A clean, shiny engine block was our reward after a night of disassembly.
The seller had taken the heads and accessories off, but included them in a separate box. Maybe they wouldn't fit in his trunk?
It might not look pretty, but our engine was in surprisingly good shape.
We also received a ton of parts in the deal. We haven't checked, but we're pretty sure there's a full engine there.
We didn't even find much oil sludge. Modern engines are amazing feats of engineering.
At the end of the evening, we parked our old parts on the bench. It was time to start ordering new pieces.
Normally we’d start a project by buying a car, but this time we did things differently: We started with an engine. Why? Simple: We want to LS-swap something, but aren’t exactly sure what yet. So, we picked this LS up from a forum member for just $400, knowing only that it was supposedly complete, but in pieces. We weren’t willing to chance using an engine that’d been taken apart and stored in a shed without rebuilding it, so we signed up for an engine rebuilding class at our local tech school, Daytona State College. For just $750–about the price of the machine work we’d need–we were signed up to spend two nights each week rebuilding our own engine from start to finish, with full access to all of the tools we’d need to do so.
Step one: Disassembly. As we tore into our LS and started taking measurements, we determined that it had never been rebuilt, and was actually in surprisingly good shape. It’s a 1999 LS1, which means 5.7 liters of sweet American displacement for whatever we end up putting it in.
This is going to be a fun project.
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Those aluminum blocks can't be bored more than 0.003" I think. The truck blocks are heavier but can be bored, glad yours doesn't need it! My 6.0L from a van still had visible cross hatch in the top travel of the rings, you are right, marvels of engineering!
That is a fantastic idea. 750$ to learn to fish. Instead buying from the fish market everyday. Thanks for the idea.
Did not know there was such a thing, but what a great concept
Learn to fish? Thats like teaching someone how to operate a fishing trawler and then giving them a length of line and a hook and sending him out into the world. Unless they plan to buy a machine shop, where are they going to have access to all those cool machines? Sure they will walk away with some assembly knowledge, but don't most of us on this board already have that. Still looks like a fun way to spend a few evenings.
Check your local community colleges for classes. We did a lot of work on our challenge car in a class like what Tom did.
I've been trying to check my local college for classes as a way to work / learn on my project but finding nothing.. Maybe I'm just bad at finding it as Raleigh NC has like 1,000 colleges in the surrounding area it seems.
local classes are good... not saying otherwise.... BUT a shop with over 200 years of collective (6 people) experience is a complete different story
In reply to tr8todd:
Let's see you come up with a better analogy.
In reply to Coldsnap:
You might also want to look for Vocational/Tech schools. Also, community education programs done by local towns/voc-tech schools.
The Wake Tech main campus used to have rebuilding classes several years ago. Not sure where you live in Wake County, but check Durham Tech and Johnston Comm College as well.
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