kind of put some Internet midst of bed so stay tuned this is going to be a really interesting video alright guys so Dana and I just got back from our other warehouse where we picked up this new or should I say reman 5.3 liter let me fill you in a little bit on the specs on this thing this is the RPO code lm4 if you're kind of wondering what that is so so we're wave it's actually a aluminum block 5.3 liter that came out for like oh 3 205 trailblazers it wasn't in production for very long and it wasn't a common option and it is the same as the iron block five threes that you'd find in a 99206 like Silverado Sierra kind of the same years suburban and Tahoes so it's nine and a half to one compression it's the exact same cylinder heads you know the small valve small port cylinder heads same crank rods Pistons kind of the whole nine yards the camshaft as well so we know these will make about the same power they rated about 285 to 290 so we've already fitted it out with a couple things to get it ready censors of course at one of the intakes we're gonna be trying stuff like that I will say we did put on a holley ol pan the pan that came on these is kind of funky for the engine dyno so we had to put on an oil pan this is a Holley 302 dash three four like classic muscle car swap so right now this is pretty much the only thing we have in this engine right now that is not stock so let's get on the dyno see what she makes all right guys we finally got it fired up on the dyno stand the break-in on a dyno is very similar to your car it's all about making sure that you check for leaks or leaks few leaks coolant leaks also get it up to temperature and just like generally performance recommends we do the same thing here your one varying loads bearing rpms you're not wanting to let it idle or go down the highway at a low load constant rpm situation and you don't want to flog it like a race car your one bearing loads bearing rpms we can't wait to get this thing braked in and give it a try all right now that we did the baseline down a run we're actually going to test the Trailblazer SS intake so we're swapping the injectors over to the rails your make another couple Falls alright guys now that we've gotten done with the dyno test first cams in this is a can actually start getting confusing for a really long time this is designed for mild power gains while still retaining like a good idle quality drivability stock torque converter which a lot of people don't want to mess with so they usually pick this specs on this early 205 and 210 at 50 thousands lift is 525 and 550 now compared to the stock one which I believe is 191 and 190 and I believe the lift is 457 in 466 so we're picking up let's pretty much call it 15 degrees of intake duration and twenty degrees of exhaust durational maintaining some stock drivability I can't wait to see how much we actually pick up with this now that we've got the cam in place we're swapping valve springs we decided to go with the pac-12 18s these are good to 600 lifts it's a little bit more than what these cams were testing today requires we're putting them in place though because we have some future plans where we might need just a little bit more spring pressure the great thing about these Springs is they utilize the stock retainers stock locks stock seals they require no machine work they are just a simple remove and replace they'll handle up to 600 lifts so we're pretty excited to be able to use these because they're very budget-friendly [Music] so we just did our first run with the SD double O 53 and it went from a about a 359 with this same take manifold in the stock cam to 389 we're gonna run another test and kind of see if we can smooth out some of the air fuel ratio kind of leaned out in the top end [Music] [Music] so we just made our second poll with the SD double O 53 cam and we actually were able to break 400 horsepower with a simple cam swap that has a mild idle and great drivability this is uh this is a really good upgrade 401 get a shot of that that's a whole heart yet I mean that's I mean saved it from the glue factory one whole horse that's pretty good though that's right ad what is it at what rpm are we kind of yeah so that's 400 horsepower from about 5,300 to around about 57 1500 pullin well past 6000 it did really well this is a this is a very impressive test alright everyone so we just finished up the SD zero zero five three cam this has been our hot truck cam for years it's something we've always recommended to people who want to pick up that makes more horsepower and torque but you know needs stock idle stock stall they they don't want any drivability issues the next set of cams are testing our other cams that we offer for five three and six litre LSE's and of course LS ones and LS sixes let me tell you about them real quick the cam that we just tested was a 205 210 on a 115 the lift was I believe 525 and 551 what we're doing here is this is our ls6 power max based on the ls6 cam but had a more budget-friendly price is it 204 222 at 551 lift on the intake and 570 lift on the exhaust we cut these on a hundred and twelve lobe separation now this is definitely probably gonna be bumping up the horsepower might be sacrificing some on the bottom in the next dyno test will tell that where we're gonna be running at the barre in though is our ls6 power max plus cam this is for customers that we're calling in they're wanting a little bit more out of it again without being too radical it might be a little too big for a 5-3 but we're kind of excited to see what this will do this is actually the same lobe separation it's the same exhaust lobe at 222 570 lift but on the intake we bumped it up to 220 and 570 lift as well so we're jumping around a good bit here we're wanting to see really what the changes we're gonna see between all these camshafts can't wait to see what it does alright so we just ran the 204 222 now this one was actually kind of surprising we had some estimates that this was not gonna pick up near as much it was probably gonna pick up about you know 10 horsepower maybe no changes in torque but actually it went from the 419 the pound-feet of torque and 401 horsepower up to 426 pound feet of torque and 430 horsepower and this is support shut it off about 6,200 rpm it actually is still pulling almost 15 inches of vacuum at idle so this is something you can still run power brakes you can still run a whole lot we're gonna do if you'll run soon and get more out of it but I think I think we've really hit our mark next one's gonna be where we take that same came and we have a bigger intake globe on it we have the 220 at 570 while everything else is staying the same the to 22 and the 570 lift on the exhaust and a 112 plus 2 on the lobe separation in advance so let's see what this thing does all right now this is the idol everybody calls about this is what they want to hear out of their truck this is a pretty