For those of you who don't know, this crank is made of 1053 forged steel and can be found in old GM work trucks/vans.

How much stronger is this thing compared to a stock nodular iron LT1 crank? I understand that 1053 is nowhere near 4340 forged steel, but how much of an edge will this have on the regular cast crank?

Is there anyone out there running this thing? Boost/nitrous, anyone?

 

Interesting that when you look up the part number for the stock LT1 crank, it says it is a forged 1053 steel crank. The rods and pistons it says goes with it for balance are also the stock LT1 fare. Perhaps they changed the specs on it somewhere down the line. I don't find a listing for the truck crank part number.

 

The LT1 crank is casting number 14088526 and you can still buy one new @ Summit. The listing says it's nodular iron but what doesn't make sense is that apparently it's internally balanced?! That can't be true because of the 1 piece RMS.

I accidentally nicked the stock crank from the 80k junkyard LT1 I was using as a basis for a LE2/GM847 build. While shopping around for grinding services and remanufactured cranks, I stumbled upon this thing. I didn't even know it existed until a few days ago but apparently you can find one of these forged cranks in 3/4 or 1 ton trucks and vans with 4 bolt main L05/L31 engines. Fortunately for me, the nearby junkyard has tons of GM work trucks and their crank prices are dirt cheap.

I was wondering how much better the 14088532 crank is than the standard 14088526 LT1 crank. It's 1053 forged steel vs nodular iron so I would imagine there's a notable difference in strength. Everyone raves about the stock LT1 crank being pretty stout but if this forged crank isn't too shabby then I might just take the lid off my build and go all out. The only evidence I found of anyone using one of these pieces in a LT1 was in a post from 2004...

That guy hasn't been on for months and I have no idea who these "people" are. I hope one of them is wondering around this site.

 

There are a few people with L98 Vettes who claim they had it from the factory. I know this crank also came in the older GMPP ZZ engines like the ZZ4 and ZZ3.

 

I was going by the actual GM parts book number for the crank. 12556307 . It does say it was used for 2nd design ZZ applications. Casting numbers are not always part numbers.

 

That is really strange. Could there be some LT1s out there with factory forged cranks? If anything, it would probably be in a 4 bolt Vette, but I'm really doubtful.

 

I find the whole thing curious, as well. I have a feeling they superseded the original crank with that newer version to save $$ in stocking or they just ran out of the original ones. For whatever reason, you can be sure it was to save [them] money.

 

I have a couple of them from ZZ4 takeouts, never tried to push one to the breaking point, but it should be quite a bit stronger than a factory casting...used plenty of GM 1053 cranks in the past for high rpm endurance stuff and they outlive the factory block.