Tearing Apart a $15,000 Chevy LSX Engine

This is a 7.4 L LSS, one of the most legendary V8s of all time. It has a reputation for being powerful, robust and, most importantly, interchangeable, which is why it is our choice for the

engine

we will put in our Ford Ranger RAC truck. build and to better understand what makes this

engine

so great and so interchangeable, we are going to tear down this new crate engine and rebuild it, yes, that's a good idea, yes, that doesn't make sense, first of all. You've never touched an American engine in your life. I know this is actually the first LS I've taken

apart

.

I'm a pushrod guy. I love pushing guys from start to finish. Have I told you about my Catfish Camaro? No, actually I have. I already told you. I have a catfish Camaro. I know, ooh, it's nice and clean. Think about the size of a hot dog. This might hold up fine, so we removed the valve cover and looked at our rocker arms and valve springs. we have an exhaust valve, an intake valve, exhaust, intake, exhaust, intake, exhaust, that exists inside one of our heads, on the back of this rocker arm, it has its push rod, that push rod is going in. in contact with our camshaft and that's what synchronizes this entire process so that things open and close at the right time.

Typically what you see on a modern engine is a double overhead camshaft setup that looks like this: The intake valves are driven by their own independent camshaft, as well as by the exhaust valves if the engine is a V8, that means there are two additional camshafts in the other cylinder driving the intake and exhaust valves on that side, that's a total of four independent camshafts taking up space and all having to work in one push. With the rod setup, you can get super similar functionality from a camshaft, which means the engine has fewer parts that could be prone to failure, but most importantly it takes up less space, so you can fit it in incredibly small spaces.

They were never designed to house a V8 like a Miata, okay as we take this

apart

it's going to be very imperative that we stay very organized and we're going to have our best man at work organizing our hardware Jimmy, okay Jimmy we have a pushrod engine which is a lot less complex than an overhead valve engine I would say, so I think that's why it will be a lot easier, sure, it'll be like 20 volts, okay, now these are the innards of the engine, right? which are? those pushrod guides yeah pushrods yeah this is the factory GM duct tape part number 69 okay check this out this is how you start your super villain uh Arc just a couple of hairs, sorry, look at those new plugs that they didn't even make.

I didn't even test the engine, huh. I think they've already resolved it. Ok, now we'll remove the rocker arms, which basically transfer power from the cam pushrods to the valve springs to actuate the valves. Dude, well if you know, damn, work, well, you were taking too much time. I had to help, are you kidding me? That pushrod almost gave Jeremiah a stress-induced heart attack. Looks like he could use a break with off-road onx. They are celebrating. National Stress Awareness Month, did you know this exists? Because I didn't save 30% on a premium membership or a whopping 50% on an elite membership.

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Strength, each head has eight extra bolts over a regular LS engine, overall it makes the relationship between the head and block much stronger and that's what it's all about. The bolts are outside, so the head comes off. I'm free, look at those fat peppers. Yeah buddy you called it, these are much bigger valves than I'm used to, but with just one or well I guess two valves per cylinder has to be big, oh yeah, I know you like it, I know you like it, OK? turn it around, punch the Pistons, I'm not going to throw it away, I'm just going to put it in, I'm just going to put it right there.

I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. Okay, while we're taking this thing apart as we mentioned that it's very important to keep things organized and luckily for us, we're not going to leave this alone. We have doctor ls here. Daisies from racing daisies. Thank you for joining us and helping us make sure that not only this. The thing takes apart, that's fine, but it puts itself back together well. Shall we take this off to see some cranks? Oh man, I'm going to freak out if I see even one connection. Oh God, man, look at that crankshaft, it looks really nice.

Not only does it have forged pistons and connecting rods, but it actually already comes with an ARP connecting rod. Hardware that's pretty good dude this looks cherry yeah this is a good kit let's do it oh I broke a nail what the hell? Are many of us aware that something was closed there when they were putting this together? Oh my gosh, one point that's crazy, yeah, it wore through the liner, it wore through the other part of the bearing a few thousand deep, this is very much like a tight tolerance area, we're talking about 3 to 5 thousand inches between the bearing and the crankshaft, enough for a thin film of oil to move around, keep things separate and prevent the metal from wearing out, we already have wear.

