This is going to be a somewhat lengthy Caprice write up that I'll try to break up with pictures and videos on my experience so far:
So this WHOLE ordeal was planned since the purchase of the car but what I didn't realize was it happening so quickly, oddly enough. The original goal was pay off the car first and THEN perform all of these activities of modifying the car but alas, it didn't work out that way.
It all started when I was scrolling around on Facebook around November time and came across a post from a prominent GM parts yard, Day's parts yard for the late model GM guys that are in the know, regarding a powertrain that had for sale that, in theory, would save me thousands.
I figured since it saves me money/time with deleting displacement on demand (DoD for short) as well as it already being supercharged and having a spare transmission and torque converter so I called on it and sealed the deal.
A couple of days later after being paid for and it shows up and I excitedly open the crate to check things out:
It was nice to see there was a compression sheet included with the engine and that's when I found out it was a little more modified than I thought
My job very kindly allowed me to store the crate in a container on site while I started buying necessary parts to start this swap process which I THOUGHT would be a simple plug-and-play process.
I started to do some homework and found out this engine came out of a wrecked 2015 Chevy SS (Holden Commodore in Australia) so I asked around the SS groups to see if I could find out more information on who worked on this engine and what exactly was done to it to no luck. I was flying blind with this guy and still am today.
The first thing I did was get on the horn with Whipple and purchased as much things as possible without the need to purchase the supercharger since it's been in a gnarly frontish end accident.
I would like to take this moment to say it's a major pain to order from Whipple and I probably wouldn't do it again unless I absolutely needed to or if it's easily purchaseable from their website. I'd rather risk it with aftermarket parts.
So aftermarket I went! For exhaust I ended up going for a full Speed Engineering exhaust setup from their long tube headers so their x-pipe to their mufflers. It does look quite funky right now as it's meant for a Pontiac G8 and thus does not exit all the way to the back right now because the Holden WM platform is a coupe of inches longer.
The next thing I needed to decide is fuel delivery. I heard good things with a company called KPM and decided to purchase their 1000hp rated fuel pump. The problem I've been running into is the tuner I use leans heavily towards using E85 which these pumps like less than pump gas. This is something I've yet to solve.
I ran into a hiccup with a custom damaged bracket where I received no help and ended up going around to my local fabrication shops to get some bits created from scratch. They came out great but what should have taken a couple of days from the manufacturer (I'm assuming) ended up being a good 4 weeks.
After that, things somewhat went smoothly! Whole the two piece driveshaft was out, I purchased a new center support bearing for it and, as heard in the video above, we started it!
Here's the first ever start of this LS3 in my possession:
The car HATED not having a MAF sensor so something was rigged up to get it to run.
I would also like to take this moment to mention this was nowhere near a "plug-and-play" experience. There were, and still is,
many hiccups that went with this. The biggest of which is having this LS3 "talk" to my car. The electrical platform for the Chevy SS was completely different to the Caprice and luckily, the person who put it in had access to every available GM scematicto figure out what pin goes where from each. I also ran into an issue I never thought of: adding hydraulic power steering. The SS is electric steering vs the Caprice which is not. There's quite a few more but those two stuck out to me.
I realized I don't need such a small pulley. Everyone that's looked at my setup thinks the car it came out of may have possibly made a 4 digit number for horsepower. I was aiming for... not that. I ended up buying a 3.5in diameter pulley instead of the 2.75in you see above. I still have the smaller pulley for the future though 😉
With the car running, it was time to take it to a tuner. That's kind of currently where I'll leave this for right now as it's an ongoing process. I have a tune from him but it's not really a full tune as I ran out of fuel pump and had some other issues I'm still dealing with.
The biggest being the rear main seal is leaking.
And my Oil cooler.
And for some reason, I continue to lose my coolant temp sensor randomly and my passenger side O2 sensor continues to be lazy even though I've replaced it twice.
If you've made it this far, here's where I ran out of fuel with:
As for the Sambar:
I've been daily driving it but ran I to a couple of persistent issues mostly related to cooling. It continues to get close to overheating but I think I've figured it out.
*edit 7/22/25: I have not figured it out. Right now, my suspicion is the radiator fan is undersized for Florida roads roads. I'm usually cruising at 110km/h (about 68mph) in this thing and I'm sure these trucks aren't designed to consistently do that.
I also have discovered the Subaru Clover 4 likes to spit an insane amount of oil on my air filter within 4k miles. I'll be solving that issue temporarily with a crank case breather and, eventually, a catch can.
