LSXcalade Returns: Late Model Engines Tears Down The 427 & Explains EVERYTHING (LSX Engine Tech!)

1700 to the tire like i said stuff is going to move around things are going to wear is there anything scary in there that's what we're about to find out so put the money in the right spots first are we still not allowed to look at the cam bearings i decided to quit school quit college and go to the trade school to learn how to build race engines how's your parents feel about just quitting everything like i'm gonna quit everything go to texas for race cars it is 6 30 in the morning back of elvis is the escalades 427 at least a short block of it today we're going to late model engines in houston we're going to tear it apart check it out go through with those guys do a bit of a facility tour it's going to be freaking sweet well i am almost there and we got a problem my dang wiper just flew off it's gone no reason just decided just but good news is i'm about 10 minutes from lme so uh we'll just not use the wipers until then because i don't want to scratch the crap out of my window we made it pretty neat place i haven't seen anybody yet but i see a bunch of oil on my bumper so kind of thinking the motor might have tipped over i uh really didn't drain it just sort of pulled it out and stuck it in there that's what she said maybe that's what he said to her i don't know there might be a mess but that's okay pelvis is tough he can take it i'm gonna go in there and find somebody to see what we're supposed to do with this thing well you know what i forgot to do when i strap this down i forgot to pull on the strap say that's not going anywhere it went somewhere i mean it didn't really go anywhere but it moved around enough for the oil to leak out the front of the oil pan where the turbo drains are and you know cool oh well at least elvis's bed won't rust now oh yeah we'll just undo this strap here no big deal not like it wasn't even tight anyway same with this one i don't think i'll ever put an engine on a tire anymore last time i did this i had it on a block of wood against the tailgate but it was late last night and i didn't feel like figuring that out so lesson learned okay you've done this a couple times yeah quite a few actually did you guys make this arm just for doing this i think so i think they had it made just for doing this i always think about the little things for efficiency in places like this i feel like watching monsters inc with the doors they get hung from the ceiling and go away watching my door go away all right so we're back here they're going to tear it apart this is brian he's the owner founder yes sir yep so we've been at this for a while it's probably our who knows 5 000 engine that we're taking apart here at lme if not more uh so we'll get this thing torn apart we're going to try to use as many components as are in the engine currently we're changing up some other things on the engine but uh really focusing on keeping the current piston cranking rods correct yeah so where we use all the bottom end if we can it should be okay but unless we're here to find out i have never touched this thing it's been in there for three years i've driven it i don't even know how many miles okay several several thousand it did all of race week and until i tore it apart i hadn't even unbolted the driver's side header since i first put the thing together it's good that's a good engine life for sure so that's definitely nice yeah i don't know if you can tell cylinder walls feel good i mean just initially you know there's no real scoring or anything like that so even this surface rust is it looks like it's kind of wiped off yeah it's not that big you know we bump the home through it it should come right out um that'll be the biggest driver if we really need so if we need pistons or not so you've got the condition of the pistons and position of the cylinder walls if the the pistons can dimensionally be okay but if the cylinder walls are way out of round or there's some issues there then we may get into a condition where we have too much piston to the wall clearance for for the current pistons and we would want to change pistons for that reason to go up the next size or the pistons themselves are not dimensionally correct there's something wrong with the the skirts are collapsed or the ring lands are not flat anymore lifted ring land something like that would cause us to use new pistons and then in that case we would most likely go to the next side if it's a 4 125 we try to go to 4 130 and get the cylinders nice and round and straight so that's what we'll find out here if it needed new pistons i wouldn't consider that the worst thing ever because after the fact i would have made the compression higher okay i think it's about nine seven to one right now but if i were to do it again i think you know bumping it up now knowing people know with e85 and stuff sure but i mean it's it never had a problem the way it was it's just if it's going to do it you know it'll take advantage right and i also don't know what the chamber size will be on the new heads we're doing for this either yeah so it's going to be we can alter them a little bit so we can go anywhere from that 70 to 65 cc's with really no issues wait what's the first step of tearing it apart uh he's gonna he's already removed the rear cover so we always remove the rear cover as we're putting it on the stand so we don't have to take it back off to get the crank out of it uh the rear cover's off he's gonna remove the balancer and then the front cover yeah i think we talked about the oil pressure weirdness that it was doing with uh where it would drop at the top of a pass so i changed it and it helped but it still never really made more than like 60 psi what pump is in it now i think it's the melling 102.95 or whatever 295. it's the one that they've made it's like a high pressure low volume or something for these blocks because of the way they're passed differently than the stock ones 10 10 295 which is it sounds like what you're explaining and then you got the 10 296 with six which is high pressure high volume yeah you've got the 10 355 which is like kind of a replacement for the lsa block with the oil squirters which is a an increased volume over the 10 296 interesting so this is probably a 10 295 in it we'll probably go back with a 296 that's kind of our go-to for with a truck pan it works really well holds pressure up top really well it's just a good all-around i forget what was in there before i don't know if i if it was the 355 before it might have been but it was even worse it would at the beginning of the pass it would spike it like 