2002 Silverado 5.3 engine swap

Monkster · October 6, 2016

I have a 2002 Silverado with 270,000 miles sitting on 35's. My motor started running very rough last week to maybe 40% of the power that it had. I did the compression tests and found #7 was failing very badly. Water was in the spark plug but none in the oil. So I pulled the heads thinking blown head gasket. Gasket was fine, piston #7 had a huge hole in the top. So now I am looking for a motor. I found a 2012 fairly cheap but I'm not sure if it'll work or not. I'm thinking all that all I have to do is change my intake over to that one and it'll work. Will that work? Also any ideas on getting the motor out and back in being that high? Took tires off to see but still too high. Could take the whole front clip off but what are the chances of going back together and looking decent?

Now all this has to be done in my yard considering I don't have a shop. So should I use a chain fall in a tree, take hood off of course, or take the whole front clip off? Any other ideas would be appreciated a lot.

I did think about changing the one bad piston and getting heads redone but that many miles wouldn't be worth that would it? Then the bottom end would go out putting me back to square 1. I've did that on a '79 350 but was cast iron with maybe 70,000 miles on it. Wasn't the easiest thing to do but it sure did beat changing motors out. I still got the truck and it has close to 200,000 on it now. Everybody said that it wouldn't work. So would that idea work on these newer 5.3's with mostly everything aluminum?