Caddys Customs

I'm Jose with Caddy's Customs and today I'm building a LS based engine cover for this 5. 3 on this 1980 El Camino. We're going to go ahead and fab one up for it just to make it look a lot nicer than what it is right now since the customer did go with the factory style intake. We're going to make a nice cover for it. So we started off with a flat piece of steel for the El Camino's engine cover and went ahead and measured it up, got the bends we needed with our actual metal break. And then I went ahead and set it on the actual engine and then measured my side pieces and got those cut out and bent those up as well before I welded them up. Alright so we're on to the next step. I'm actually going to add the other side to duplicate this one and then we'll go and make our cut for our grills. So we're going to go ahead and tack it up and then we'll test fit it again. Now we're going to measure for where the oil dip sticks at. I mean the oil fills that so we can make room for it to come through the engine cover. That's about where it's going to fit. Now we can take our measurement for where our oil fill is going to be at and we can measure for our grill that we're going to put in there and we'll measure the whole new face to be one piece. Alright so I got all my measurements taken for where I'm going to have my oil fill coming through and I'm just basically going to use a 2 and 3 8 hole saw. Cut a hole that we have enough clearance for that oil fill neck to come through. Go ahead and use this carbide bit just to clean up the whole inside. Make sure it's completely smooth so you won't have any jagged edges for when you put the filler neck back in there. I'm just marking trying to duplicate the other side of where I have the actual center where I'm going to start drilling the other hole for the grills to match it up. Get my reference point. I'm going to just drill two more holes and then cut it with a grinder. Right now I'm just taking a measurement where I'm going to cut with my cutting wheel so I can actually make the big oval for the grill. I cut these two circles that I measured out earlier and now I'm going to mark these two lines with my measuring tape and my straight edge. We're going to cut it off with a cut off wheel along these lines so we can get the big opening for the mesh. To see now we got our opening cut out. Go ahead and grind it and clean it up. Then we can start taking our measurements for our back laid mesh and get it tacked up to match the other side. I'm just doing this so we can have a good piece and then I'll measure it. I'm going to go ahead and mark this opening here on my mesh. I cut the mesh bigger than what it's going to be and then I'll trim it down from there and then get it ready to get tacked on. Now that I have a rough idea about how big I'm going to need the piece, since laying over from the back it doesn't have to be exact. You want to make it a little bit bigger so that you can get tack welds through the back side. You're only going to see this portion through the actual cut out so you can cut it out a little bit bigger than what it is. Now that I have our piece cut out I can actually set it on there. See where I'm going to be at. Know that I have enough room all the way around so you won't see none of the welds. Now go ahead and get it tacked up. I'm going to test fit it in again. Now I can start getting my measurements for the actual front piece to cover up most of the intake. You'll just see basically the throttle body coming through the actual new cover we're building for this LS. Basically I'm just trying to make a borderline of a template so I can make the front fascia for the actual engine cover. Alright so we just finished up the engine cover for the LS swap. Now it's ready for the next step. It's going to move over to body work. We're going to get it ready for paint. Get some color on there and go from there. Alright so that was part one of our LS engine cover. Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel at Caddys Customs. Check us out on Facebook and Instagram and stay tuned for part two for our LS engine cover. you