Just thought I would share my findings with you guys:

I have a 2003 half ton with a 5.7 that I dropped in a comp 260 cam. Has longtube headers, tuned on super chips 91 (for now), and I had a homemade CAI as many have made in this forum. Gains from the cam weren't very impressive to say the least, I had lost a lot of lowend which was surprising to me. Anyways my A/C gave out so I decided to delete it and route a true cold air and ram air intake to the front of the grill, a homemade vararam if you will. All I can say is WOW! My motor must not have liked the smaller filter and hot air from the previous setup... I went with a larger filter and it's seeing a lot colder air now and the gains are incredible...

I had run a 15.7 on the 1/4 mile post cam install with the old intake setup. I would be willing to bet it will hit high 14s now. The intake feels like it was a HUGE bottleneck. I will post back with updated times this weekend. Just food for thought for you guys with homemade setups sucking hot engine bay air.

 

Very nice man. I like that set up! Valve covers look sick

 

You shouldve been able to run 14's before the cam. I'm mid to high 14's with the stock cam on a SC91 tune.

 

You should spend the coin and get custom (dyno) tuned

 

Gotta love 03's

 

Ya I was pretty disappointed with the time I ran immediately after the cam install. Granted it was 90F outside and I had a passenger, my fiberglass tonneau and spare tire underneath. But it was really lacking on the low end, my 0-60 ft was pitiful but the trap speed was 91 mph so on par with high 14s. Also a 05 PCM swap is in the works, found a donor truck for PCM, engine harness, gas pedal, front harness, cluster and dash wiring. So the future is bright!

 

Forgot about that 03 problem. So glad mine is an 04. That **** right there would have been enough to make me sell the truck and change years

 

Definitely don't want to sell the truck cause the body is in far too good of shape so I found a donor 05 truck for 500 bucks to swap out all the electricals.

Also ran the truck at the strip again. ET of 15.4 92.7 mph. Weighed the truck also, 5340 with me in it. Assuming a 20% drivetrain loss, it should be putting out 400 crank hp with that trap speed. I think quite a bit of time can be shed on transmission tuning. The ET and trap speeds just aren't lining up. I have been manually shifting it to get the rpms up to 6300 (03 superchips can't go near that high in drive), but the 2 to D shift is really delayed, feels like engine power is cut back majorly. A dyno shop can adjust the tranny shift points, firmness, etc with a Diablo in tune and the 05 PCM correct? Getting the engine parameters dialed in and adjusting the tranny at the same time would be awesome, although the superchips never ran lean with my wideband showing a steady 12.7 WOT

 

You can disable the torque management in your 03 for the time being, there's a write up on here on the wire to pull from the TCM. Might have been cheaper/easier to have hotwireauto do a conversion harness rather than getting a whole truck. With the conversion harness you won't have to swap out pedal assembly, etc and they could upgrade your coil connectors to the 06+ setup. Mine is out getting modified right now. Now I have to decide if I want to go with the 260 I've had laying around or the KRC 210 I picked up.

 

I opted for the whole truck route cause ordering from the states is hella expensive for us Canadians. And the truck came with motor and trans that I sold for 350 so I am a couple hundred deep for every harness and electrical component on the truck. I got the 06+ plugs, valve covers, and coils waiting to be hooked up into the new harness too. Is the Hotwireauto harness just the engine harness, cause your harness that includes the fuse block, instrument cluster, dash and cab wiring has a PCM plug on it too