With the F 85 at home the work began. It had come with a 6 cylinder, 3 speed auto, no air and a bench seat. But it was original color red car though!
The plan was to take the drive train out and put everything that was taken out of the 70 442 rust bucket. Amazingly, I could not find a buyer for the chevy 6 cylinder, seems all it was good for was a boat anchor!
One of the 455cu engines I had gotten in the deal with my friend was mated up with a turbo 400 and slid into place , along with a 3:23 posi rear. With all connections made, we fired it up. It ran pretty good, but a knock developed soon. This engine had sat for a long time since the rebuild. Realizing this wasn't going to work, out came the motor and trans.
My friend Jim was kind enough to walk us thru a rebuild of the motor, so off to Hickory we went. Once the tear down was complete, all parts to be machined went to the shop. The boys and I drove back to VA where we took the tranny to Rodgers Automotive in Chantily,Va.
In a couple weeks after the machine work was done, the boys and I went back to Hickory for the big build. Jim has been working on Oldsmobiles forever! He even bought a brand new 1971 Cutlass and drag raced it back in the day. He has since restored the car, but it only has like 20000 miles on it, 1/4 mile at a time!
I wanted the engine to look stock on the outside, but inside was a different story! It was bored 30 over, heads shaved, which brought the stock compression of 10 1/2 to more like 11 to 1. The cam we put in had big lift and long duration.
After the motor was together and painted, ( it looked great! ) we took it back to the machine shop to run on the dyno. Well, the numbers weren't bad considering we had a weird intake manifold that didn't flow very good, bad carb and a old piont distributor with non-matching wires. With the breck in complete, we loaded the 455cu in my truck for the 5 1/2 hr trip back to Va.
Good times my friend! I need to do that to my Bird. So tell us, how many brews does it takes to rebuild an engine? Keep up the good work and post it all when you have time between races!
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