LS Swapping A Snowcat Part 1

Welcome everybody to the new channel that does not have a name yet .

At the time of filming this .

No names today , we are gonna be starting our very first project on this new channel where we do , what do we do ?

Car stuff , fun stuff , motor swaps , crazy projects and just having fun in a garage .

And this is our first project .

This is a snow cat and that's it .

Pretty much .

We don't really know much about it other than it's got an old motor and it's got some kind of a carb like Chrysler industrial bus motor in it .

We're kind of flying by the seat of our pants on this one a little bit , but we do know one thing that everything is way better with an L S motor .

So obviously , since we don't know much about it , we kind of got to give it a little walk through and sort of see how it operates .

It uses obviously big snow type tracks um with two axles on the front of the back that are powering those tracks .

Not much in way of really like electronics , there's some gauges in there .

But as far as what we're gonna do for powering it .

A normal alternator should work pretty good to keep everything on and working .

If you look under here , you can kind of see how heavy duty this is .

Um , we've got a normal aluminum fuel cell sitting right there above the frame .

Uh , obviously the exhaust runs from the front of the front of the snow cap to the back .

Uh We're using a , like a modified leaf spring set up back here .

Um That's a bird's nest .

I don't know if that plays into the functionality of this or not , but I think it's abandoned though .

There's , our fuel line is coming out and it looks like the fuel comes out of both sides of the tank because obviously a snow cap is going to be going up mountains and down mountains and sideways and stuff .

You're gonna want to be able to get the fuel wherever you're at .

It's using a trans just a two wheel drive transmission it comes to , I guess this would be considered somewhat of like a transfer case or a mid differential .

Uh So it's only got the one input shaft that comes in the top that rotates these two bottom shafts that drive the front and the axes .

So realistically is as different and as alien as this seems right now , not really overly complicated , should be pretty easy to uh kind of figure out a way to make this work .

So what we're gonna do .

Now , just again , we're just gonna dig right into this project .

We're going to pull the hood off and kind of see what we're working with under the , uh , inside the engine bay .

Snow cats don't use a traditional like rack p style , obviously , because tracks would be almost impossible to move like that .

So it uses a hydraulic ram and it actually pivots kind of like the way a monster truck pivots .

So this right here is very uncommon for any type of motor set up really .

Um As far as like what we've put our in and what not .

But this is the pump that runs the high pressure hydraulic system .

So this is specific to this setup .

So this might be a bit of a challenge to figure out how we're actually gonna take this unit and mount it to the L S me .

Um Everything else .

I mean , you can see it's really old and very well used uh using one of these extremely high horsepower single barrel carbs letting in all the air and fuel .

I bet this thing makes , I would imagine probably about 113 horsepower .

That's what , that's what my science says .

Anyway , as far as everything else , it's very , very simple .

Uh We've got our heater core lines here to run the heater inside the wiring situation here is a little bit dated .

It's semi interesting .

You can see someone's made some repairs in the past here , but really , we're using like old school relays and flat connectors and a bunch of stuff like that .

So maybe we'll , we'll use part of this or maybe we won't .

I'm not sure yet .

Uh Other than that though , it's essentially a very , very basic engine setup .

So , right there , that's where we had to cut because those bolts are not coming out .

We cut it on both sides , it should be free .

Well , that's the theory anyway .

Yeah , we broke this one .

Those bolts have never been removed .

So the bolt that was holding this front engine mount actually just shear .

It just broke right in half .

Yeah , there's something else holding that on .

It looks like it's just on this mouth .

I don't know what's holding it there .

It is .

So if we learned anything , it's that they didn't want people working on me .

Yeah .

And back up .

Is it separated ?

Yeah .

Yeah , it came out it out .

Yeah , the firewall right here .

Now there's the firewalls .

We're coming away from them , but I don't think you're going to get up high enough to get over that .

Yes .

And that is how you move an engine more or less .

There were a few things that we had to cut off to get it out like that oil pressure sensor tube , some wiring , but we're not reusing this .

So it doesn't matter , we can just clip those off .

We also failed to drain the transmission .

Hence the , the puddle .

Now , with the engine removed , you can kind of see what we're working with here .

You can see right there .

That's where the drive line will connect into that transfer case .

We'll need to come up with some new motor mounts in here .

We had to cut the exhaust off , but that's ok .

Next step will be assembling the new motor and then we can just kind of lift it in here and see what we need to do for the mounts because those will need to be custom made .

And when I say new engine , I use that term loosely .

Yeah .

Where did you find that ?

This was actually a boat anchor ?

See this is a pickup truck , 53 .

So this is gonna be a cast iron block L S variant .

Um It's a 5.3 liter displacement and yeah , it's obviously in very used shape .

So we're gonna go through the motor , we're gonna replace some key components on it , clean it up .

Um We've got brand new heads for it , intake manifolds and stuff like that .

So we'll slap it together and hopefully have a sweet hot rod , hot rod , Snow cat , hot rod snow cat .

And here's the transmission .

Yeah , the weakest Trapp transmission .

Arguably of all of them .

This is a four L 60 E that are extremely prone to failures um under any kind of power or load or any of that .

Uh But on a snow cat , we have a theory on the snow cat .

Yeah , it's , uh , the snow cat is gonna be geared so low that we're not actually sure that it's really gonna matter a whole lot .

Um , so I think that we're gonna just try it and see what happens because at this point it's just for science , you know , we're taking our better judgment , we're throwing that out the window and that's essentially how the whole L S project came to be , I think really is what is really what it boils down to .

Ok .

Yeah , sure .

This is our refurbished L S motor .

Now , essentially we just went through it , replaced all the gaskets , head gaskets , head bolts .

Uh , we got our seals in .

We've got all the gaskets on here .

We've got the rear main seal .

We did too as well because why not ?

Yeah .

Well , it's fresh motor now , I mean , gasket wise , the heads were redone .

So we took those to the machine shop and had all them gone through and whatnot .

We got our really baller 76 custom motor pick up plates here .

Side note 76 is the name of your racing team , racing team and shop .

Yeah , so , but not the channel for some reason because we wanted to name the channel something cooler than su su have to bound that in .

We didn't get that in .

Is that just the front seal ?

Yeah , we'll finish doing that when we put the , uh , yeah , this is where your water pump and everything will go and then our accessory driving in our crank .

We're just not sure what we're doing right here yet because of the pump .

So in theory , the hydraulic pump on the snow cat we're hoping can sit right here .

That's gonna be a little interesting .

I'm not really sure how that's gonna work out yet , but she's solid .

Everything's good on this motor .

We actually , uh this is a gen four L S motor .

Um , and we didn't know that until we started trying to bolt the heads on because the uh head bolts are actually different links between the GEN three and the gen four .

So that was it .

But the heads are interchangeable between three and four , all the heads as far as we know , have changed all between them .

So if this , so this one would have had a rectangle port head and we just put Cathedral port stuff on because that's what we , we usually only just deal with gen three stuff .

So this is our shop assistant Nigel .

He's not pleased with the crank seal .

But whoops .

And , uh that's a wrap on , on this episode , tune in next time when we put it in a thing and .