big camp so let's see what this does on a 5-3 and see if it's really worth giving up bottoming torque which we think it will for that great sound wisdom at this [Music] [Music] all right so we just finished that one up and kind of like we expected we pulled it from 2,000 rpms this time spinning to 6,500 rpms trying to see really what the power band of this engine is and also see how much we're losing to the bottom end and sure enough here on the Dyna graph we can see it did lose some blow and torque especially compared to that ls6 Power Max cam this is the power Max Plus but it did really pick up some more horsepower looks like starting about 4200 which is about right it really started to pick up quite a bit more and it did kind of make peak horsepower more and a higher rpm looks like 6000 6100 we're looking at 449 horsepower and 433 pound-feet of torque but they definitely favors much more of a mid-range high mid-range - top-end if you were to put this cam in a 5-3 in a pickup truck it would run great if you had some good gears in it and honestly you're gonna need at least a 3,000 stall or higher I would say - to really make it to where you'd enjoy it but it rained pretty good but we have one more test but we'll talk about that here in a second alright guys so we finally did our last camshaft it was the ls6 power max + 220 on the intake - 22 on the exhaust now at the beginning of this test we did something kind of special we did the bone stock engine with of course dyno headers and our dyno intake setup here and that's pretty healthy for these kind of engines it's not typical what you'd see on the street but it's still good for testing we went from the stock intake manifold you see here to the Trailblazer s or new new body style sometimes what they're called as well with the 92 millimeter Nick Williams versus the stock 78 millimeter we ran the rest of the dyno test with this intake mostly because most of y'all that are doing a cam swap there's a really good chance you've already done this intake swab but as we saw in the beginning when we did the stock testing going from this intake to this intake on an all stock engine it almost picked up nothing we want to see really how much power is this intake worth so now we're gonna work backwards we're gonna take the old intake manifold and we're gonna put it right back on this engine with this big cam and it's still going to run great I want to see how much power Liuzza's so we can really see how much this intake is worth all right guys we have the old stock like 99206 Silverado intake manifold on there let's make a pole see what she does alright so we just made this is probably gonna be one of our final runs here because we just made it with the ls6 Power Max Plus cam our biggest camera we tested today with the original early style 5 3 truck intake manifold and of course this test has been done before this information it's not anywhere new but we wanted to test it back to back to kind of see for itself especially with kind of what the internet would call the small cam we think they're pretty healthy cams and sure enough we were right it went from 433 pound-feet of torque 449 horsepower with the Trailblazer SS style intake manifold with the Nick Williams 992 millimeter throttle body it went down to 422 horsepower and I believe 410 408 pound-feet of torque so it will lose it looks to be 20 or more horsepower and torque and you can see here on the dyno graph it actually lost it throughout the RPM range we did test this from 2,000 rpms again all the way to 6500 in it it's lower everywhere so if you if you have a stock cam it seems our final verdict here on this we all kind of had a debate going here our final verdict was if you have a stock 5:3 don't do the Trailblazer Trailblazer SS style intake unless you plan to cam it because on a cam 5-3 it seems like it's gonna want it alright guys so a day and a half and three cam swaps later and multiple intake swaps and we got some pretty interesting data here we're gonna kind of go over it for just a minute here because it's to be honest this surprised a lot of us the first game we tested was the hot truck torque cam this is the SD double-o 53 cam this cam made 400 and 1.6 horsepower at 5700 rpm which is 41.7 horsepower over stock it made 419 point 3 pound-feet of torque at 4700 rpm which is 25.6 pound feet of torque over stock really great came for the stock trucks you know this some of your unstuck converter this is something you could run if you wanted to you could also run it with your stock exhaust manifolds and cats so this is a great all-around you can put in a sport truck all the way up to a 4x4 you could put it in a Tahoe if your tow and you can put it in anything the one after that was the LS six power max cam this one came out at 400 in two 30.3 horsepower at 6,000 rpm which is 70 point 4 horsepower over stock it's a big jump there 426 pound-feet of torque at 4700 rpm which is 32 point 3 pound-feet over stock this is definitely about the biggest earworm with like a stock torque converter you might want to start thinking about a slightly bigger you know torque converter something like 2000 2200 rpm maybe a little bit more definitely good for a sport truck we can still be used in kind of a bigger truck with some modifications definitely something you don't want to run with really big tires are really big you know towing loads or anything like that but really great still really great all around a performance camshaft the final cam we ran was the LS six Power Max Plus as the biggest cam we ran this one made four hundred and forty seven point nine horsepower at 6100 rpm that's an 88 horsepower gain over the stock camshaft it also still made good torque 430 3.1 pound-feet of torque at 4700 rpms which is 39.4 pound-feet of torque over stock being that this is our our biggest cam and it's it's almost not really even made for the 5.3 it's really made for the LS one to the LS six the 5.7 S or maybe even a six liter we do recommend this be kind of left of some of the more lighter weight pickup truck so the the two wheel drive sport trucks maybe something like a 2500 3000 stalls somewhere in that ballpark maybe even possibly gears you know the stock 342 s aren't gonna be that great 373 s or four tens might be a better option to end here we're pretty we're pretty impressed by all of this we're pretty surprised this will not be the last you see of this engine like I said in the video earlier the reason we put pac-12 18s in here instead of the Chevrolet performance like blue LS six ls3 ls9 star valve springs that are cheaper is because this will be back in a future video and it's gonna need a little bit of help to keep those valve clothes stay tuned for that one that one's going to be a whole lot of we're gonna show you a lot of great tricks to do with maybe a little bit of boost thanks for watching guys stay tuned for more videos see you next time