90 and then it would go down to like 40 by the way there's different things that can be happening if it's like you said if it's pumping too much oil and it's not draining back fast enough it can deplete the oil that's in the in the oil pan itself so you're basically sucking the pan dry so adding oil can help with that or reducing the volume in which the pump can turn or we can look at possibly restricting the oil inside the oil galley itself in the dark block here you have the oil galleys that you can manipulate the uh you can manipulate the volume of oil going to the top end yeah i guess we'll find out what pump is in there pretty soon here because i i can't remember i know those three numbers really well in my head it had one of them now it has one of the other ones i don't know which one it is though but when i changed it it held better pressure but it never made as much pressure how many quarts of oil did you have you know um i tried like seven and it still yeah it still did it it didn't seem to help is that a crank bolt that you turned down just to put in there for pressing stuff out yeah exactly so because the threads are so deep in the in the crankshaft so we put this we have a turndown stock bolt and then our puller centers on it and it allows us to not have to you know go into the bottom of the to hit the the depth of the threads in the in the crank itself that's cool uh little tips and tricks like that to like speed things up that's the kind of stuff i pay attention to and i like to talk about it so the end yeah like the end of our puller has has a taper on it so other pullers like you can take that taper off and there's like little push rods that you can essentially it looks like just like a push rod so they're different lengths but this is a more rigid rigid setup because you only have certain amount of diameter you can get in there those things can start bending now we're about to find out what the lifters look like those are johnson limited travel hydraulic lifters this is not a solid roller motor but these lifters are about as close as you can get to having one without having one with a with a nice spring and you know a properly designed 8 000 rpm with this lifter combination's not a problem yeah that's that's what i've shifted this at is eight grand yep that sounds really cool i don't really need it but i like it you couldn't help but notice there's a is there a reason you're doing all this by hand instead of just buzzing it off with an impact yeah because you don't want to basically strip the bolt out you know you gotta if you're using a six point on the six point it might be a little safer but you want to do it by hand first and then basically strip it out our back it out with an impact later so you just do that for precaution when you're tearing one down you always do it by hand yeah that's cool how do the lifters look what do you think man they look alright yeah they're looking at normal wear on them they look completely normal so we can reuse those um well that's something we'll decide i mean you know once we get to the assembly part of it they do look removable okay let's that's promising is there anything scary in there that's what we're about to find out so hopefully not maybe some rtv some orange paint from my garage floor that got in there somehow no bearing material or any type of material in here so so we're good yeah no damage that's the relief which oil pump is this uh it has the number on the back of it oh so we still can't find out yet a cool the suspense builds so before everything comes apart we're going to check uh the pickup tube the pan clearance with the gasket in there just to see if that might have something to do with why the oil pressure was acting the way it was but you're saying if it's too far away it can be a bad thing too right you want it you want it right about a quarter inch away from the bottom of the pan max about 350 thousands you know max max like 400 but getting up to like a half inch of clearance between the bottom of the pan and the bottom pickup tube you're just leaving that much volume of oil that you're not able to reach having it that quarter inches is optimal for allowing enough uh space for the oil to actually get up into the pickup tube without having sacrificing the amount of oil that you can actually reach in the pan the volume of oil makes sense if it's up higher i know you can't get to the bottom but does that also affect the amount of windage that can cause under the pickup like you know as far as like air getting in there and not just oil because you have you have your wind you have your windage tray so i mean it's calmer down there obviously this is all upside down so um you know your pan is is right here let's say but if it's if it's up in here you know let's say you have that much pick up to the pancreas you're leaving that much volume of oil across the entire pan that you're not being able to pull up so you think you might have seven quarts in it but you're only able to reach you know let's say six of them makes sense yeah see yeah then it can only pump six up into the motor and you got one just chilling one just sitting at the bottom of the pan so we'll just do a little quick down and dirty representation of what it is with clay i'm excited to get this figured out because one i'm tired of this thing leaking oil two i'm tired of wondering why the oil pressure isn't doing what it's supposed to do so that'll give me just that much more peace of mind when we go to like really turn this thing up right when you first started was it you doing all this yeah of course uh when when we first started it was myself and my partner pecos we were doing all the tear down machining you know answering the phones the whole nine yards so um every aspect of the machining and assembly of the engines myself and my partner um executed and then we uh you know a little after that brought on our first guy and you know the rest is history what did you do before this like before this i went to went to high school so we this is uh went to high school what start was at a community college in upstate new york that's where i'm from is upstate new york i was doing that whole deal one of my buddies that from high school that we used to you know do street cars and i'd help him build his car so we're doing the whole hot rodding thing uh you know on the weekends he told me that he was going down to houston texas to build to learn how to build race engines at the school of automotive machinists so i'm like damn that's pretty badass you know so i decided to quit school quit college and go to the trade school to learn how to build race