Opti's Cheap Family Hauler (GMT800 Content)

I needed a family car. The wife's Jeep is too tight for two car seats for me, SWMBO doesn't mind it, but it's not for me. Car seats barely fit in the ECSB GMT400, and towing capacity is a little lower than I'd like, fuel economy is also a little lower than I'd like. AC In the 400 blows cold (under 40 at cruise) but not hard.

I wanted something that corrected all those and was cheap, because I'm cheap.

GMT800 Suburban to the rescue. It does everything I want perfectly. So I started the hunt. It was very hard to find the options I wanted, 4x4, efans, rear buckets, DVD player, and sunroof. I looked at probably 20, standard marketplace problems. I got sick of looking so I spread my search to 200 miles and decided I was buying something Saturday.

Lo and behold a very high mileage 05 Escalade ESV Platinum popped up about 4 and a half hours away, in the one place I didn't want to drive. So at 9.24pm we arranged a meet, and I hit the road at about 7 am the next day.

Got there and it was considerably rougher than expected but after a 2 minute test drive to verify all for gears still reside inside the transmission, and a half assed bend down to make sure everything wasn't rusty (one thing I won't deal with), we agreed on a price, which was only about half of what I was wanting to spend, so I'll put up with a lot.

I filled it up, very slowly (more on that later) checked trans fluid and oil and drove it 4 hours non stop back home fueled purely by blind faith.

It made it. Seems to run decent, so I parked it and went to have dinner with SWMBO and her friends since it's her Bday, and she just spent 8 hours of it sitting in a car so I could drag home another pile of E36 M3.

Here she is in all her glory

So the pros are she made it, and it's a 6.0 and maybe you could call a 4l65e a pro compared to a 60e. Being a platinum it has some weird features like heated and vented front and rear seats, so even my rear passengers can have cool air blown lightly between their cheeks, heated and cooled cup holders, a DVD player for the 2nd and one for the 3rd row, and a bunch of trims pieces that are platinum only and somewhat valuable.it came with stock wheels and most importantly it was cheap and has frigid AC

Cons. Its beat. Looks like someone E36 M3 on the carpet. Everything is filthy. The suspension or something makes it pretty unhappy when you hit a bump. Got a couple whiskey dents. 280k miles. It will only take .5 gallons of fuel at a time, and I'm told it has a new canister which means there is probably charcoal all through the evap and vent lines which is a PITA to deal with. I'm sure there are many things wrong with it, I haven't discovered and its another project that I didn't need. 

Next up is cleaning, then shake down, stay tuned and join me in my misery

Fun! I've got some suspension stuff, e fans, and a reman booster if any of it helps i will hook you up cheaper than anywhere else

Patrick said:

Fun! I've got some suspension stuff, e fans, and a reman booster if any of it helps i will hook you up cheaper than anywhere else

Thanks but this one came with the efans (05-06), might take you up on the suspension, but I have to shake it down and check it out first.

This is 100% the kind of stuff I get myself into.  I can say that my 2011 Expedition with 159k miles that I grabbed last year on the cheap has served me well, and those GMT800s really are pretty good.  Let Rockauto be your friend and it will be fine!  Tuning in for more!

I still haven't been under the truck or given her a thorough shake down, trying to get it inspected and registered before I dive in completely but I did manage to clean up the headlights this weekend.

Before

After

They were cloudy and a little yellow before. Didn't quite show as well in the before picture, they weren't the worst I've seen, but it made a huge difference in person

Finally got a chance to do a little work to it.

First the truck required priming the fuel system to start, so I figured the pump was dying so I ordered one. Got a 60 dollar Sparta pump off rock auto, I'm sure that won't bite me in the ass later.

It also wouldn't take more than a quarter of a gallon at a time when fueling, so that's either a failed vent valve or a canister that has come apart and allowed carbon through the whole system. I hoped for a bad vent, but expected carbon, because the truck had a new canister and vent. So once I got started I pulled the purged and tapped in on the bench

Alright so need to clear the lines when I get the tank down

Tank down and after lots and lots of work got all the carbon out. Pump looked like it's been in there for a while but this is a gmt800, so it can't be oe.

Getting the tank down was a bear because the strap bolts spun because the speed nut tore. Apparently pretty common even on non rusty trucks. If anyone runs into it Dorm 55157, is supposed to be for gmt400 trucks but I think that's a catalog error because it's perfect for gmt800.

I was running out of time but I wanted to do some maintenance, including flushing the trans. You know what they say, if you have a super high mileage trans of unknown condition and origin, the best thing to do is flush it. I ran 20 quarts of Valvoline max life with BG chemicals.

Before

After

Next I moved to the diffs

Rear was a little low, not sure on how the fluid looked because I didn't pull the cover just sucked it out.

Front was overfilled and pretty nasty

Plug

So I cleaned that off and pretended I never saw it, and filled it up with some Valvoline Synthetic 75w90.

While I was under there I poked around doing a little cleaning and inspected and I found this

In my experience GM doesn't make it a point to paint stuff no one sees, so I'm pretty sure someone's been monkeying around in there. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

I ran out of time before I finished everything I wanted to get done, so I might try to do a couple things Sunday.

Seems to have dropped trans temps about 15 degrees, still want to do a bigger cooler, but working on fixing broken stuff for now. It starts without priming and it took a full tank of fuel.

Plan is to make everything work as it did when new then decide if it needs mods and which ones

Yeah, those gm canister charcoal issues are a mofo. Glad you had another reason to drip the tank and got it all done. No one will ever see it but should feel pretty satisfying. 

Had a few mins this morning so I spent it working on the truck.

The passenger side window didn't work so I put a 17 dollar regulator in and a new courtesy light/reflector. Install went fine (I did notice the lower pocket is broken so I'll see if I can grab one off eBay or something) and now the window works.

glueguy (Forum Supporter) said:

Yeah, those gm canister charcoal issues are a mofo. Glad you had another reason to drip the tank and got it all done. No one will ever see it but should feel pretty satisfying. 

I have blown a couple out and it takes forever, just back and forth for about an hour or longer before it all comes out. What I've found that works best is to take the lines on the tank off and just tap them on the ground for a few minutes and it'll all come out, and the line that runs to the purge hit it with a vacuum then blow it out. I don't think I cleared everything to the purge out, but I'll let the purge valve and engine vacuum do that for me. It takes about 30 seconds to pop it off then I can just tap it and whatever's it's caught will comes out and put it back on the engine.