Finally, got the engine and transmission in today! Been looking forward to this for some time now but it wasn’t without some challenges. Sorry for the lengthy post but I would’ve died to have this info when I got started but there’s basically little to nothing out there for this scenario, so here’s a few things of note for those wanting to swap a GenV LT1 into a Second Gen Nova.
First, the factory Camaro oil pan with integrated oil cooler did fit when I mocked it up in the subframe before the subframe was installed on the car, however, once you attach the transmission and account for working within the confines of the firewall, you can’t fit the engine/trans assembly in the car due to contact with the firewall before the oil pan sump clears the crossmember. One thing I did not try was removing the transmission and installing the engine and trans separately…I didn’t want that kind of hassle. I was pretty bummed about this in particular because I was really hoping to utilize the factory engine oil cooler setup. I also wasn’t wanting to spend $500 on a new oil pan.
Speaking of oil pans, there’s a limited number of “swap” oil pans currently made for the GenV motors and really only one cast oil pan like the factory uses (what I wanted) which is Holley’s 302-20. This is the first Holley swap pan I’ve used (I used a Mast Motorsports pan on my Camaro) and I’m not very happy about a couple of specific items you have to deal with to make it work. The first being that I had to”open up” one of the windage tray hole that’s shared with the oil pickup tube hold down in order to get the bolt in without binding up the pickup tube. For the cost of this pan, you should never have to deal with that. The second thing that pisses me off on principle alone is that nowhere in my research of the Holley 302-20 oil pan and nowhere in their bullet points of features on their website does it mention that they moved the dipstick location from the passenger side (where the factory put it) to the driver side. This means that you have more crap to deal with on what’s already the more crowded side of the engine but it also means that your $450 oil pan is now a $550 oil pan once you buy the necessary and recommended GM dipstick and tube since the nice new one you got with your crate motor is worthless as it’s bent in all the wrong ways. But never fear, Holley gave you a worthless hole to plug on the passenger side in place of the dipstick boss. Ok, rant is over.
Even with the Holley oil pan which has a 2” shorter (front to back) sump then the Camaro pan, I still had to remove the motor mounts in order to have enough room to get the motor as low as possible so it could go back towards the firewall enough to get the engine all the way in. Putting the motor mounts back on was really tight but manageable. I think if the wiper motor mounting area didn’t protrude out as far out as it does, this wouldn’t be such an issue.
So anyway, that’s what I can tell you for sure at this point but now that it’s in there, there’s actually sufficient room on the backside, even with the factory high pressure fuel pump that sits on the back of the engine. As a side note, you have to pull the crank pulley to get the oil pan off and I’d like to send a homemade bomb to the guy who made the decision to put thread locker on the crank pulley bolt and use a team of wild elephants to torque it down. Thanks for looking!
Brian Hobaugh SCCA National Tour June 2014
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