So now that it was time to get the car running again, I had to pick a shop to do the work. I had to pick a shop that would be able to do the job quickly. I needed a shop that had experience doing v8 swaps. I hunted around and eventually I picked speed1. Dave is surprisingly knowledgeable about the swap. Everything I researched he already knew. There was NO surprising him. Apparently, speed1 does ALOT of v8 swaps fellas. I ended up going with a Samberg kit and even Justin knew about speed1 because he ships so many of his kits there. I was drowning and finally, a hand reached down to save me. At first I was a little hesitant because I didn't know any of the people that worked at Dave's shop and I like to know who is going to work on the car but Brian was there and he's good people and certainly knows his shit. Plus he looks like Ethan Hawke and celebrities don't lie.
Well, time passes. Swap parts were gathered. Work began. Of course, me being me, I had to complicate things so I ended up buying stuff like an oil baffle, Pez headers, custom exhaust, trailing arms, toe links, projector HIDs and Ohlins. Also, some swap parts were needed so I had to hit up Justin (awesome guy btw). Things were delayed, checks were sent, Brian was hassled (hahaha sorry buddy) and finally, the swap was complete.
Not fucking bad huh? Yordan did a great job. Look how well the motor fits!! Everything looks O E FUCKING M!! I even put on the poseur vette fuel covers. I now owned an LS2 FD. The car still felt like a huge turd but at least it was a quick turd. I have some improved racing parts in there as well. They were pretty great to deal with!
Apparently the work done on the exhaust is top rate! I have no idea about what constitutes good work when it comes to exhausts so I'll just leave you with that picture. With the new exhaust setup, the car was LOUD. I still had the Nur spec on there and it was raspy as hell. The car was super obnoxious and I hated it. I even hated it when it backfired. When the car backfires, it makes these weird noise like metal rattling in a can or something. I thought something was wrong with the tranny. All of the obnoxiousness eventually grew on me and I learned to love the car. It shook like armageddon at around 2000rpm but man did the car feel raw. I see the appeal of v8. The T56 was another story. It felt like shit. I thought I was driving a truck. This may be due to the short shifter that was installed though. Apparently, a mounting plate was missing (or lost) so the install had to be a bit improvised. This was like, NY taco sloppy. I'm not talking about in terms of food (in case some of you didn't get the reference). When I first got into the car, the shifter had so much movement in 1st gear, I thought it was in neutral. I was trying to shift into diffent gears while I was in 1st. It was very confusing. Each throw of the shifter was so long. I felt like I was literally rowing a boat. The side to side was so long that the shifter actually hit the ebrake handle when it was up. I'll be adding a new short shifter to the list. In the end, the car ended up doing around 350/350 on a base tune that was running super rich (real tune coming up) and had enough torque to take off at 3rd gear, which was great because sometimes 1st and 2nd gear were hard to hit. The clutch was surprisingly supple for the power it held and the response of NA felt great.