Gen I SBC - LSX Retrofit

[Camaro Zach]

so i'm sure some of you remember the dune buggy a friend of mine and myself built a few months back. https://www.pro-touring.com/forum/showthread.php?t=14726&highlight=buggy

It has a pretty much stock rebuilt 350 with about 50 miles on it...
4 bolt mains
stock rods
stock crank
hyper pistons
and 882 heads
so it's nothing special but is going to be a learning experience as well as something to toy around with.

To make it possible we have an 02 truck harness, coils, TB, and pcm.
Here is the plan:
For the Crank position sensor i took the reluctor ring? (don't know the name of it) off a junk ls1 crank I had which will be sanwiched between the harmonic balancer and crank pulley of the SBC. Then ill build a small bracket to hold the actual sensor.

For the Cam Position sensor i plan on cutting an LSx camshaft apart and fastening the part the sensor reads to an old dist. That way everything will be external and easily modified/removed/transplanted.

The only hard thing I see with those sensors will be getting them alligned perfectly where their supposed to read in the tdc position.

For the intake we were going to just modify a edelbrock air gap but have now decided to just fabricate a new aluminum intake manifold from scratch (might change as i am lazy lol)

From there the coil packs should be straight forward and the wiring will be next.

If anyone has a wiring diagram for an 02 truck harness it is greatly appreciated. ill have pics of the various parts soon.
Sorry for the long/unorganized post
Zach

[Ralph LoGrasso]

Retrofitting the LSX electronics onto a gen 1 SBC...that is very cool, Zach; and definitely no small undertaking as it's all custom. Keep us updated.

[Camaro Zach]

Thanks Ralph, hopefully it will look good on my resume for this years projects.


I got one of the maintnance guys at the local community college to turn down a blank for the center of the reluctor ring for me since I don't have a lathe. So now all I have to do with it is drill the 3 holes for the crank pulley, index the ring on the crank/harmonic balancer, run a few small welds on the perimeter, and mount the actual sensor.

Hopefully ill have a larger update next week sometime

[pist0lpete]

You may also want to look into like an MSD crank trigger that is made for a gen1 SBC. For no more power than you are making however I can't really see that the advantage of Coil on plug would be work it. There is the cool factor but really those coils are ugly and most guys are relocating them to clean up the engine bay. However, it will definitely be cool and a big improvement to adapt Fuel Injection to the motor. What engine management are you planning on using? The 5.3L truck computer would be quite a feat to make work as all the sensors it requires etc. Instead you could go with something like a F.A.S.T XFI or Bigstuff3 etc.

[Camaro Zach]

Well I need to use the crank position sensor from the LSx based motors because that is the signal the pcm needs. The signal produced by other Gen1 SBC crank triggers are different and the PCM will not read them correctly.

As for performance advantages... none really the motor is pretty much stock rebuilt and will never make much power especially with the heads. It's just an experiment and i'm not great with tuning carbs.

Other reasons for doing it are: I can familiarize myself with HP Tuners and tuning of an LSX based FI so by the time my camaro is running it'l be a breeze to tune.

F.A.S.T XFI or Bigstuff3 etc. all defeat the purpose of the project and the LSX retrofit will cost a fraction of those setups. (i will have it running for under $600 guarenteed)

And also i'd like to look back on this and be able to say "back when i was 18 yrs old I built a dune buggy from scratch, and 5 months later I converted it to my own fuel injection system"

[pist0lpete]

What are you gonna do about MAP sensors and knock sensors and MAF and all that. You could get one of the msd/edlebrock carb conversion box's to get rid of the MAF and be able to run a carb. Or if you plan on running Fuel Injection you wouldn't have to worry about that. This is definitely and interesting proposition and I would like to see it come to fruition but its not gonna be easy.

[Mudweizer]

Bump an old ass thread, sorry. (5 years old)

How did this project ever go?