The pulley war is finally over and I was victorious!  Since the stock bolt was barely threaded into the crank by maybe 2 threads at best I spent a good amount of time driving all over town in search of a longer bolt.  It is not an easy task to find an M16-2.0x120mm bolt.  But finally at the sixth place I went to, I struck gold.  Came home and made that pulley my bitch.  Since I broke off part of the stock pulley I was a little concerned that it would effect the balance so ordered a 25% underdrive replacement that should be here on Wed.

Once the pulley was off, it was smooth sailing to get the old cam out and the new one installed.  Here is a shot of them side by side.  As you can see the new cam is not a huge change over the stock but there are some noticeable differences in the lobe shapes.

Installing the new timing chain was cake as well, just tossed it onto the gear.  This of course was the easy part of the timing change.  Here are the two chains, the LS2 replacement being a good bit beefier than stock.

Here is where the fun started.  Lining up the timing indicators on the gears was a pain in the ass since you have to align the dowel pin on the cam with the guide on the gear while also aligning the timing dots and keeping the chain taunt.  And if you don’t get the dowel pin in just the exact right spot it pushes the cam into the block at which time you have to put everything down and pull the cam back out again then start all over.  Took about 20 minutes but I finally got it all done.

The truly fun part of the night was replacing the oil pump.  I swear on all that is holy that I will never replace the oil pump on an LS motor while it is in the car again.  At least not without dropping the K-member.  This was a colossal pain in my ass.  Unfortunately with these LS1 F-Bodies you can not drop the oil pan without at least partially disassembling the K-Member.  So the best I could hope for was to loosen the bolts and let it drop about half an inch.  That in itself was a time consuming process as there was a couple of the bolts directly over the K-member and it took hours with a small 10mm box wrench to loosen and later tighten them back up in a space I could barely slide half my hand into.  But that was the easy part of the task.  The oil pickup tube has a bolt that holds it to the pump and is behind the lip of the pan so there just is no easy way to get it back in there without a great risk of just dropping it into the pan and causing no end of misery.  It took a great deal of patience and a cleverly re-purposed bread twist tie to get the bolt down behind the pan lip and back up into the pickup tube where it belonged.  I am crossing my fingers that the o-ring did not get pinched during this as I will be beyond livid if I have to tear all this down and re-seat that pump again.  I forgot to snap a shot of the pumps before I installed it but they were nearly identical with the exception that the new one was ported for better flow and better internals.

I did come across one oddity while changing the oil pump.  I found this wedged between the rack and k-member.  Free Snap-On tool.

Tomorrow will be valve springs and seals.  Should be a fairly easy day.