Ever since I first got my truck I’ve had the itch to mod it. I figured at first that I would be happy with the usual bolt-ons like headers, intake, tune, and maybe a drop. Of course I was wrong and eventually did a cam swap. Shortly after I had transmission issues and decided to stop modding the truck for a little while.
This didn’t last long since my friends had cammed camaros, firebirds, and trucks. Around April I ended up piecing together my latest build which consisted of a TR224 cam, fully built 4L60E, and a Yank TRT3000 torque converter. We did the swap and after a few small electrical issues with the transmission I had the rear differential blow up on me. I knew that eventually the stock G80 would blow up, but it was horrible timing since I just put several thousand into the truck. I called up a member on PerformanceTrucks.net (AxisT6 aka Brian) and ordered a Detroit TrueTrac with Yukon 4.10 gears. There goes another thousand dollars…
So after everything was installed and broken in I finally got to the tuning side of everything. The shifts were a little firm on the low end so I lowered the shift pressure a bit, but everything is still a little more firm than most would be comfortable with. I always thought that I wouldn’t like to daily drive a “built” car/truck but it kinda grows on you. A little idle surge here and there won’t hurt anyone, right? Telling the passengers after the first 1-2 shift that your truck really is fine and it’s meant to be like that is a little annoying sometimes, but it’s all good because I can hang with stock GT’s on the street. After doing some fine tuning with the VE and MAF tables I finally had everything where I wanted it, and I also experimented with some WOT converter lockup which was fun. Putting down 350rwhp with the converter locked up sure sounds and feels good, but when you drive a buddy’s cam only Fbody it almost makes you sick. For some reason I never thought “…damn this thing is really heavy and to make it really ‘fast’ it’s going to take some serious horsepower…” After rolling around for almost 6 months with my current mods my truck kept feeling “slower” although I knew it was a lot faster than it used to be. Why can’t we just be happy with 350rwhp?
I eventually want to be in the 12′s which requires some good power (450-500rwhp), but I want to keep it fairly tame. I could go radical and build a 408 stroker, but I really like the idea of making “efficient” horsepower with newer technology. Cathedral intake ports are “out” and the new L92 rectangular ports are “in” apparently. When the new Gen IV truck motors came out I read up a little on them but had no idea how much better the head designs are now. Basically, here’s the plan: pickup a 6.0 (LQ4/LQ9), get some L92 heads, L92 intake, a new cam, and a Dr. X adapter then call it a day. Sounds easy, right? Finding the L92 parts has proven a little more difficult since Car Craft did a great writeup of 550hp on a budget. I’ll post some more information in an official “project” post later.
photo courtesty of carcraft.com