5.3...Nah It's a 5.7 Now.

[littlemissGTO]

Right after the Dream Cruise I started my final semester at school. It was high performance engine building and machining. Our projects this year were 5.3 LM4s. Our class was pretty small, 12 students total, so we were paired up. One student dropped out so one guy was left by himself. We all picked engines off of a pallet that came from a junkyard, so we all started with a level playing field. The goal was to make as much torque and horsepower as possible from 3000 to 6500 RPMs. Everything was the same on the engines except for the camshafts and port work. My partner ported the heads on our engine, as I couldn't make it to the cylinder head room (second floor) due to ankle surgery and crutches. This thread will be photo heavy so enjoy.

We reused the stock rods, and learned how to hone them. Once they were honed I assembled the rods and pistons.

A couple of us had mishaps with the boring bar mic and ended up learning how to sleeve a block. Here's my instructor showing us what to do.

 

[littlemissGTO]

Now that all of the sleeving and machine work has been done. We did mock up and moved on the the build room.

ARP head studs installed:

Coming together nicely.

Cam numbers I picked out:

This intake and carb setup was pretty cool.

All set up and ready to go on the dyno cart.

All ready to go. Notice the coils in these photos are red. What I didn't know was that two of those coils were bad and it caused our engine to only run on 6 cylinders.

 

[littlemissGTO]

Our engine was the first one finished and on the dyno, so no one really knew what to expect. I said we'd make 425/425. Other crazy guesses were thrown out there, but I didn't want to set myself up for disappointment.
These were our numbers after a partial pull:

We finished up with less than 400/400 and I was a bit disappointed. Then it was time to get our engine off of the dyno and make room for the next group. That's when we noticed this:

That made me pull the number 7 plug and this is what it looked like:

So we swapped coils for the other group and had to wait another day to put our engine back on the dyno. Checking only 1 spark plug wasn't a good idea...LOL So back to the dyno we went:

The numbers were way better.

We had to run 20W-50 our engines because we've got a 55 gallon drum of the stuff. Pretty sure our numbers would be better on 5W-30. All in all I had an absolute blast and learned a ton. Here's a video of a couple of the power pulls:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvU4vIBLSJM&list=UULoYzs65yugex9K6vOgrCbg&index=1

 

[Hugger Z]

Nice work Shauna! Looks like a lot of fun and good stuff to learn.

 

[cjmatt]

sweet, so whatd u guys get to do with the motors?

 

[smooth]

Awesome!! Great job

 

[Scooter70]

sweet, so whatd u guys get to do with the motors?

Drop it in the Goat?

 

[BIGCOWL-IMP]

Good job and did your motor make the most h.p. ?

 

[TopElimn8r]

What fuel were you running on that. Looking at the A/F numbers I would expect it to be E85.
If it was on pump gas it was way too rich and has some power left in it.
I assume they do not run individual exhaust thermocouples which is why you didn't notice that you had 2 dead cylinders instantly.

Either way it sounds like you enjoyed it.

 

[littlemissGTO]

sweet, so whatd u guys get to do with the motors?

I'm pretty sure that the one I built will be going into a 55 Chevy that belongs to an instructor in another department. Two will probably be torn down next semester. One was is a time bomb. Heck that group didn't even get to run their engine on the dyno, and the last one didn't get finished because that kid was a wimp.

Drop it in the Goat?

Nah, the Goat is a 6.0 would be a bit of a displacement drop for me...LOL

Good job and did your motor make the most h.p. ?

Came in second. I was 8HP and 8TQ behind the winner.

What fuel were you running on that. Looking at the A/F numbers I would expect it to be E85.
If it was on pump gas it was way too rich and has some power left in it.
I assume they do not run individual exhaust thermocouples which is why you didn't notice that you had 2 dead cylinders instantly.

Either way it sounds like you enjoyed it.

The A/f numbers are deceiving. We didn't have O2 sensors hooked up because there were no bungs welded into the headers. The engines ran on 93 octane. We also didn't touch the headers like we normally do or use an infared temperature gauge to see what the temps of the header tubes were. That would have told us there was a problem right then.
Yeah I enjoyed the class immensely. I wish it was a semester or two longer. There's that much more that could be taught.

 

[Mclovin]

what school is this ?? I took high performance engine machining at Ferris back when and we supplied our own engines to work on.. But I like the sounds of this class a lot more..

 

[littlemissGTO]

Ranken Technical College in St. Louis, Mo. The High Performance Race Technology program is 2 semesters in addition to the Automotive Maintenance Technology program. The AMT program is 4 semesters long, but you can switch over to HPRT after 3 semesters, which is what I did.

 

[86CamaroZ28]

Yeah I enjoyed the class immensely. I wish it was a semester or two longer. There's that much more that could be taught.

Thats the problem with northwestern ohio's high performance degree. The classes are too short to get into any real learning. You spend most of your time brushing on topics. I was disappointed with my end result. Its seemed like they expected you to have a huge hotrod background before you enrolled. Most of the kids there were fresh out of highschool.

I didn't even have enough time to machine my own block in my high performance engine building class. :shake:

A program like what your doing would be fun though. You get to see it from start to finish. Looks like fun!

 

[FlyLike]

Awesome!

 

[WayFastWhitey]

Nice work!

 

[jordanbmx]

Thats the problem with northwestern ohio's high performance degree. The classes are too short to get into any real learning. You spend most of your time brushing on topics. I was disappointed with my end result. Its seemed like they expected you to have a huge hotrod background before you enrolled. Most of the kids there were fresh out of highschool.

I didn't even have enough time to machine my own block in my high performance engine building class. :shake:

A program like what your doing would be fun though. You get to see it from start to finish. Looks like fun!

And it was 1400 a session when i was attending. thats why i dropped out.

 

[littlemissGTO]

Wow. My tuition was roughly $7500 books and lab time included for both semesters.

 

[BIGCOWL-IMP]

How did you go from 5.3 to 5.7 ??

 

[fyoung7]

Thats the problem with northwestern ohio's high performance degree. The classes are too short to get into any real learning. You spend most of your time brushing on topics. I was disappointed with my end result. Its seemed like they expected you to have a huge hotrod background before you enrolled. Most of the kids there were fresh out of highschool.

Reminds me of the old motech in and out before you know what the hell you did

nice post love the pics

 

[littlemissGTO]

How did you go from 5.3 to 5.7 ??

Bore the block out.