The Silver Freak is getting a new lease on life. I promised myself that before the old Duke hit 200k miles, I'd replace it. So in anticipation, I bought a used 2.8 V6 and started rebuilding it.

In typical fashion (for me, anyway), I couldn't resist the urge to tweak the engine. It now displaces 3.2 liters, has increased compression, an aftermarket valvetrain, and lots of porting/grinding. To make a long story short, I built this engine to maximize torque in the 2000-4000 RPM range. According to Desktop Dyno, that's exactly what I'm gonna get with this combination of parts. It should make for some pretty spirited daily driving.

Below you see a couple shots of some of the goodies that went into the engine.





Here we see the short block assembled. Notice the double-roller timing chain.



And here's a shot of the long block assembled. Can you see anything wrong with this picture?



I decided to use an industrial-looking paint scheme for the engine and transmission. I really don't like chrome (or any "bling-bling" for that matter), so I opted for steel grey with black trim. Just about anything that would normally be chromed or polished is instead painted semi-gloss black.

Masking off the engine for paint was quite a task... very tedious. Check it out:





After painting the long block, I looked at all the junk that was supposed to be installed on the engine and thought to myself "WTF were the GM engineers thinking?!" The mess of tubes and hoses running all over the place was mind-boggling. So I decided to do something about it.

(more to follow)

quote Originally posted by Blacktree: And here's a shot of the long block assembled. Can you see anything wrong with this picture?

you forgot to install the lower intake gaskets before installing the pushrods?

In order to reduce some of the pipe/tube/hose mess, I decided to delete some unneccesary things... like the cold-start injection system and throttle body coolant lines. I live in Florida. So these two things are basically dead weight. I actually went so far as to remove the cold-start injection wiring from the wiring harness. The cold-start injection fitting in the fuel rail is plugged with a bolt. The cold-start injector still sits in the intake manifold, just to fill the hole.

I also managed to greatly simplify the PCV system. To accomplish this, I moved the PCV valve to the opposite side, and made a short pipe to run to the intake plenum. On the other valve cover (where the PCV valve normally sits), I installed a breather filter. In the photo below, that's the entire PCV system. No kidding!



To simplify the vacuum routing, I made some more changes. First of all, I moved the EGR solenoid to the other end of the engine, almost directly below the EGR valve. This allows me to run a couple short hoses up to the EGR valve and throttle body, and deletes 3 of the under-plenum vacuum lines.

I also gave the MAP sensor a dedicated vacuum line to the plenum. The vacuum line for the fuel pressure regulator has a line running to the intake plenum near the distributer. And the vacuum lines for the fuel vapor canister run directly from the canister to the nearest points on the engine (the throttle body, and the plenum near the distributer).

In the end I was able to delete almost all the under-plenum lines, except for the brake booster pipe and the re-routed fuel pressure regulator line. This is good, because now I can reach a wrench in there to adjust the fuel pressure regulator!