I have been very slow to get this replacement engine finished. There has always been something nagging me from the instant we changed trucks in the the junk yard and started working on an engine with a different intake manifold. I have just always been hesitant. I didn’t fee like I a had a full grasp of what was going to happen. Tres on the other hand was pretty positive, a 350 is a 350 we can just swap them. And to a point he is totally correct. Unfortunately that point requires some significant changes to either the donor engine or the way in which it will work in the truck. I turns out that in 1996 GM made some significant changes to the standard engine that it put in it 1500 trucks. The new engine had roller lifters and a multiport fuel injection system. The previous year was still using flat lifters and had a set of central throttle body (TBI) fuel injectors. To support this change they made changes to the Intake manifold, the block itself, the cam, valve springs and the heads themselves. So unless I was going to do those same changes to the donor engine, it would make sense to just use the (TBI) injection as is. The one problem with that is that siince we weren’t planning on using it we didn’t get an intake manifold that had a working (TBI) system. So the choice is now, get a couple of injectors and figure out how to wire it up with my existing computer and hope the programming will work. Or pull Betty’s engine and use the parts that I bought for the other engine to rebuild it.
Long Live Plan B.
