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Installing the Beast-What Will I need? |
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| Okay,you've found your engine,avoided the errors I made,and now you're eager to jam the thing into your Astro. I am not going to cover pulling the old V-6 engine in its entirety, its a straight-forward engine pull out the front like a car,the difference being you have less room and the front of the van had best be as high up off the ground as possible for clearance. On the other part of this site I have taken step by step pics of my engine pull, if it will help, refer to them. | |||
| Word to the wise, once the engine is out, NOW is the time to degrease and detail the engine compartment, perhaps replace fuel and brake lines,recover your wire looms,paint and polish, etc., because it's the last time you will ever have room to get at these items easily. The V-8 really doesn't take up much more room then the V-6,the V-6, after, all being nothing much more ( less?) then a 350 with two of the center cylinders chopped out. The problem is, there isn't much room to work around the old V-6 to begin with, so adding more engine won't make it any easier. | |||
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V-8 Motor Mounts |
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| Before you install your engine you'll need something to hold it in, thankfully, there
are motor mounts specifically made for the Astro V-8 conversion allthough I've heard descriptions of how to make
or adapt your own, that strikes me as nonsense and a waste of time considering the time and effort involved and
the relative low cost of getting them premade. Plus, I don't know about you but have you ever tried to drill through
a frame rail? I don't plan on it myself if I can avoid it. Racecraft Conversions in Canada sells a set, however ,I found mine at Carshop inc for 70 bucks, about 40 cheaper then Racecraft's price. I also found my headers there,they are Hedman Headers for 130.00, again,cheaper, around 80 bucks cheaper then Racecraft's,and the very same header, in fact. I am mentioning the headers and the mounts together now as there is another ugly surprise, actually not so ugly if you correct it BEFORE you install your engine and mounts, Test fit the headers on the engine with the new motor mounts in place, you will see one mount needs to be trimmed a bit to clear the header, not a biggie, and you won't need to trim much. I replaced the rubber components of the mounts before I installed the engine, only around 20 bucks for the set and easy to do when the engine is out.No matter what your rubber mounts look like they do absorb oil, dry out, etc and cheaping out on something so simple makes no sense.Buy the factory mounts for your year Astro and install them before you stuff in the engine and steel mounts.Oh, and remove the headers,hopefully you only test fitted them to begin with, in any case you don't even want to try to install the engine with them on and you will need to do more work on them before they go on, anyhow. Also,paint the V-8 mounts before you install them, whatever they use for paint must be just a shipping coating because they weren't on my van for more then a week and they were as brown as a berry, thankfully, I was able to pull the engine up and sneak them off and paint them as I had not gone too far when I noticed the rust. |
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Headers or Cast Iron Factory Exhaust Manifolds? |
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| I decided to go with headers, reasons being, I wanted the few extra horsepower,I didn't have a set of donor cast exhaust manifolds available, and lets be honest, headers are so much cooler then the stock cast manis.lol, In any case, I will cover only my experience with the headers, specifically,Hedman headers. | |||
| Ah, the headers. I have installed headers on most of my vans before , always bought
quality, brand name headers so never had a problem.Evidently they were all ceramic coated as I never had problems
with the paint boiling off. Until now. |
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Too Much Excitement-And WORK |
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| Surprise, surprise, like the mounts, the header paint was in reality just a shipping
coating. I found this out after I fired up the new engine, within seconds the "paint" burned off, the
headers turned cherry red, and the fan blew all the semi flaming debris through my nicely detailed engine compartment,
into the interior of my van and incidently, on me! Picture, if you will,hot,sticky,foul smelling black leaves blasted
into your face at high velocity. Hours of vacumning , washing, and cleaning the crap out of every nook and cranny of the engine compartment( and van interior) later I pulled the headers, sanded, and painted them with high temp ceramic paint , reinstalled them, repeated disaster as above, this time, with expensive ceramic high temp engine paint. Removed them again, sanded them, recoated them, baked the headers in the oven to cure them( my wife was SO pleased with that),started the engine to cure them further,shut if off when they got hot, repeated, and now they are painted and cured. If you can, buy ceramic coated headers to begin with, I have yet to find some specifically for the Astro V8, if you find them , let me know, please. |
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Header Exhaust Manifold Gaskets |
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| There are many schools of thought, header exhaust manifold gasket-wise. Composite, etc.
I've tried them all and found the fiber/paper gaskets suck,they are one use only, they bond to the exhaust ports,
the block, and the headers, and make a hell of a mess that you have to scrape off every time you remove the headers,
fun fun when you have no clearance to begin with. They also don't seal very well and allow the header bolts to
loosen faster then average.( yeah, header bolts do that, a lot) I have found the copper gaskets to be the best, they seal better, they can be reused at least a couple of times, the down side is they are 5,6 times the cost of the cheapies. The same applies with the gaskets that attach the headers to the exhaust reducers, spend a few bucks more and buy the reusable composite gaskets, a lot of money saved in the long run as they are designed to be reused and you will no doubt be removing them at least once as you configure your exhaust system and every time you do a tranny filter change, for that matter. |
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Another lie: You can use your Astro Y pipe with headers |
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| I was told this and should have known better as the exhaust manifolds on both Chevy
V-6s and V-8 are offset, one side is not like the other so obviously an offset Y pipe will not fit headers as they
are equal lengths on each side. But silly me, I tried anyhow, trimmed my Y pipe down to naddah trying, so now it
will fit nothing . If you're lucky you have welding skills,have a friend that welds, or a connection at an exhaust shop that winks at emissions standards so you can have your exhaust built, I have none of those so I ended up ordering the box o' pipes, do it yourself, exhaust kit from Jegs, for around 100 bucks you get enough pipe to make your way to the muffler(s). Because I was told I could use my Y pipe ( thanks for nothing) I had purchased a Flowmaster 1 in, two out muffler in 2.5 inch diameter thinking I would run my single Y pipe to the muffler, then have dual pipes to the rear of the van. I couldn't return the damn thing, paid a lot for it, so now I had to make it work, anyhow, Again, Jegs makes a 2 into one venturi pipe that allows your two pipes off your headers to become one, myself, had I not wasted time and money on the Y pipe fiasco I would have just gone two into two into two, Flowmaster makes a 2 in , 2 out muffler, also. You can have dual exhaust on an Astro, but as the gas tank is on the drivers side quite close to the outside of the van I can't picture running a pipe down that side in close proximity to 27 gallons of gas,or,as I tell people, I carry a fire extinguisher but I don't wear a fire suit. There is room,however, to run a second pipe alongside the originals location over the axle on the passenger side. For 30 bucks or so a stock Astro pipe will do,it's a decent diameter for exhaust flow when using dual pipes, and its bent the way you need it to be, |
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