My suburban -

A little background -

I've always been a 'burban boy. My parent's said I cried when I was 5-6ish and they sold one we had then (lol). - I drove a '95 K1500 SLT for a few years, downed it to do a drivetrain transplant and it has basically just sat in neglect for a few years now as the body was honestly too rough to warrant fixing. I decided I'd get it back going as intended and just find a clean body to swap in place, but scored a great deal on a running K2500 with a super clean body, thus I'm simply putting my custom powertrain in it & swapping my loaded interior over.


Now onto the "victim". After a light wash/polish the day I drove it home -


Gave $1k for it & drove it home, though the trans was mortally wounded. 454TBI/4L80E trans, ifs front/full-floater 14-bolt rear. It had had a roughly life for its almost 250k miles, heavily dirt/grease stained interior. Motor was supposedly rebuilt within the last 40k miles, all kinds of new gaskets/sensors/etc and signs of a major over-heat suggested they probably cooked it and had to freshen it up.

I cleaned it up a drove it for a few weeks in basically stock form, getting a whopping 10-11mpg...."ain't nobody got time for dat".

A TBI big-block was never an efficiency minded motor, but the same engine/trans in our 32' motorhome manages 11-12 while towing our loaded enclosed car trailer.....tells me what the simple "free mods" and namely what a full exhaust(headers & all) can do to really help efficiency.

Apart it came to start the list of mods:
- custom 4" suspension lift
- 305/5.0l full-roller short block, mildly ported 350 "vortec" heads, TPI intake manifold, '97 sequential-fire efi computer/harness, all force fed from an Eaton M112 blower (ford lightning/cobra blower).
- Full length ceramic coated headers & all mandrel bent dual 2.5" merging to single 3.5" exhaust that I had on the '95
- Essentially stock 4L80E with a shift correction/improvement kit(an 80 will handle around 700-800hp in basically stock form, so no reason to upgrade much)
- Interior swap from the later SLT
- 18" or 20" wheels with likely 33's, but maybe 35's.

It's being built as a nice/fun daily driver/tow rig, shooting for high teen/low 20 mpg & enough torque to pull the enclosed trailer comfortably on the cruise control at 75mph w/o downshifting for every over-pass. - I got 18-19mpg out of a 2-door tahoe on 35's with a 355 & crappy OBD1 TPI computer, so the smaller bore motor & better ecu should get me within reason and the "boost on demand" of the roots blower should give me plenty of power when wanted.

The interior swap wasn't as straight forward as one might think. The later door cards required changing all hardware(including all handles & linkage rods) and the mid passengers' door frames are slightly different than the later, thus some cutting/grinding was required to fit everything up. I haven't yet swapped the dash/steering column but it also requires cutting out the entire column/pedal mount assembly and welding the later one back in place. - I only seem to have one pic of the int uploaded as of now, a shot of the door cards. I'll be working on the dash swap tonight, and will take pics accordingly.



Being a daily driver/tow rig I decided it made sense to keep the IFS, though in all honesty an SAS swap would have been a much easier route. - I measured everything up and figured out that if I cut the stock upper a-arm mounts off and moved them from the top edge to the bottom edge of the frame it would net me a true 4" worth of lift. Then I cut the lower mounts & crossmember off and spaced them down with several sections of 2x4 box tubing. Every "spacer" is at least doubled up(thus 4x4 with 4 upright walls) and they also span a length of the frame rail. I still have a couple braces to add, but I'm happy with the results -


all cut-off -


notching/boxing in the lower section of the rail to allow full caster/camber adjustability/a-arm movement -


front mount welded back in it's new place -




rear -


All cleaned-up/finished -


Spacing lower mounts/crossmember down, behind the sections of 2x4 that you can see here there is another peice standing up right(at the inside edge of the frame rail, welded to the sections viewed here at the outside edge) -





I'm going to run a section of angle from the lower-front edge of the crossmember up to the very front of frame rail. Will add some additional bracing & make a nice spot to mount a big skid plate to.


The rear of the front diff mounts is part of the rear-lower a-arm mount thus it moved down along with the above a-arm mounts. The front mounts are part of the engine mounting platforms, thus I built extensions to lower them accordingly -


Drop blocks for the torsion bar crossmember, cut with my logo just because. The back side is notched open so that the crossmember sets inside the box, while still being box for a few inches forward of & behind the crossmember. -


I used two drag links to build the drop unit -


Front suspension bolted back up -


Front all back together -






In the rear I simply built some custom blocks. They are fully welded to the spring perches/axle housing and are wedged to correct the pinion angle. I made them 4" on the short side & 4.5" on the long, should have gone 4 x 4.25 as I almost back the pinion off too much. It's still down 3-4* at ride height so I don't think it will be an issue, but I will re-work them if I have a vibration. - I'll be building some custom traction bars for it as well, later on.

Suspension all back together & standing a true 4" taller -



The new long block is sitting in it now. Will be working on the dash/colum swap tonight, hopefully get it done so that I can get the exhaust & accessory drive on tomorrow night. Then mod/install the wiring harness, put the front clip back on & it should be back on the road. Also gotta swap my step-bars over.

Hopefully have a nice set of wheels/tires on it shortly. I will probably leave the blower off for a little while till I decide what I want to do on the tuning. Paint will be one of the last things, thinking a nice 1-1/2 or 2" cowl hood would suit it nicely. Probably sport a nice "D.I.L.L.I.G.A.F" sticker at least until paint, lol.

Also looking at having the later "non-chrome" looking rear windows swapped over.