Welcome to SilverFox MotorSports, the high performance division of Mid-City Auto Service in Lake Charles, La. We do GM LS-X, Vortec, and Duramax Diesel tuning and also Ford Powerstroke Diesel tuning and are an SCT Tuning DEALER. Give us a call for all your SCT needs.

New Life for an abused LS-1

Below is a series of shots of an LS-1 rebuild. The oil was not changed often enough in this car leading to oil pressure issues….


That’s James standing by the car above as it comes up, and also behind the engine. That’s me sitting on the stool under the car shifting gears and pretending to drive the engine…


There is a shot of the bare engine block to give you an idea of how cruddy this thing was.


Here are a couple of the subframe and body with the powertrain gone…


It just amazed me how many people asked if this was a NEW block as I was putting it back together…..This is NOT a new block….I just painstakingly CLEANED the old block! Again, we do this type of work every day so it is second nature to us, but I guess MOST folks have absolutely NO CLUE how clean an engine has to be to be assembled the RIGHT WAY.


Here the bottom end is all together. This is a bulletproof bottom end, but if you are looking to build 700 or more horsepower, I’d seriously consider the 6.0L iron block.   The second picture shows the cylinder head alignment dowels…these must be here! These are bad about falling out at the machine shop…Like these did when I was cleaning the block…


Some of you LS1 guys may know you have to remove the heads to access the lifters….You may also have heard that you can do a cam swap without pulling the heads due to lifter retainers…Well here they are. You may ALSO have heard that you should go ahead and pull the heads because the retainers won’t hold and halfway through the job a lifter will fall and you will only have to pull the heads anyway….

Well, I put the lifters in each of these and held them upright and TRIED to make a lifter fall out and they stayed in! Keep in mind all the crud and 120,000 miles on this engine….If you have a clean low wear engine, I would be really confident that the retainers would indeed hold the lifters up….Just keep the jolts and vibration to a minimum while the cam is out and you should be okay (don’t slam the hood or doors!).  

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