Elemental Garage
04-16-2022, 03:34 PM
Hey all,
I have a friend who we are helping do the LS3 swap into his 68 Camaro. He had his crate engine and transmission sent directly to my location a few months back. I'm not sure what company he went through, but I guess they had a 580hp package with a FiTech intake, wiring, etc, so that's what he purchased. We unwrapped it and took a cursory look at the engine, and the other boxes of wiring, ECU, etc. and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, but we missed something big.
Fast forward to today, and we're bolting plates to it to hook up the engine crane and move the engine and transmission over to the car. We notice we could see the intake ports below the FiTech intake. It quickly became apparent that the shop installed LS2 heads on an LS3 block (confirmed the block via the numbers on the back). However they then bolted an LS3 FiTech intake to it. So quality control and idiocrasy aside of letting an engine out the door with that mismatch, is there any performance reason why someone would install LS2 heads on an LS3 block? I can't seem to reason any, and my thinking is that someone was being extremely lazy, put the wrong heads on, and didn't give the intake a second look after installing it.
This is my first LS3 (have done a few LS1s though) so I'm not keen on why anyone would put older-style heads on a newer block, but I'm open to learning something if there is a solid reason.
Cheers all!
I have a friend who we are helping do the LS3 swap into his 68 Camaro. He had his crate engine and transmission sent directly to my location a few months back. I'm not sure what company he went through, but I guess they had a 580hp package with a FiTech intake, wiring, etc, so that's what he purchased. We unwrapped it and took a cursory look at the engine, and the other boxes of wiring, ECU, etc. and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, but we missed something big.
Fast forward to today, and we're bolting plates to it to hook up the engine crane and move the engine and transmission over to the car. We notice we could see the intake ports below the FiTech intake. It quickly became apparent that the shop installed LS2 heads on an LS3 block (confirmed the block via the numbers on the back). However they then bolted an LS3 FiTech intake to it. So quality control and idiocrasy aside of letting an engine out the door with that mismatch, is there any performance reason why someone would install LS2 heads on an LS3 block? I can't seem to reason any, and my thinking is that someone was being extremely lazy, put the wrong heads on, and didn't give the intake a second look after installing it.
This is my first LS3 (have done a few LS1s though) so I'm not keen on why anyone would put older-style heads on a newer block, but I'm open to learning something if there is a solid reason.
Cheers all!