- All right. You ready?
- I'm ready.
- We're speeding, or whatever Trace says, we're speeding.
- 5, 4, 3, 2.
- When it comes to gasoline engines,
there are a few that can hold up to the legendary,
the legacy, if you will, of the LS 5.3.
I mean, after all, my buddy Grant had one in high school,
and if it can survive his crazy ass,
then the five three is basically bullets.
Like, I remember one time we ran his old one Silverado
on literally a single court of oil.
Now for the record, if you're not familiar,
that's a six court system.
So, you know, we were a little bit on the low side
of where we needed to be on that one by about five courts.
Not only are these engines, bulletproof though,
they're extremely popular with pretty much every culture
in the automotive industry.
Drag guys, drift guys, truck guys, daily driver guys,
hell even the show truck and classic truck guys
love these engines for their simplicity, their reliability,
and better yet how easy it is to make power with them.
Let's say you have a five three though,
and you want to make some power. Where would you start?
How do you dive headfirst into this stuff?
I'm Dustin with the Custom Offsets.
You guys can follow me on instagram at dusty.co.
And today's video is all about the best performance mods
for your 5.3 liter vortec. Let's get into it.
(high pop music)
Now I know what some of you guys are going to say, right?
To slap a turbo on it and go to town. But listen,
I hear you. I do.
And yes, while that works,
there are a few better ways to make some power
with your truck.
We're going to start with some super basics here, right?
The easy to install, if you would,
none work our way up from there,
all of which are all readily available at customoffsets.com,
by the way, you know, all the simple bolt on stuff.
We have those for you.
If you're pretty experienced in this world though,
then you know,
you're going to want to stay tuned because in just a second
here, we're actually going to be chatting about
some pretty incredible stuff.
And you're probably not going to want to miss it.
It's, it's spicy.
It's very spicy. It's good spicy.
- Hot and a spicy meat. Yeah boy!
- So first things first,
and I don't want to spend a ton of time here, right?
Because we've talked about this one a lot,
but it's going to be your basic bolt-ons.
We're talking things like intakes and exhausts and
a plug-in flash tuner are all easy,
relatively cheap wins that you can do to gain
a few extra horsepower. Plus let's be honest here,
the five three Vortec is
one of the best sounding gasoline engines ever produced
ever to exist when it has the proper exhaust setup.
Don't be confused with the guides like banker over here,
who just, you know, hack off their stock muffler
and roll around with an exhausted dumps under the cab.
Just don't be that guy, please, for the love of God.
- For the love of God!
- Outside of your basic bolt-ons though,
this is where things start to get really fun.
One of your best ways to add power for your LS engine
is by dropping a thick boy cam in there.
And we're talking like thick with three C's like...
- Damn boy he is thicc.
- A cam shaft referred to as a cam for short,
it's gonna be a long rod looking metal thing that has these
little bumpy doodads on it.
That seemed to be random to the untrained eye.
Now, as this shaft is going to rotate in your engine,
these little bumps things known as cam lobes rotate as well.
And in the case of a five three, they're going to push your
push rods up or let them drop effectively
opening and closing the valves on your cylinder head.
Now most factory cams are designed to be easily drivable,
making the power band nice and smooth and easy
like Sunday morning.
Well, this is cool for grandpa who wants to take his wife
to church on Sunday. It's less than stellar,
if you're looking for more power from the factory,
as your factory cam is actually going to sacrifice power
for that drivability.
Swapping cams out can net you a bunch of extra horsepower.
Plus, it's going to give you that wicked chop chop
that we all know and love from the LS platform.
(car engine throttles)
It's not all rainbows and unicorns though when it comes to
camshafts is too big of a cam can actually negatively impact
the drivability of your truck.
Meaning that the truck isn't going to want to stay running
at stoplights and you know, on cold starts,
it's going to sound like it wants to die.
(cartoon character groans)
- Khay.
- There are tons and tons of online resources
available though. So, you know, if a cam is in your future,
then we recommend doing your research and really making sure
that you're getting exactly what you're looking for
out of your cam.
Another easy and often overlooked part
when it comes to performance is a good set of headers.
Now, I know we talked about exhausts earlier,
but many of the exhaust kits available for today,
many of the exhaust kits available for today,
that didn't make any sense.
I'm going to just scroll it back.
(beeping sound)
Many of the exhaust kits available today
for the five three Silverados and Sierras
are going to be only from the cap back,
meaning that they're going to leave your factory exhaust
manifolds, untouched.
A simple way to pick up a few extra horse powers
is to pick up a shiny set of tubes
to replace those old rusty cast iron exhaust manifolds.
So what's the difference between an exhaust manifold
and the header.
Glad you asked. By all accounts, right?
By, by all measures, exhaust manifolds and headers
serve primarily the same purpose.
They bolt onto the exhaust port to the engine
and funnel hot exhaust gases out of the engine
and into the exhaust system where they're carried
to the tail of the vehicle; and then,
you know, dumped out the side.
With that being said, though, one of the biggest differences
between an exhaust manifold and a set of headers is
the material they're made up.
Most factory exhaust manifolds are made from cast iron,
which is, you know, heavy and it retains a lot of heat.
Headers are most often made of thinner tubing than manifolds
helping keep less heat in them.
Additionally, headers are also made from primary tubes
that are all the same length.
All of this, right, is going to add up to equal more power,
but it also means that your truck is going to sound
even better than it did with just a
standard exhaust system on it.
And of course, how could we talk about adding power
to your truck without about the one and only
forced induction.
Now, ever since I was a kid, the name of the game,
when it came to building a 5.3 liter LS engine has been
forced induction, regardless of that's a single turbo,
a twin turbo or a supercharger.
Fact of the matter is that
this effortless beauty just plain takes boost so well,
and it's been proven hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of times over and over again
in all sorts of YouTube videos.
(person screaming)
From the mild to the wild, we've seen turbo builds
that continue to impress us every single step of the way.
There's just nothing quite like the scream of a
turbo LS engine or better yet the low whine
of a supercharger when you're shredding tires
and a cat eye soubarato.
It's just so good bonus round.
(funky music)
No, come on guys.
You really thought we were going to talk about
adding horsepower and not talk about
the old bottle throttle.
How could you forget the happy gas?
Like you just can't do it.
The one that captivated so many of us
when it torched a Mitsubishi eclipse after being shot up
by Johnny Tran and his crew in
the first Fast and the Furious movie.
Back to the matter is that
if you want to make power on a budget,
there are a few ways that are going to bring you more power
cheaper than nitrous oxide.
There really aren't any other mods out there that are going
to give you the same performance as a spray kit.
Companies like Nitrous Express are making bolt-on kits
for your truck for as little as 500 to a thousand dollars.
And they're going to net you sometimes north of
a hundred plus horsepower.
That's a lot of ponies for only a little bit of money.
Now, with that being said, though, there's a few things
that you might want to keep in mind
when it comes to nitrous, including the biggest one that is,
you know, if you're not careful, you can end up causing
some real damage to your engine.
And we're not just talking like melting wires here
or dropping the floor pan off your eclipse.
We're talking like window, the block type,
you know, damage like melt the piston type damage.
You know, like the catastrophic stuff.
Now, we could go on forever but the thing to remember here
is that do your homework before you dance with
the old happy gas, right?
Just, just do that.
There you have it guys, the best performance mods
for your 5.3 liter truck.
Do you have an engine build done to your truck sound off in
the comments section below and be sure to subscribe to the
channel, if you haven't already.
With that, I'm Dustin with Custom Offsets.
We'll see you guys on the next one.
Peace.
- Whoo!
O yeah!
(bouncy, bass thumping music)