Blown or Just Bruised? Crew Drops Boosted LT2 For a Thorough Inspection

An untuned, untested twin-turbo setup in the Corvette C8 factory LT2 engine sets the stage for flying sparks.

In the second part of her series on tuning her C8, Emilia Hartford dug into her boosted LT2’s horsepower on a shakedown run, only to pull to the side of the road with an alarming knock. A late borescope examination revealed a possible cracked piston. What to do in such a situation with a shop full of tools and a lift? Drop the engine, of course. And take viewers on her YouTube channel along for the ride. Chevy estimates an LT2 engine drop as a 24-hour job at the dealer (we suspect they mean 24 hours for a full replacement), and Hartford is nothing if not ambitious when she muses that she and her crew can do it in six hours.

Watching the disassembly alone is worth the time. It’s a tribute to brilliant engineering design, even if it comes at the expense of a technician’s frustration. Corvette owners will smirk at the comment from Hartford’s main wrench, Sandy, that Ford engines are easier to work on (“Why wouldn’t [GM] put the plugs in an easy place to get to? Most of the Ford stuff, you just unplug, like, six plugs. Boom, the cap’s off. The motor’s out.”), but there’s no denying that the C8’s drivetrain is a tightly-packaged marvel in an everyday sports car.

The crew needs most of the day to disconnect lines, harnesses, and suspension components, there’s a minor coolant explosion along the way, and moment of high drama when Sandy gives the order to raise the lift, in microbursts, to separate the drivetrain from the chassis.

There’s speculation that the head is damaged. Scuffed, pitted, possibly beyond repair. One of the helping hands issues a contrary opinion, “I think we’re gonna open it up and it turns out that everything is perfectly fine.”

True enough, once the heads are off, we see no head or piston damage. No crumbled pieces of forged alloy in the cylinder or catalytic converters. As Sandy turns the crank, the only thing that seems amiss is that the deck height of a couple of the pistons are fractions off from the others, which leads to the speculation of bent rods.

Hartford’s plan has been to build the LT2 to a more durable, extreme performance spec, so this episode isn’t quite the setback it might seem. Given her enthusiasm (and apparent resources), Hartford is simply accelerating the timeline of the C8 build.

And while it’s easy to scoff at the borderline sacrilegious acts of these young enthusiasts — plenty of us hate to see a well-oiled machine from the factory poked and prodded by amateurs — it’s also fun to discover the limits of a new platform on someone else’s dime.

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