Ok, big and fun update to the truck. Now that we have a renter in our condo I have a little extra disposable income again as I'm not paying 2 mortgages anymore!
I changed out the rear main seal on my last days off to cover all bases from the oil leak I learned that it's worth spending the money on a quality piece of equipment. I picked up a trans jack from Princess Auto which is the Canadian version of Harbor Freight, well as I was repositioning the trans for the reinstallation the side-to-side adjuster failed which resulted in the transmission tipping sideways and falling off the jack (yes it was chained, the whole assembly tipped over); and with my luck it tipped over onto the side where the cooler hoses screw in and they were open so it dumped ALL the trans fluid onto the floor of my garage and almost landed on me in the process. Needless to say, there was about 10 minutes of some choice vocabulary followed by an attempt to clean up 9 liters of ATF. 3 rolls of shop towels and one of the wife's picnic blankets later I'd absorbed most of the oil and I walked away from it for the night. All is well and it's back running again.
That's the bad/annoying news, on to the good news!
Well, ok, so-so news first. I'm sick and tired of Procharger's bracket with the 6-rib belt, I've got lots of belt slippage and the tensioner's maxed right out and I've swapped to a larger idler pulley to try and tighten it up some. So I was looking at going to an 8- or 12-rib setup and I ran into the same problem, nobody makes a pulley swap kit so I'd have to build a bracket and run an independent drive. So I decided to say 'puck it' and I have ordered everything to go straight to a cog drive, to hell with belt slippage. I have to build a custom bracket myself anyways so I may as well go all out. I have the ATI sprag cog pulley which will make the kit street friendly and keep the blower spinning at a higher RPM while the engine ramps down which should stop me from shearing belt teeth.
The ATI sprag is a 45 tooth pulley so I tried to get a 100 tooth crank pulley to spin the D1SC at it's max rpm but nobody makes one so I ended up with an 88 tooth that will bolt to the ATI 6% OD pulley I have to install. I figure I'll be able to make 18 psi with no belt slip with the pulley combo and if I upgrade to an F1-C in the future then I'll be able to downsize the blower pulley for more power. The whole project will probably cost me $2K by the time I'm done but then there will be blueprints for anyone else looking to do something similar in the future with either a cog or wide belt setup. I've found a few similar brackets that I can use for reference off the LS engines so it should look something like this
And lastly, I now have a cam ordered through Modern Muscle Performance. We are still talking about the specs for it but it will most likely be a 218-230 cam with about .600 valve lift which will still clear my Manley pistons with the phaser limiter installed which will still give me 18 degrees of phase shift.
I will have a bunch of goodies waiting at the border for me when I get back home from work next week so I'll have a nice drive to the border one day. Will be picking up my hidden hitch to sit behind the roll pan, some repair parts for my e-cutous since I blew the butterfly off of one of them, and a few cosmetic items like techflex for more wire covering. I have also decided to do the 4.56 gear swap with a DTT, so I'll have to save for a few months because I have to pay for everything I just bought! Don't tell my wife!
If this doesn't fix it then I'm looking for a new 370 shortblock because this PWR has been nothing but trouble since day one.
