TRIPLE THREAT
Style, Comfort and Muscle … You Can Have It All!
IN THE ENTERTAINMENT WORLD, A “TRIPLE threat” is someone who can sing, dance and act. It’s serious competition when you’re toe-to-toe with a triple threat at an audition. In our world, a triple threat would be a truck that goes like hell, is comfortable to drive, and with a killer stance and looks!
Gary Faust has this goal with his 1983 C10 truck, which up until now has had two out of three boxes ticked off on a good day. Gary wants it all, which is entirely possible with today’s aftermarket products and platforms as versatile as a C10, but some strategy is involved. GM made the small block Chevy engine from 1954 through 2003, and it revolutionized the automobile industry with the potential for performance upgrades. The introduction of the LS series of engines in 1997 showed great evolution in engine technology and expanded the performance aftermarket, so much so that the LS swap is very common, and for good reason. Gary Faust had a sweetheart of a Square body that his family fell in love with, and it was something he could spend time fixing up and enjoying.
He bought it with the ’87 grille installed and the ZZ3 crate engine already broken in. As typically happens, Gary got used to the power levels, needed more, and went
down the road of researching a typical LS swap. Gary’s a handy guy, and after serving as a combat medic in the Army, he traveled down a respectable automotive career path as a mechanic and is currently an electronic diagnostic technician repairing vehicle guidance systems. His love of high horsepower has produced several projects, including an OBS project, a badass Jeep JK and a G8GT that he built to well over 500 hp at the wheels with a string of upgrades including a centrifugal supercharger that was a blast to drive!
Gary’s holdback on LS swapping this truck was the ridiculously low (less than 5,000) mileage on the ZZ3 crate engine with forged bottom and bulletproof internals, in front of a beefed up 4L60E transmission feeding a new LSD and 3:42 gears in a 10 bolt 8.5-inch rear diff. A decent foundation for sure! Gary, being no stranger to forced induction, decided a blower was a “musthave” and started his research. Torqstorm Billet Superchargers has a fast-growing reputation for making great performing and reliable hardware with several different applications, including traditional smallblock engines. After a few phone calls and some websurfing, Gary settled on the Torqstorm SBC centrifugal blower system designed for 40-50% power gains, which
(on paper) should net him about 500 to the tires—with air conditioning to boot! Yes, please!!
Randomly throwing a ton of air and fuel and an unprepared engine may be fun on a bonsaiweb-car show, but Gary wanted to do things in the right order and the right way, thinking and planning his way through the process of creating a powerful and comfortable classic truck that will give years of reliable performance with room for improvements! We’re going to follow the process of solidifying the foundation of this truck, making it robust enough to withstand the demands of forced induction and reliable enough for his family and the occasional cruise to a cars-ncoffee or even an occasional jaunt down the 1350.
Addressing all the vehicle systems began with Gary knowing the limitations of the existing drivetrain and improving components one by one until the pyramid was right side up. This starts with a cooling system upgrade from Cold Case Radiators, a new Vintage Air HVAC package that we’ll show you in part 2 of this series, new fuel delivery and Sniper TB/EFI from Holley Performance to accommodate blow-through requirements, and a free-flowing exhaust system from Flowmaster and Flowtech to get rid of the spent gasses and sound great to boot.
An added bonus that has nothing to do with power is a TMI dash pad replacing the cracked and poorly repaired stock dash, which is typical in these trucks. (Hey, we all want it to look good too!) Then we’ll shake down and baseline the N/A package before we install the Torqstorm blower to get a before and after comparison, as well as realize the true potential of the combination of all the upgraded components.
No, the world doesn’t need another LS swap… Yes, Gary is absolutely correct in building up the cool factor of an already proven platform of the venerable GM small block and making it current and a lot more potent!