Rebuilding A Police Car Engine With Melling

If you’ve been to an LS Fest, or really any event Melling attended in the past few years, you’ve probably see the company’s project Caprice. A former police cruiser, the team at Melling has thrown not only their entire catalog of parts at the PPV’s engine, but also some other fun parts.

The build started with all of Melling’s valvetrain components, including their timing set, camshaft and retainer plate, valves, valve springs, retainers, locks, rocker arms, pushrods, hydraulic roller lifters, and — of course — oil pump. But the goodies didn’t stop there. All new GM gaskets and covers, a Circle D Torque converter added to the build, along with a set of Kooks long-tubes with a set of GREEN Cats and a VCM Performance cold air intake.

Now, the interesting part of this article, at least to EngineLabs’ readers, is going to be the LS engine teardown and rebuild included in the video. A quick teaser: during teardown Melling’s Cale Reisinger found the 40,000-mile stock engine was NOT in perfect condition.

The camshaft chosen for this engine is one of Melling’s “Class 2” grinds. Designed for non-AFM/VVT engines, the bumpstick features .585 inch of lift on both the intake and exhaust, with 228 degrees of duration at .050 inch of lift on the intake and 230 degrees on the exhaust side, with a 112-degree lobe separation angle. Not anything super wild, but enough to wake the engine up and let everyone around know that there’s more than a stock 6.0-liter under the hood.

In addition, the 2.165-inch intake valves and 1.590-inch exhaust valves have had a nice little back-cut applied to bump up flow from the 823 rectangle-port cylinder heads that came stock on the L77. While the rocker arms are stock replacement pieces, Reisinger points out that they don’t require a trunnion kit, because the Melling replacements come with a full-rotation trunnion already installed.

With everything back together, the dyno showed a gain of about 135 horsepower and 100 pound-feet of torque. If you’re looking for a little bit of entertainment, the video is a cross between a tech video and a laid-back hangout at the shop and definitely worth your time and the cost of admission.