60 Years of Small-Block: We Salute Chevy’s Iconic V-8 Engine

It was influential. So influential, in fact, that it created ripples that have touched practically every American driver.

The Chevy small-block V-8, celebrating its 60^th birthday in 2015, is an automotive icon. Push brand loyalty aside, and it’s difficult to argue otherwise.

Introduced in 1955 (to the delight of hotrodders) as a much-needed upgrade to the under-powered Corvette, the small-block was actually the second V-8 in the brand’s history. The first was in 1917. Ten years passed before the engine was referred to as the small-block, only receiving the nickname because the big-block arrived in 1965.

Over the last 60 years, the small-block’s evolutionary tale includes the debut of fuel injection in 1957; the arrival of the 302-cid version in the all-new Camaro in 1967; the LT1 in the 1970 Corvette; the second-generation LT1, with higher compression and computerized ignition, which rolled out in 1992; the debut of the third-gen LS1, featuring all-aluminum block and oil pan, in the C3 Corvette; the fourth-gen 7.0-liter LS7, which was installed in the Corvette Z06; and the arrival of the fifth-gen small-block, with active fuel management, direct injection and variable timing, in 2014.

To commemorate the small-block’s 60^th birthday, the gearheads at Hagerty produced a four-minute time-lapse video showing the teardown, machining and rebuild of one example. After pulling the engine from a 1970 Impala convertible (which was surprising clean on the inside considering it had been driven 120,000 miles), Hagerty’s video team spent seven days documenting the small-block’s transformation: one for teardown, three for machine work at Thirlby Automotive in Traverse City, Mich., another for paint and two for reassembly. Using a special motorized camera slider to make the shots more dynamic, the video was created almost entirely with still images, approximately 20,000 in all.