Grind Hard Plumbing Puts a Corvette Heart in a Humvee

A 350-hp lightweight Humvee that sounds like a hot rod? Where do we sign?

A Humvee with an LS1 and front brakes that won’t unlock is a burnout machine.Grind Hard Plumbing Company

It’s like a roll call of Real Red-Blooded America: AM General Humvee, C5 Chevrolet Corvette, LS1 small-block V-8, open headers, burnouts, and big air. Well, big air for a Humvee. Grind Hard Plumbing Company, the backwoods Frankensteins who create monsters that come to life with big-bore iron lumps instead of lightning, got an LS1 installed in their Humvee build project.

The quick recap: Visionaries buy two government-surplus Humvees, one tired, one a torment; embark on a road trip to get Humvees home that turns into 37 kinds of trouble; get home and strip both rigs; finally fix up the tormented rig enough so it acts a little right, only to discover more torments.

This is where we pick up. The crew bought an old C5 Corvette for a heart transplant, using its gas-powered V-8 to replace the Humvee’s turbodiesel V-8. As anyone who’s done an engine swap knows, this involves a lot of custom parts and troubleshooting. So this episode is almost entirely fabrication work and troubleshooting.

As always with GHPC, though, there’s desert at the end. We’d already filled our imaginary post-Apocalypse garage with UTVs and gear, looks like we’re going to have to add an imaginary extension for this Humvee.

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