We do have some wear so one thing we always do on this show is you like to take your fingernail and rub it against the bearing and see if it catches and if it catches you have a deep cut from all the motors that we have. I've done it here at Donut and it's broken, this is the worst, yeah with zero miles and I know what you're thinking, well it's because you guys were cranking the engine by hand without oil, this definitely didn't get any better. with us turning it by hand, but that should be fine when it was assembled there was a piece of metal there and it sank into the bearing.

I've been saying since we started doing this, this is stupid, we're taking down a brand. new engine, but it's a good thing we did it right, we wouldn't have noticed and this would continue to get worse. I'm curious to see what the remaining seven look like, so let's take a look too, let's find out. The top half of the bearing, much better, actually has a little wear on it, not as bad as the first one, so it's not terrible, but it's not really what you want to see on a new engine, bro, they forgot place the RIS.

Hey guys, same thing I'm talking about now, yeah that's crazy okay, so the way you attach a piston to the connecting rod is through the wrist pin which is this little cylindrical piece that's basically a really nice slit fit. and then in this case it's captured by a couple of clips on each end that you can see in that slot and that makes it so the wrist pin can't fall out without those circlips, it will slide out. One of the circlips is missing. Look, it's completely down. Note that there is a complete circlip missing for retaining the wrist pin.

See what happens when I press one that has a clip that prevents that movement. Now let me press the no. having a clip shouldn't do that, I know I can see something like that, yeah, we have the most interesting things we've seen in any of the Engels we've taken apart. I think so, that's probably exactly how they built the catfish. Not Camaros, I've got 40 billion on mine, it's been huffing and puffing baby, this is a $115,000 race engine just like the one back home. Guys are supposed to buy this oil in their car and you know, go to town, you never thought someone would buy one of these.

Take it apart and look at it, called the misleading Chevy of him. While we found some problems with this engine, we contacted GM and told them about the problems and they will send us a completely new engine and pay for the repairs on it. Now this LS needs to go into the ranger tomorrow, so let's move forward with the repairs, but let us know in the comments what you think we should do with the new LSX when it gets here, okay? F, oh, I removed the timing chain cover. uh we've got the oral pump cam gear and the cam behind it so all of this can come out and then we're one step closer yeah oh thank you okay the oil pump comes out.

I've got our oil pump, oh cool, how does this crankshaft driven thing work, so this is a cool, sturdy unit down here, you see how it attaches with this shape, yeah, it slides in there and it spins, this is where the truck would go, it runs up to the sump, forces it through the crankshaft and through all the various nooks and crannies of the engine to all the places that need oil for the crankshaft to drive the pump that lubricates the crankshaft yeah that's cool, cool , so here is our chain tensioner, this allows us to have no slack in the chain. so your crankshaft connection is transferred directly to the camshaft, well Jar is taking out the camshaft responsible for operating all the valves, hopefully it will look new, it looks pretty good, what the mad scientist invented, this is great, okay, now we've removed it. our rear cover uh we're taking off our main covers these are the bearings for the crankshaft.

I hope that on this side everything is in perfect shape, yes, I am interested to know where we are going, here is number four, it is quite attractive. bearing with a strange diagonal piece of a small scratch there, yeah not bad you can't really feel it just a basket of gasket material okay so we have a really strange looking bearing with a quite strange looking thrust bearing strange. as low as we can go, once we take out a crankshaft, we get to block 1, two, three that release it, no, you got that right and with that we are officially in the block of this LSX and I thought about it.

It was going to be fun to take it apart. I didn't expect to find so many little problems. Then this will be fixed. We're going to put it back together. But it was fun to learn what makes this engine so special and reliable. On the way, the next thing we're going to do with this engine is put it back together and then put it in that Ranger, so make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss it and we'll get to As soon as we get this back together, bye bye now.