Interesting road block in the story of this car. I called JW to question him on the streetability of this car with a GS-113A cam. He said it would be no problem, but everything would have to be dead nuts correct for it to perform the way I would want on the street. Here's the problem: He caught one of the sentences I said "swapping to the new ported heads dropped vacuum from 15 to 13/12.5" at idle" and he immediately questioned either valve job, the intake fitment, or even blowing out the stock rings. So, first thing I will do upon arriving home, is run a cold compression test to determine if there's any issues at idle. Another thought I had is that it could be poorly adjusted pushrods, which I can mend relatively easily. If the test comes back poorly, I guess I'll first check all the pushrods, then pull the intake for leaks on the intake gaskets, which I wanted to check gasket lineup as is. If I see a stripe of oil leading into any particular port, that appears like its sucking oil in. If its rings, run er till shes a choo choo train with blowby and then reassess. If its valve job, no one is about to be happy. No one at all. That's a damn promise.
Yeah probably, and if its valve issues I'll hear it in the exhaust or the intake too If the compression test is wayyy off, I'll probably go get a leak down tester or at least borrow one.
Confucius say: "Man who show-off engine to friends by revving engine too high with no load, will soon be showing more of engine to friends than he planned!" Confucius didn't really say that but he would've if he'd thought of it! Years ago the town drunk brought a car to me to buy from him. It was a 70 Electra that had been rear-ended. I had cash in hand and was ready to buy it. He then proceeded to dry rev it 5 or 6 times to probably 6K rpm. I cringed every time he did it! It sounded great when it got there but then it started tapping. Then it started missing. He couldn't believe that I no longer wanted it. "Cuz it sounds so good!" he said. He barely made it back to his house and ended up just scrapping the car. What a waste......
Well I guarantee its not nearly as damaging as bouncing off a high rpm two step or rev limiter. Still, I suppose I won't do it again.
I'm just giving you a hard time. I'm sure you didn't do any damage. One of the first cars I ever had was a 70 Olds Cutlass 4 door with a Rocket 350/2 barrel. It had a peg leg with 2:56 gears. That thing would roast the one tire for as far you wanted! It was a great cruiser for me and my buddy's to pile in and go out looking for trouble. I finally killed the trans and I was ready to move on to something with fewer doors anyway so I just parked it. A year later one of my friends pulled the 455 out of his 442 for a rebuild so I gave him the 350 to keep his wheels rolling while the work was being done. That whole summer he tried as hard as he could to kill that 350 Rocket but it just wouldn't die. When his motor was finally ready and it was time to pull the 350 out he mashed the pedal to the floor sitting just outside of the garage. We all thought it would last for maybe 30-45 seconds and then it would blow up! That's what we all wanted to see anyway, stupid kids... Well, after 10 minutes of holding it to the floor his foot got tired so we just wired the carb wide open. Nothing happened! It just sat there running as hard as it could without so much as a tap, click, miss or anything. We gave up after an hour when the talk turned to draining out all of the oil and antifreeze. We decided it should stay together so we just pulled it and threw a tarp on it out behind the garage. Occasionally we will still talk about that Olds 350 that wouldn't die! Too bad a Buick won't last like that....
I've posted this before, but I had a '78 Cutlass Supreme with a 260 V8 Olds. Slowest car I've ever owned by miles. Had the worst rod knock I've ever heard, but finding an Olds engine isn't super easy sometimes and I'm not a cross-breeder, so I just filled it with 80w90 and drove it that way for over a year. When I did get a 350 Olds to replace it with, we did the same thing. Parked it outside the shop we were doing the engine swap in, and I mashed the pedal to the floor. That thing rod knocked soooooooo bad it was unbelievable. I held it for a couple minutes with smoke rolling out of every orifice and area of the engine compartment and the engine slowed down and down and down until it seized. Let it cool off, thing fired right back up, and repeated the same cycle 4 more times before we gave up on killing it. Thing would seize tighter than a wedge, but after cooling off it'd return from the dead every time. Drove it into the shop and pulled that gut pile 260 out and had the 350 in and running 4 hours later.....I'm a big Olds small block believer.
No such thing as an "Olds small block", calling it a short deck Olds would be alright though because the only thing smaller is the deck height. Olds 455 heads will bolt onto a 260 Olds engine and will even run but probably not that good because compression would be WAY down. 260/307/330/350/350 diesel/403 all have a 9.33" deck height while the 400/400/425/455 have a 10.625" deck height. The reason there are 2 different 400s is because one is from 1965-'67 that has a 4.00" bore with a 3.975" stroke and the '68 400 had a 3.870" bore with a 4.250" stroke.
I consider a small block to be a similar engine of the same make manufactured around the same time with a shorter bore spacing than its big block counter part. So what do you consider to be a small block?
Ladies, we're talking about my 430 that doesn't really want to cooperate here. Don't get me wrong, I like the Olds stuff too, but the Buick stuff is malfunctioning, not the Olds that I don't own.
We're just shooting the breeze trying to keep the thread at the top while waiting to hear the leak down results.
No worries with both of ya, I just wish I had results to post! This is bothering me that I’ll have to take it apart again
My little money is on the head/intake match.. Maby some re valve grinding to do?? To many strong runs before the heads to be a ring blow by. Oh and when I was 17 I put the air cleaner back on the wrong way on my 66 Wildcat 401. Put the throttle to the floor to set the choke and of course the mechanical linkage stuck WOT and didn't notice. No clue how fast that motor had run before I turned the ignition switch back off.. It didn't shut down instant either..
Interesting question, simple answer: If the compression test reads to be fine, it's likely the intake leak?