Channel: Scoggin-Dickey Parts Center

Views: 71,790

Rating: 4.9529781 out of 5

Keywords: SDPC, chevrolet, chevrolet performance, dyno, engine dyno, 5.3L, gen 3 LS, truck engine, 1320video, sloppy mechanics, matt happpel, David holdener

Id: rzzGidbDhvY

Length: 21min 42sec (1302 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/dont_bro_me_bro]

We tested some entry level cams and intakes on our engine dyno using the common early 5.3, with some great results!

This is pretty good info for you guys that have a truck or a swapped hot rod with a junkyard 5.3 and are looking for easy gains.

Test 1: 5.3 LM4/LM7 with stock cam and early truck intake

Test 1b: swapped to TBSS intake and 92mm TB

Test 2: swapped to Hot Truck Torque cam

Test 3: swapped to LS6 Power Max cam

Test 4a: swapped to LS6 Power Max PLUS cam

Test 4b: same cam but swapped back to early truck intake

All tests ran with 1-3/4 stepped dyno headers, large short ram intake, and electric water pump with no front accessory drive.

Hot Truck Torque cam: 205/210, 0.550/0.525, 115

LS6 Power Max cam: 204/222, 0.551/0.570, 112

LS6 Power Max PLUS cam: 220/222, 0.570/0.570, 112