GIRTHQUAKE said:iansane said:AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) said:In reply to RacetruckRon :
I've been a brake system engineer for longer than you've been alive. We should talk.
I feel like admitting that on this forum will make you a popular penpal for lots of individuals.
Not gonna lie, I have this detail saved on a sticky note on my computer "just in case".
Not gonna lie, I'm OK with that.
Cylinder #6 spun a bearing real bad.
And the oil was a glitter bomb. Crank needs machine work, I'm working on balancing the cost of that vs building the LS3 block I have in the garage.
There was also a surprising lack of oil in the pan so that was a big problem too. I'm going to pull the heads to see how the rings look. I'm pretty set on building that LS3 now but I'd like to know why my oil level is so low compared to when I last checked it a coupke hundred miles ago
That sucks but I guess it is a good excuse for the turbo build?
I'll start with this, your wife sounds like a very very patient lady! Keep her.
And sorry. Sucks. Idk what to tell you you don't already know. Build the ls3
More carnage was discovered after we got the heads off. Cylinders #3 and #7 had what looks like detontation damge to me and one of the pistons is missing a bit of the ring land. Unfortunately this also damaged the head on the Odd bank.
Here's a few pictures of today's carnage. I had two buddies come over to help me strip it down. We made quick work and had the engine out and on a stand in under 4 hours.
Here's the current plan. I'm going to repair the LS3 block (I bought it with a broken starter ear), add a cheap L92 rotating assembly from a buddy, a mismatch set of 243/799 heads and my current cam and valvetrain. I have 823 rectangle port heads but I want to stick with the cathedral port heads since I already have a LS6 intake and I want the compression bump. This combo should be a 11.6:1 static compression, that's a spicy meatball. I will upgrade my injectors over the winter so I can run E85 to take full advantage of the higher compression.
The last couple days have kinda sucked, but my buddy Nate had a nice outlook on this setback. He told me that blowing up an engine is really nothing compared to the rest of this build, small potatoes. I'm looking forward to building this thing up with the LS3, this thing has potential to be a monster next year. The friend of a friend that towed me home last night has a LS7 powered Sonoma and won the LSFest truck class a couple years ago. After talking with him about that experience my goal for 2021 is to work on my driving, dial the truck in, and compete in the truck class at LSFest.
Ls3 will be good 
hard to stay positive but like your buddy said it's just and engine swap now, nothing compared to the rest
In reply to java230 :
I don't know why she puts up with me honestly, she's a saint.
Your buddy is the buddy we all need. Just keep going.
I had a Eureka moment today shortly after I was having a mini panic episode about having a lot to do on the LS3 build before the truck goes away for the winter. We have about 5-6 weeks before the roads will potentially have salt on them (we got 8" of snow on Halloween last year) and the truck is going to live in the in-laws lake house garage this winter so the wife can park in the garage.
There's a lot of little differences between the Gen3 L33 and the Gen4 LS3 that I wasn't accounting for. I also would like to take my time on the engine build and try my hand at porting the heads. I have a 4.8 sitting in storage that was going to be the truck's engine originally until I stumbled upon a cheap L33. Let's just throw that in there and get it running again, it makes too much sense which is probably why I didn't think of it at first. So that's sitting in the back of my Jeep right now and I'll be throwing that in the truck this week and hopefully have it on the road again soon.
In reply to RacetruckRon :
I mean, it's not like it'll be underpowered with a 4.8...
On that note, the airflow (requirement) differences between the 5.3 and the 4.8 have been puzzling the crap out of me lately (I have one of each, both with the same LS9 cam, but one has a truck intake, the other a Dorman LS6). Tuning should be interesting, but using the same intake should help your situation at this point. Aim for some richness this time. Is the same thumper cam going in?
In reply to rustomatic :
That 4.8 has a stock LS1 cam in it. The big thumper is going into the LS3 this winter. My AFR targets and timing in the tune were both conservative and had nothing to do with my engine failure. 285k mile bearings, oil consumption and running the tank dry are what caused my issues.
Update: I have the 4.8 and trans in the truck. I hooked up the minimum sensors and wires to crank the engine over to check oil pressure. One of my good friends has a known good 5.3 taking up space in his garage so if this 4.8 had no oil pressure I was going to run over to his place and offer him free storage of his engine this winter.
Luckily that won't be needed. It took a little bit to build oil pressure but once the system was full primed I had 46psi of oil pressure cranking. That's more than the L33 ever made even while running.
I'm confident enought to put the exhaust and the rest of the ancillaries back on now. I need to get the truck running this week, and clear out the storage unit so the truck can go in there at the end of this month for the winter.
