What would you do if you had a Chevrolet Corvette, a Humvee, a workshop and a large area of woodland at your disposal? It sounds like a matter of personal choice, but there is a correct answer, and just in case you didn’t know it, American YouTube channel Grind Hard Plumbing Co has provided a handy demonstration.
The first part of this equation is a fairly sorry-looking C5 Corvette which, thankfully, still had a fully functioning 5.7-litre LS1 V8. The second part is an army surplus example of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s LA runabout of choice, the Humvee, bought from a government auction.
In a marriage of General Motors products that nobody saw coming, the Humvee’s torquey diesel V8 was thrown out in favour of the much more powerful LS1 from the Corvette – once pretty much all of the Humvee’s front bodywork had been removed to accommodate its new heart.
The result was capable of ripping some fairly mighty, dust-billowing drifts and burnouts, but what if you wanted to jump it? The Humvee was originally designed to carry lots of people across rough ground not particularly quickly, so came with some rather agricultural suspension.
Corvette-powered Humvee
As the Grind Hard team takes it apart, they discover that a single spring weighs 13.6kg – just 2.7kg less than the entire spring and shock assembly of the tricksy off-road suspension they’re replacing it with. Up front, that suspension is fitted as part of an entirely custom front end, which is also used to house a quartet of enormous fans to solve the Humvee’s propensity for overheating.
Once everything’s done, it’s taken for a shred around Grind Hard’s compound in the remote woods of Idaho, to address a question nobody was asking, but we’re glad we have an answer for: can you jump a Corvette-swapped Humvee?
