Invaluable Tips For Your LS

ere at All Chevy Performance we don’t have to waste breath explaining to you just how important the Chevrolet LS engine is to the world of automotive performance. When it comes to the legacy of horsepower, the LS is the greatest thing since … well … the original small-block Chevrolet.

But that doesn’t mean the LS series of engines is without its idiosyncrasies. No engine is. You can, however, with a smart plan, almost always build an LS that perfectly suits your needs. The only problem is you need to know ahead of time what weaknesses you need to work around, and that knowledge usually only comes with years of hard-won experience.

he one thing that you quickly learn when working with the small-block Chevy is that they all leak. When this engine was designed in the early 1950s, all engines leaked oil. The joke is that if your small-block stops leaking, it’s probably out of oil. Leaks were a fact of life. Automotive engineering has come a long way since those days but the fact remains that this little small-block is still prone to marking its territory with light brown oil stains on the garage floor.

This story will address how to minimize these bouts of leakage. Notice that we didn’t try to claim to eliminate those leaks. In the name of full disclosure, we’ll stick with minimizing these drips and brown puddles.

We’ll start with the oil pan area since that’s where many of these drip paths begin. The big gorilla in the room is the classic, two-piece rear main seal. Many of the ideas forwarded in this story are retreads of common repairs and improvements that, over the years, have been proven to work. Veteran readers may recognize many of these, but we’ve also pulled up some new ones that are worthy of consideration.

hen it comes to casual cruisers or even daily drivers, it’s easy to overlook certain items, especially if there isn’t any noticeable damage. The phrase “out of sight, out of mind” rings true in many situations as long as performance isn’t compromised. In the case of our trusty 1964 Chevelle four-door cruiser, the rear suspension has been trucking along for 60 years without any real maintenance. The coils were cut many years ago to lower the ride height, and we’ve been pleased with the ride quality and stability on the highway, so upgrading the suspension never made it very high on the to-do list.

A while back, we decided to upgrade the front of the car with tubular front control arms. Classic Performance Products (CPP) manufactures the kit, so as we browsed classicperform.com we noticed a few options for rear control arms. Knowing that the bushings were likely toast, we thought it would be a practical upgrade to toss the stamped steel control arms in the scrap pile and replace them with tubular units from CPP. We found the appropriate kit (PN PT6467RTCA-KB) and added a pair of CPP Nitrogen Shocks (PN CPP-1007) as an upgrade to our parts store shocks.

here’s nothing like original sheetmetal on a vintage car, but original glass is a different story. Scratches, pitting, hazing, and more can detract from an otherwise-strong appearance.

That was the dilemma Mark Stielow faced with his latest Camaro project, so he had Sled Alley replace all its glass, including the door windows. Dropping in the new windshield and rear window were straightforward enough, but the intricacies of the door windows are what prompted us to following along and take notes.

If you’ve never attempted it, replacing the door glass on a vintage Chevy can seem easy enough at first but can quickly turn into a maddening exercise. Fine adjustments must be made to the fore/after positioning, along with the front-to-rear tilt, in order to position the glass correctly and frame it properly in the door opening.

hen car show promoters dive into the second time running a highly successful inaugural event it’s typically done better, having learned valuable lessons from the first year. Well, when car show promoters Bobby Alloway and Gary Case made plans for round two of the Triple Crown of Rodding presented by PPG held at the Nashville Superspeedway in Lebanon, Tennessee, September 6-7, 2024, they gathered extensive feedback from attendees, vendors, and participants, and used that information to ensure their second event would run smoother, better, and hopefully much bigger than the first.

There was no doubt that the second Triple Crown event would be much larger than the first, as early vender and participant registration was up substantially from the previous year. Case and Alloway realized they had their hands full and would need to accommodate more cars, more vendors, and way more people. Early preparation ensured Triple Crown troops were ready to pull off another successful event; and they did exactly that.