I have a 96 LT1/T56 with low miles and I'm thinking of swapping out the 350/700R that's in my 69. The 350 that's in it now works fine, but I would like to boost the gas milage and drivability of the car to make it a daily driver instead of a Sunday cruiser. I just finished a complete restoration of the body, paint, installed a Vintage AC, and had the car rewired with a painless wiring harness, but after all that work, I feel like I should have gone farther and dropped the LT1 into it. Of course I have the ecm and wiring harness, but just how hard is it to do? Will the stock exhaust and motor mounts work? I know Painless makes a harness for this application.

 

your exhaust and motor mounts should work. you might want to try swaping exhast manifolds to make sure that the angle plugs won't interfear on the LT1. If you have headers you might need angl plug specific headers

 

i would seriously look at converting your gen1 to fuel injection.. with the problems of the cooling system and optispark of the lt1, i would definetly convert before i went to the trouble of installing an lt1 and making wiring harness's..

plus with a conversion you can either go with a custom unit such as the popular megasquirt setup that actually priced pretty good and has good support, or converting using the more modern LS computer...

do a google on 411 pcm swap.. you use mostly sbc vortec parts on a gen1 engine using the vans pcm which is LS based..

 

I did the same sway except with a 94 LT1/4L60E. I would reccomend if you want to tune it yourself the convert to a 94/95 PCM since the software & cable are much cheaper than the OBD II stuff. Most of it is bolt in. Not sure what accessory bracket you have on the engine, but the Corvette one makes the engine bolt in very easy.

Brian

 

I know this is an old thread but have you considered putting a Tuned Port Injection harness on the car and running an LT1 intake manifold? It isn't plug and play but it's the next best thing.

 

I've decided that if I want to go with fuel injection, I would rather convert my gen 1 motor. I'm trying to decide on TBI or Tuned Port. TBI would a simple process, but how would it stack up against the Tuned Port. My 350 has plenty of power so I'm more interested in gas mileage and driveability I can't find anyone who has done this conversion where I live to find out more information, but all the old hot rodders say to stick with my carb. I would love to get more mileage out of my 69 to drive it daily.

 

Colin, how could you run a tuned port harness and an LT1 injection manifold on a gen 1 block, would I have to change over to vortec heads?

 

Hey,
There used to be a website named LT1Intake.com and it showed how to use an LT1 intake in the place of a TPI setup. Basically, you have to drill a hole in the intake manifold for the distributor a tap a hole for the distributor hold-down clamp. Then you have to drill a tap the front of the intake for coolant crossover because the LT1 intake is a dry intake (like the LS1). If you don't do that, the SBC will overheat because it won't get coolant across from one side to the other.

It's a proven swap. If you are using pre-86 heads (i.e. non-centerbolt) you will have to change the angle of the center two intake holes on each side because the centerbolt heads have different bolt angles. I did it on a carb intake I put on a later engine and it was pretty easy.

Other than that, everything else is the same. Even the fuel injectors.