engines and pretty much the rest is history man we met my business partner at the school we started our loan little shop so for about four years we were pouring cylinder heads out of a small warehouse by hand you know ls heads we were selling them online and to our local buddies and that type of thing so ported tons and tons of cylinder heads by hand hours after hours of that after so we're also working at i was working at a machine shop full time building you know circle track and big block chevy uh nitrous engines was our kind of forte there um and then porting cylinder heads after after that and then uh we finally built up enough uh vocal clientele to start our you know to start late model engines go full time so that was in late 2003 uh so this is like 18 years later we're uh we're rocking and rolling there's about 19 of us here that that are working we've got we're building about 400 engines a year um all ls and llc we do some of the gen 5 vipers some late model hemis but primarily our bread and butter is definitely the ls and lt market high horsepower streets are pretty much racing of any form we can pretty much build it all how did uh how does your parents feel about just quitting everything like i'm gonna quit everything go to texas for race cars they were actually pretty supportive they're really supportive of it so that was awesome to have that to have that support you know they wanted me to follow my passion in a sense of and i'm thankful for that you know a lot of parents try to pitch and hold their kids into the into their dream or to what they're trying to do but uh they kind of let me uh you know wanted me supported me in doing what i wanted to do so that turned out to be a great thing because i just put everything into into the school and then into working and learning this whole this whole game here this whole game of racing engines so um you know living and breathing that for the last 19 years i mean we've really uh excelled and and that's uh i attribute a lot of that success to you know just our my passion and my partners and everybody that works here i mean we just live and breathe this stuff and it's uh it's what keeps us wanting to continually make our product better well that's why i like to like dig a little bit and figure that stuff out because like you said a lot of parents don't want their kids to do something that's like maybe not gonna work or something stupid like that they just want to do something you know sit in your box and stay there safe right yeah so yeah definitely and then you know working at working at the at the other engine shop for the four years and then jumping out onto our own um yeah there's definitely unknowns there you know and i mean we started up with with no money um it wasn't like we just had a big loan and started our whole deal with with like unlimited funds or anything like that we really uh bootstrapped the whole thing we're like i said we're selling stuff uh online cylinder heads and whatnot to build up so we buy one piece of equipment then have another capability in turn make more money build get another piece of equipment um so that's really how it all it really all came about so we started with cylinder heads that's our kind of a lot of people know us for our our complete engines or short blocks that type of thing but right now i mean we're pumping out like almost 500 sets of heads a year um all cnc ported we've got really the best headquarters in the game here but you know our our origination of lme was supported cylinder heads so our our knowledge of airflow and making power through cylinder heads is really our base to our whole company when you started in 2003 where does where you're at right now stack up to what you thought you were going to be doing or what you wanted to do you know it's a good question like you never really know but i i feel like we've exceeded my how can i say i thought we were gonna i knew we were gonna do really well because because our like we just never gave up and our you know our dedication to to this crap but um you know definitely meeting having the right clientele and the right guys you know building a team that we have i mean it's uh really i'm really thrilled about where our future our future is so we're kicking ass right now but i mean it's almost like we're just getting going because of the capabilities that we now have that we didn't have you know say 10 years ago i mean what we're getting into now is just next level we've got some really good projects that are coming up that are going to set us off to the next level i've noticed that it's a it's a common perspective of guys like you who built stuff is that it doesn't matter what happened before it's like right now it's like i feel like we're just getting started like all you're thinking about is you know no doubt yeah dwelling on the past or thinking about you know you have you can't rest on your on your achievements of the past you know what i mean you're great you know you had an achievement back then but what are you doing tomorrow yeah so i really feel uh you know strongly about that is you know it's like the guy that uh you know won the football game in high school or something yeah yeah peaked in high school exactly so you know uh looking forward to the future that's freaking cool oh there's that's that's why i make a point to do this because no one ever talks about this stuff no one ever puts it out there and i know there's a lot of people out there even kids that are stuck in that box and they don't have anybody to tell them that it's okay to get out of the box so if they watch stuff like this you know you don't have to have your parents approval to go follow your passion for stuff no doubt i mean today with the internet and there's so many opportunities it's just you can pretty much find a way to make to monetize your passion almost no matter what it is right i mean there's some way that you can either educate other people in that in that same field or create a product and and sell it i mean um so i think it's it's definitely following it makes it a lot easier no doubt when you're when you're passionate about your your craft you know it doesn't feel like work no sometimes it does but most of the time you're like owning any business is is it definitely uh has its ups and downs but the fact that uh the passion of that of your of your field is what makes you get up and after those those hits you know yeah you take hit after hit and if you're not passionate about it that's when you you fall down if you're you're passionate about it you're going to get up the next day [Music] you look forward to mondays exactly exactly what…