I've been playing with photogrammetry a little more seriously lately. I'm trying to get some decent scan data of a few different components so I have plenty of truck stuff I can do remotely this winter. I got a copy of Metashape that fell off a truck which has been a huge help with getting better data. The program will generate these targets that you can print out of paper and lay on or around your work piece which makes the photo alignment process way easier and more precise. The target also double as a scale bar which allows the mesh to be exported at the correct scale factor and saves a lot of time in CAD. This took a couple tries to get useable results, there's a lot of factors for someone like myself who has no experience in either photography or photogrammetry.
I am mostly concentrating on the tailshaft housing and the section of the shift linkage hidden under the inspection plate. The project scope here is to design and implement a toploader style shifter that can bolt to the transmission in place of the inspection plate. There's 1 or 2 people out there that offer a solution to this but they are $5-600 for the shifter. I was getting close on this project this spring but shifted focus to getting the truck running instead.
I trimmed and decimated the mesh so that the file was more managable and would be able to be pulled into NX. I went from a 560mb mesh that had over a million vertices to a 112mb STL with only 300k points. It took a little bit to get it aligned to my liking and then I checked the scale with a part that I designed previously that I know fits the physical transmission. Not bad for using my wife's Canon T6i and the cheapo 18-55mm starter lens that came with it. I might gamble on a chinesium 35mm prime lens and keep my eye out for a cheap full frame DSLR this winter. This tech is super cool and there's definitely a lot of room to improve upon these results just with practice and a better understanding of the setup.
Cool project. This is an area where mechanical engineers really get to do some cool looking stuff.
Stop that 18-55 kit zoom down to f8 or f11 and let the tripod allow for as long of an exposure as you need with the ISO set to 100 or 200 if you're having issues with distortion or general softness etc with current shots. A true macro lens would be preferable to just a cheap prime due to less field curvature and probably better corner performace. If you do go looking for your own camera for this sort of thing, make sure whatever you buy is a true EF lens between now and then, so you don't have to worry about EF vs EF-S lens/body incompatiblity. Not a lot of 35mm macro lenses out there but lots of 50's.
In reply to pres589 (djronnebaum) :
The set of photos I got good data from were ISO 100, f8, plenty of shutter time and had the lens locked at 35mm. I've done quite a bit of reading on the subject just need to play around with a few things on some future projects. Oh and I need a bigger hard drive this stuff is very data intensive.
I saw this on instagram as well, pumped to see you doing this. I had looked back through both your thread and the GT Wreck Racing team's thread to find whatever I could on this version of scanning/mapping, it looks awesome..
The set of photos I got good data from were ISO 100, f8, plenty of shutter time and had the lens locked at 35mm
before you get another lens I'd try the one you have but with a more moderate focal length like 45-50mm.
Most zoom lenses will have the worst performance (distortion, softness, light falloff, etc) at the wide end of their range, but can be pretty good at longer focal lengths. 35mm is not too wide but you may get better files by zooming out a touch. Also should be sharper at f11 or f16, where the extra depth of field will help.
In reply to jerrysarcastic (Forum Supporter) :
He seems to be using the lens at or near optimum inre: sharpess at a zoomed focal length and f-stop;
https://www.imaging-resource.com/lenses/canon/ef-s-18-55mm-f3.5-5.6-is-stm/review/
f11 is about as stopped down as one would want to go with nearly all lenses to get to greatest sharpness, and it seems like a lot of modern glass is better at f5.6 than f11. f16 is rarely where you'll find best sharpness assuming the lens is of decent quality and condition (I have one lens that seems most sharp at f16 and it's really not that sharp at any aperture).
jerrysarcastic (Forum Supporter) said:The set of photos I got good data from were ISO 100, f8, plenty of shutter time and had the lens locked at 35mm
before you get another lens I'd try the one you have but with a more moderate focal length like 45-50mm.
Most zoom lenses will have the worst performance (distortion, softness, light falloff, etc) at the wide end of their range, but can be pretty good at longer focal lengths. 35mm is not too wide but you may get better files by zooming out a touch. Also should be sharper at f11 or f16, where the extra depth of field will help.
I took 3 different sets of photos to try and get that mesh. One set at 24mm (too much background), one at 50mm (too zoomed in) and 35mm seemed to be just right. I'm going to play with the f stop on the next scanning project.
Just dropping in to say sorry about the set back, but I'm really enjoying the thread!
Looking forward to the rebuild and the CAD stuff-
damen
In reply to badwaytolive :
Blowing the engine up was a good humbling experience, I hadn't totally embarrassed myself in front of my wife for a while
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