Installing a turbo in an engine swap, what do I need to do to accomplish this?

Good evening,

You will need to upgrade to the lower end. That means crankshaft, pistons, and rod for the motor to be able to use a turbocharger.

If you don't, you will damage the motor for sure.

Roy

800 HP would be nice, but the question is what is the expectation for this vehicle and engine?

At a minimum, the lower end will need to be gone through.

If the expectation is to race the truck, then the LS will make 800 HP with no issue once you beef up the internals for not only the load, but you will need to increase the compression ratio slightly to make the turbo efficient enough to reach that 800 HP number.

I assume this is an LM7 engine which has just under 300 hp so to almost triple the HP you are going to need to blueprint the engine.

However, if the expectation is to have a fun truck to drive and it needs to be dependable then you may want to rethink the turbo. The only reason is all a turbo is doing is forcing more air into the engine so that you dump more fuel to increase the HP.

You can gain a couple hundred HP very easily with just building the engine with slightly different parts.

In fact, we have a complete video series on how to do this using Summit parts for less than $3,000.00. More than likely the turbo kit will be more expensive than this.

Here is a link to the first video of this series:

https://youtu.be/NyX6FwLYDuc

If you go this route, I think in the long run you will be happy with it as it will be reliable and not take much tuning which if adding a turbo, you will have to deal with as well.

However, if you want to add a turbo, I would suggest you do some research on what kits are available and go with a kit as all the brackets, wiring, oil plumbing, and programming are thought out. More than likely the kit will come with a chip and recommended injectors so that you won't have any issues.

However, going this route may not get you 800HP. That number is a big number and to have an engine run reliably for longer than a quarter mile at a time, will take basically a complete overhaul.

There are many people out there that will tell you that the LS stock engine will take a giant turbo and hit the 800HP with no issues, but the unfortunate thing is we never hear what happened 2,000 miles later.

Just getting to the 800HP number can be done cheaply, but keeping the motor running for thousands of miles is totally different.

Let me know if you have questions. Thanks.

My colleagues are correct. If you want that kind of power with any sort of longevity you are going to need a forged rotating assembly. The pistons and rods we used on our LS build would work great, but you would also need a forged crankshaft too. Thanks for watching!