The Minus Max

Building a 600hp '0.45 Chevy with Smarts Instead of Parts

- Jason Sands

When it comes to building a diesel truck, most enthusiasts follow the "more is more" approach, with huge turbos and injectors, multiple pumps, and usually a lot of heat and smoke. In the diesel industry at leat, it's not often that you get someone who builds a ast truck with the least amount of parts possible. But that's exactly what kirkville, lowa's Alex Hynick did.

To be honest, it helps that his brother AJ owns a diesel performance shop called Hynick Diesel. That enabled him to sweep up a wounded ’04.5 Chevy 2500HD for dirt cheap. As it turned out, the 240,000mile truck ended up breaking a crank, which meant a full engine rebuild.

BUDGET MINDED

It’s easy to spend a lot of money building an engine, but Hynick was on a budget, which meant using as many stock parts as possible. Still, the team performed a few clever upgrades along the way. A new LLY block and crank were found, but the rods were upgraded with stronger LML units, as were the pistons. The cam and crank were also keyed, both the mains and heads were upgraded with ARP hardware, and the heads received TTS valve springs.

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