Blueprint short block
$800 for TTI headers for an LA, run the same combination from the flex plate back as you would with an LA. Cope sells a flexplate you can run a regular 727 converter with. What fuel injection system is less than $3000 for your LA? Add up what it would cost to build an LA to that level. Can you do a sb chevy cheaper sure. But LA to gen III? An lt1 crate at that level is $9700.
Well, the problem is that $10k is the price of admission. There really is no cheap way to put a hemi in an old car. As far as an LT crate motor costing the same...it doesn't matter. People who buy crate motors are such a small minority. I can tell you from experience that the average LS swap is completed for under $3k. If people want to drop $10k on an LS swap that's the choice they made. Guys looking to swap a hemi don't have a choice.
I would really like to use a hemi. Here's where my research has brought me. Hard core info on G3s is pretty hard to find. I have personally torn down about 20 of them (a mix of old 5.7, 6.1, and eagle 5.7).
The old 5.7 and 6.1 are by far the easiest to swap. Cores are cheap, MSD and fast make ignition controllers, and there's carb intakes available for the 5.7 (they can be modified for the 6.1 and most are obscenely priced). The downfall with the old 5.7 and 6.1 is that the cores are usually beat, and need a full rebuild. Every one I've opened had scored bearings, beat pistons, some level of valve train carnage, and a couple had dropped seats. The pistons and rods in these engines were not even suitable for stock engines, much less performance applications. So you can add forged pistons and rods to a complete rebuild, a $600 ignition controller, $800 headers, a $1,000 intake. So you can see that we are quickly approaching that $10k mark....and we have done nothing to address the bearing wear or the valve train eating itself. Oiling issues, poor factory tolerances...who knows. There's a million theory's, but if anybody knows for sure how to fix these problems they are keeping it to themselves. So now you are a $10k guinea pig. No thanks.
The eagle motors I've opened had all the old issues with the exception of the valve seats. The eagles have the great heads, and are easy to find with low mileage so a rebuild probably won't be a necessity. There are some other issues that need figuring out though. There's no stand alone ignition controller available. People have theorized that by replacing the tone ring with one from 6.1 MIGHT solve the issue, but I can't find anyone who's actually done it. Now you have to contend with VVT and MDS. Sure you can lock it out easy enough, but no one I can find makes non VVT cams for VVT engines. So you have to find someone to custom grind a cam on a VVT core. There's no eagle carb intakes that I'm aware of, so you gotta buy a $1k intake and then make it fit. You can see this junkyard project is going sideways already.
I haven't done any postmortems on Apaches yet. The compatibility problems are the same as the eagle. I can not say whether or not the pistons, oiling, or valve train issues have been resolved.
