The New Engine! - Part 5 - 09/01/2007

Wow. Five months without an update. Rest assured, work was going on. Slowly. Here and there. LOTS of little things needed to be done and taken care of, and they all tended to happen serially. First there was the oil pan drama. After hating life over the other ones, a new pan was bought from Ames. It fits great and doesn't leak a drop. Then the valley pan spent 3 months in the soup getting cleaned and STILL had gunk in it. Rather than risk the engine, Steve and I decided to send it out to get baked at the local machine shop. The doofus there lost it and we had to argue with them for several weeks, but in the end they made good and gave me a fully cleaned up and ready to go pre-EGR valley pan that looks beautiful (albeit flash rusted). The new cam from CarQuest arrived and it was made in the USA from around 1995 (been sitting on the shelf a LONG time). It was installed, timing chain was installed, a '72 carb with AC solenoid was rebuilt and fixed, the intake from the wagon was taken off and cleaned up for installation here, and the timing cover was handled despite being quite corroded in the water passages and repaired using JB Stick. All that was left was to prime it, finish cleanup and assembly, break the cam in, verify no problems and install it. Sounds all so simple...


Priming with a Chevy distributor because the Pontiac one was lost.


Hard to argue with that!


Balancer is installed with a tiny smear of silicon to prevent oil from leaking past it and onto the floor of the garage.


Valley pan is installed. Cork gasket is glued to the pan itself, not the block.


Intake is laid on and bolted down.


Bolted on!


Summer was fine until this weekend. This is in the shade. It's 105.2°F!


Motor is assembled and ready to go. HEI distributor went missing too, so a junky points one was installed.


Fuel lines installed on the test stand.


Needs a water pump pulley and alternator and it's ready to go! Unfortunately about this time it started to get late and we realized the stand had some "modifications" done to it which prevented the exhaust manifolds from clearing. Time to cut and re-weld!

Definitely coming together. Maybe this project will take less than a year. Let's hope it runs...

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Last updated September 1st, 2007