Thread: My Little Red Muscle Truck

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2 mpg would be about a 10% increase on most trucks so I guess to a manufacturer trying to meet ever tightening CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) requirements of the EPA, it makes sense. Never mind the long term downsides to the consumer.

Here's a crazy story that shows just how out of touch federal regulators are. When the new version of the Pontiac GTO, which was just a rebadged Australian Holden Monaro, was first sold in the US, some buyers were noticing amazing fuel mileage from it's non-DOD 5.7 LS engine on the highway. Turns out those clever Aussies had included a separate fuel and timing mapping strategy that allowed the ECU to add timing and lean the fuel mixtures out drastically ( as high as 16 0r 17 to 1!)under certain light load cruise conditions. This apparently resulted in big MPG gains, but as it turns out very slightly raised nitrogen oxide emissions. This extra pollution only occurred at these special cruise conditions and was just a very small amount over the allowable limit, otherwise the engine was clean. GM was forced to disable this feature on any existing car that came back in for service and to completely eliminate it on future models. I think it is called super cruise or lean cruise. So for a slight increase in emissions we could have been saving who knows how much gas nationally if this scheme had been implemented on all LS powered vehicles. The fuel savings alone would have probably lowered total emissions substantially. Fuel not burned doesn't pollute. A crazy example of the regulators not seeing the forest for the trees!

Ok gang. It's been awhile. With everything that was going on taking care of my mom's affairs and making a few needed mods to the Healey, it was June before anything really got rolling on this project. Of course, that’s when things started falling apart on the truck “plan”.

I have a few short updates already done and will be posting them in the next few days and hope to stay current. The project has kinda started rolling good. Maybe next year will be better than this one was. Here’s the first up date. More to follow soon.

Since the engine and transmission were important parts of the build and sitting in the way in the middle of my shop, I decided to get them cleaned up, checked out and ready to install. That’s when I discovered that the engine would not make more than about a half of a turn before stopping dead. It took much fiddling with converter bolts to get the transmission separated from the engine since I couldn’t get to all the bolts and had to take them out one flat at a time with a long open end wrench. What a pain!

After getting the engine on the stand I decided to pull the heads and get a look at the bores. Now, you know, I’m not an engine expert by any means, but I don’t think the cylinder should look like this!



Needless to say, this was a gut punch. Not only was it full of rust, but there were pits rusted in the bore deep enough that it would have to go .060 over to safely clean up. Might as well go to 6.2 pistons which would be .065 over. I really didn’t want to go that far over unless I was forced to and I thought there might be a better engine out there somewhere. Sooo, the search started for engine number two.

I had my sights set on a 6.0 or 6.2 and passed on several 5.3’s. A 5.3 would probably have done anything I needed to do, but I’m old school and wanted the bigger engine.

After several weeks of looking and calling, I found an early 2000’s 6.0 in a van at a salvage yard about 30 miles from my house. I had made up my mind that I would not buy anything else unless I could hear it run or it came with a guarantee. I have known the salvage yard owner for many years and he gave me a very good price on the engine and trans combo. It fired right up and seemed to run well. He was pretty sure that the engine had been replaced at some time in the past and considering how it ran, I had to agree. The transmission went in gear and everything seemed OK there. Good enough! The next week I had it sitting in my shop.

Shame about engine #1.. but sh..tuff happens right?