My takeaway after doing this cam swap:
I took lots of pictures & a video plus bagged & tagged bolts as removed & kept then in order of removal which made it easier when putting everything back together
The intake cover has 4 wire holder connections on the back that are a pain to remove. Cover is best to be left attached to the intake. The hardest part was disconnecting the various electrical connections.
Removing #8 coil pack makes removing/installing that valve cover much easier.
Removing fender liners makes the spark plugs & exhaust easy access.
The 2 stretch belts are easy to remove & reinstall by using a small screwdriver to guide the belts off as you manually turn the crank.
These 2 made easy work removing & installing the harmonic balancer. Took about 1 minute to remove or install.
After removing water pump blow out the antifreeze from each head. This will save you later when removing the heads so no antifreeze goes into the cylinders.
Front bolts of air pump need to be removed. The back 2 bolts need to be loosened abit to allow it to push back a little to allow room to remove 1 of the timing cover bolts.
After removing timing cover aligh the timing mark on the cam gear up.
Remove cam bolt then cam gear from cam. You can walk the timing chain off without removing the oil pan. I used the oil pump alignment brackets then loosened the oil pump then moved the oil pump counter down & forward. Doesn't move much but helps. To get all the chain slack to 1 side rotate crank counter clockwise about 1°(very little). Using 2 small flat blade screwdrivers and a pick the chain walks off with very little effort. This takes some practice but now I can take off or put back on is less than 1 minute.
Disconnection the exhaust manifolds from the heads gives enough room to remove the head bolts so I didn't completely remove them.
When installing the cam gear on the cam get at least a 4" long bolt to screw into the cam to handle it better, pull cam forward as possible then rotated cam until dowel goes into cam gear. Repeated just to make sure. LOL
Failure to get the dowel in the cam gear correctly will result in 8 bent intake valves.
With new cam installed and assuming the crank has not been rotated walk the timing chain back on the cam gear with the timing mark up. Once chain is partly on the cam gear (installing clockwise) rotate the crank about 1° counter clockwise to get all the slack to the one side. This is what makes walking the chain on/off easy.
Once timing chain is on install cam gear to cam. Make sure pushrods & rockers are NOT installed yet. Rotate crank until cam & crank alignment marks are pointing to each other. The best view for the crank is from the passenger side.
There are many videos on AFM delete / cam swaps. My intent here was to add things that might be helpful that may not get talked about in those videos.
