Jordan Sweet’s 2008 Super Clean Silverado

When 21-year-old Jordan Sweet decided to sell his 2006 Duramax and upgrade to a newer truck, he planned to have a simple daily driver that would remain stock. Fortunately, those plans didn’t pan out for the young man from Roanoke, Indiana— after purchasing his 2008 Chevy Silverado 2500 HD he began to work on it almost immediately. The truck was in good shape to be a regular daily driver with a just few dents and scratches. But after owning it less than a year, it transformed into the stunning rig you see here.

Sweet, who is a drywall installer, started on the truck the way a lot of diesel enthusiasts do, by installing a lift kit and some new wheels and tires to improve the truck’s curb appeal, giving him a ride he could be proud of. He installed a 7.5-inch BDS high clearance suspension system with Fox Racing Shox front and rear to keep the ride controlled. The high clearance suspension system doesn’t use torsion bar drop brackets, so it allows for more ground clearance under the truck and a much cleaner looking installation. To fill the additional fender gap, he replaced the stock tires and wheels with a set of Fuel 22×11-inch Hostage wheels wrapped in LT325/50R22 Nitto Trail Grappler M/T tires that provide good looks and excellent traction. To help keep the rear axle planted and to minimize axle wrap when Sweet gets on the loud pedal, he installed a set of white Longhorn Fabrication traction bars to link the rear axle to the truck’s frame.

While cruising around in a lifted Duramax truck would be enough for most, Sweet just couldn’t help himself and decided to push his truck a little further—thinking he’d still keep the engine stock while putting some more attention into taking care of its minor dents and scratches—he took the truck to the team at C&C Auto Body in Huntington, Indiana, where they took care of the imperfections then repainted the entire truck in bright white paint.

Rather than go overboard with the white and give the truck a monochrome finish, he chose to use gloss black to accent and offset the white with great results. They also painted the B-pillars gloss black to blend with the dark tinted windows and smoked the head and taillights. The final paint detail to accent the truck is the unique approach to the front and rear Bowties where the front is painted black with a white outline against the black grille and the rear emblem is painted white with a black outline against the white tailgate.

After lifting and repainting the truck, Sweet decided to upgrade the sound system, but still kept the drivetrain stock. Moving inside the truck, you’ll find that it looks like a pretty much stock extended cab Silverado with a black Sport-Mesh cloth interior, but looks can be deceiving. Sweet’s upgraded sound system starts with an Alpine CD-receiver in the dash to replace the factory head unit. Audio signals from the Alpine flow to a pair of JL Audio amplifiers mounted behind the rear seat hidden away from prying eyes. The four-channel 300/4 amplifier powers Hertz Audio component speakers installed in the factory locations to improve the midrange and high frequency sound. A 1000/1 mono-amplifier drives a pair of JL Audio 10W6 subwoofers installed in a custom enclosure integrated under the rear seat to cover the low frequencies.

Now with the truck looking great, sounding great and riding high on a suspension lift with performance wheels and tires, the inevitable happened, and Sweet caved in to that burning desire all of us gearheads have and decided to give the truck more power. He turned to Jason Wehrli and his team at Wehrli Custom Fabrication (WCFab) in Sugar Grove, Illinois, to work some magic on the 6.6L LMM Duramax engine. In keeping with Sweet’s earlier theme of leaving the truck stock, the crew at Wehrli worked with the stock LMM adding to it rather than replacing existing parts “on” or “in” the engine. All of the internals remained stock, as did the heads, fuel injectors and CP3, but the fuel system was augmented with a FASS 150 pump and filter system to make sure it had all the clean #2 it could handle.

Rather than ditch the factory variable-vane turbo and replace it with a larger aftermarket turbo, they opted to compound charge the Duramax by adding a Borg Warner S475 turbo to work with the stock LMM VGT turbo. The S475 is perched upon a custom mount on the passenger side of the engine bay. To make room for the turbo and the associated plumbing, the factory air cleaner assembly, coolant overflow tank and passenger side battery were removed. The battery was relocated to the passenger side frame rail below the door using a factory battery mount for a Chevy van, and the overflow tank was replaced by a fabricated Wehrli tank that frees up extra space under the hood by mounting against the fender and firewall. The custom aluminum tank was powder coated bright white in-house at Wehrli Custom Fabrication to match the truck and stand out in the engine bay.

On the exhaust side of the compound turbo setup, spent gasses flow from the heads into the stock GM manifolds then into a set of Wehrli up pipes before entering the factory charger; the gasses then flow from there into the S475 then out to a 5-inch diameter stainless steel MBRP exhaust system. The exhaust terminates at a black 7- inch diameter miter-cut MBRP exhaust stack in the bed. The engine inhales through an aFe air filter in front of the S475 which hands off the compressed charge to the inlet of the factory turbo. From the factory charger, the boosted intake charge is sent to the factory intercooler back-through a custom WCFab boost tube then another tube up to a WCFab Y-bridge where it is divided and sent into the cylinder heads. The S475s compressor housing and boost tubes were powder coated bright white while the exhaust tubes were coated with high-heat black then wrapped to keep under hood heat down while keeping the heat and velocity up inside the exhaust pipes.

To get the most out of the LMM, the team at WCFab uploaded custom EFILive tunes from MotorOps Tuning. To switch between tunes for power, economy or towing, they installed a DSP-5 switch to control the tunes at a flick of Sweet’s wrist. But rather than mount the control knob under the dash, they chose to integrate it into the factory ashtray. To keep an eye on the truck’s vitals while cruising down the road, Sweet relies on an Edge Products CTS display mounted on a windshield mount near the driver side A-pillar.

Sweet has not run the truck across a set of dyno rollers yet, but Wehrli feels that it can deliver around 600 horsepower and about 1,200 lbs.-ft. of torque to the ground. Of course, a stock Allison transmission wouldn’t live for too long behind a 600-horsepower Duramax, so Sweet had the crew at Wehrli rebuild the transmission as well. They used Suncoast clutches and other hard parts to give the transmission a fighting chance to hold together against the potent LMM. The engine is linked to the upgraded transmission through a Suncoast triple disk torque converter to prevent slipping under power when the converter is locked.

While Sweet has gone far beyond his original plans for the truck, he says he’s not done yet. Since we shot the truck, he added LED accented headlights and wheel lights and has plans for a black and white leather interior upgrade to make the interior pop like the exterior. While he is working on the interior, he also plans to have the factory silver accent pieces hydro dipped to go with the black and white theme of the truck as well. Whatever the state of completion, this big LMM powered Chevy is certainly a head turner, especially when you consider that Sweet still uses it as his daily driver! UDBG

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