drhach

I can't attribute all of this to my machine shop. There also was a 6 week lead time for the pistons that I ordered. So, around May, my pistons came. The Machine shop started trying to get me back in to their schedule. At one point, they had the block cleaned and a preliminary bore for the new pistons. I actually had to borrow my block so that I could make a crossmember from the new transmission. Finally, at the beginning of August, they got it all done. I brought it all home and started the assembly process. I started with paint. I know some people save this for the end. But there are lots of nooks and crannies. I wanted to make sure I got good coverage. Next came assembly Crank. pistons and cam. I checked all of my clearances and all was good. After that came heads, valve train and pretty much all of the external stuff. I got my harmonic balancer torqued up last night. My new driveshaft should be ready Thursday. The plan is to wrap up a few last things and get then engine/transmission/driveshaft installed this weekend.

Hey everybody, I just thought I'd share some of what's going on with my car. It has about 136,000 miles on it; maybe more. The speedometer stopped working for some time. It had a noisy lifter and I was just getting more and more worried about how much life it had left in it. I was worried about the nylon timing gears. Also, the bushing in the tail shaft of the Dynaflow had tons of slop and I was getting quite a vibration from the driveshaft. All of this led me to the decision to jump in to an engine rebuild. While I was at it, I decided to swap in an ST400. I'm not great at documenting this stuff, but I'll share what I have. Here's the car in question My Son helped me pull the engine and transmission last November. If I had known how long it was going to take the machine shop to get it done, I would have pulled it sooner. Also, I don't have a heated garage, so I figured I wouldn't get much done if I got the engine back in February. It turns out, I had nothing to worry about there. Upon disassembly, I discovered that the nylon from the timing gears was completely gone. There were huge chunks of it in the oil pan. The timing chain was wearing the cam gear down and as far as I can tell, the engine was a ticking time bomb. Amazingly, everything else looked quite good. I inherited the car from my brother and I know he liked to abuse it. I expected much worse. This was a factory low compression model (9:1), add to that, at some point the head gasket had been changed for a newer blue composite type gasket. I'd bet this was lucky if it was 8:1. There was no scoring on the cylinder walls to speak of and the cam looked appropriately worn, but certainly not worn out. In hindsight, I probably could have replaced the cam train and gotten more life out of it. These engines are clearly way overbuilt. I sent the parts off to the machine shop and started the tedious engine bay clean up process. Winter set in soon after this and I moved as much of my operation indoors as I could. Earlier in the year, I sourced an ST400 from a 1965 Riviera. I went through that completely, upgrading where I could. I also found a rebuilt torque converter from an ST300. So I should get some nice stall speeds. Winter ended, Spring came and went. The machine shop was pretty clear from the beginning that they were quite busy. I asked in the beginning if May was reasonable. I got a definite "maybe". I could have chosen another machine shop, but these guys were pretty highly recommended and they also made their knowledge of Nailheads pretty clear. I figured I'd wait. May came and went. June came and went. July and final mid August, I got my engine back. They did a great job. It was worth the wait.

It's a nice car even if they don't.

Must be trying to flip it. Can't even be bothered to vacuum the interior.

Gen light and cold light are not related to each other. If the cold light just started working, I would suspect a loose connection somehwere that came on all of a sudden. The Cold light should go off after the engine warms up. Does the gen light stay on after you start the car? Or is it only when you first turn on the key?

I subscribe to him on youtube. His affectation gets a little old, but he does find some great cars. More often than not, they have warts from actually being used. Almost always they're out in the wild and not museum queens.

Resurrecting this thread with the same question. The neoprene seal projects above the surface somewhat. Do you trim it it, or let it crush a bit?? I think the answer is trim it. Also, it seems like it would make sense to rotate the seal so the halves ofthe seal are not in line with the halves of the main cap. Anyone?

Only 2 months for a rebuild. My block was at the machine shop for 11 months.

The other side of that is finding how much is unique to your particular car and year. These are definitely not Chevys.

I'll second "Clarkson's Farm". It actually made me like him more than I have before. The big star of that show is his hired assistant. Sadly, I think "The Grand Tour" will end up crashing the cars. I'll still watch though.

I like the chromed stock parts. Very cool. If you get the chance, I would check the timing chain gear. My 62 had 136K+ on it when I took it out for a rebuild. Everything internally looked great except for the timing chain. It had nylon teeth on the big gear and they were all gone (and sitting in the bottom of the oil pan). It was sticking time bomb. I probably could have replaced that alone and gotten many more miles out of the engine.

Nice looking car. Has the engine been rebuilt? That paint looks really fresh. Unless you want to go full original, a standard inline fuel filter should do the trick.

Right you are. I forgot about those old ads.

Notice the "Maico" floormats. I would expect a newish marginal paint job.

Oil leaks are fixable. I chose to do the swap rather than rebuild my Dynaflow. I'm not done yet, I still have the engine out for a rebuild. But I've had to do everything everyone has already said. It's not that big of a deal really, but it takes some creativity to get it all back together. Could you swap in a 65 Shifter? That would solve that issue. The bellhousing is a direct bolt on. But that's about it.

Is this your website? That's quite a collection.

I guess that's better than being buried in the car.

There's a guy northwest of Kenosha that parts out Buicks of the 60-70's. I bought an ST400 from him last year. Bob Wambach is his name. He's on Facebook if you have access to that.

Where in Illinois are you?

So what's a fair price for this car? Assuming you were mechanically inclined, you could do a fair but of the work yourself, maybe not keep it perfectly correct and have a very nice driver. Where was the rust that was so worrisome? Were the floorboards rotted out? Was the frame junk? Just curious.

So, is that car parked at the Dad's grave site?

My 1962 Lesabre has a printed circuit board for dash instrument lights.

Also consider that zinc vapors are poisonous. Unless you have (very) good ventilation, you don't want to melt that base metal. Brazing or silver solder may be a choice. A high silver content solder and MAPP gas might get you a good join.

In the end, you'll have a car you can trust and enjoy. That's a pretty good thing.

Do those wheels ever need to be trued?