I was told the engine was bored 30 over. Not sure of the rest of the motor. I did forget to ask for the paperwork on the rebuild. I'll contact the seller and see what he has. Engine was stored in a basement level garage which kept it basically climate controlled. In fact the wood shop next door was climate controlled from the house and only separated by that plastic cooler type separators used to keep alittle cool air in certain areas with. So I'm pretty confident everything is ok inside the cylinders. They gentleman in my opinion knows his cars and most probably took good care of the engine. Really only concerned about the torque of the main, rods, heads, etc. Todd
My personal opinion, which doesn't mean much, but if you have any doubt about this engine then play it safe and pull it apart. They are not difficult to disassemble, especially one that is all cleaned up like yours. It would be a piece of cake to tear down, check clearances, and go back and retorque everything to spec. That way you know it's right. It's already on the stand, the hard part was done for you. But there again, I am overcautious when it comes to my stuff and always very skeptical. It's a blessing and a curse. If it were a small block Chevy, I'd say have at it what's the worst that could happen. But they aren't exactly turning out cheap parts for Nailheads anymore. Hahaha.
I agree with Johnny,,,, it would be a mistake to put that engine in a car without knowing what is inside it.... I recently went into a engine that a man had paid real good money to be built and found a rod cap that was just finger tight.....he had fired it up and it ran about 10 minutes and started knocking....lucky for him , all I had to do was get a bearing and re install it after I inspected all the mains and rod bearings.... no,,,, check the bottom end out and retork all the bolts.......then you will know....
Take it apart retorque it to specs... When you go to reassemble it, coat everything with zddp (zinc) STP oil treatment in the blue bottle has zddp (zinc)
I'll add the next question here since any teardown will require removing the heads. With gasoline changes over the years are there changes to heads(valves)that should be done to run modern fuel versus the lead based fuels of years gone by? Todd
What I do is to look over the heads/pistons/head gasket and make very sure that there is no projections that can heat up red hot as the engine is running and cause a cyl. to detonate out of time.....:Brow: That is all you need to do,,, you dont need hard seats for the valves... you do need to have good thick edges on the valves to keep them cool...
I just go over the combustion chambers/pistons/head gaskets to make sure there are no bumps/projections ect that can heat up and cause untimed detonations....and inspect the valves to make sure the edges are nice and thick, not too thin so the valve edges will not cause pre detonations.....
Someone with more engine building knowledge might step in here and correct me if I am mistaken. But generally speaking, I think it has been rebuilt and if the motor is staying pretty well stock, then the answer is no. It should run fine. From what I understand it isn't so much the lack of lead in the gas that makes a big issue as much as the ethanol they are adding now. The ethanol can cause issues, but if that is all you can get then you just kinda have to live with it, or run race gas at $10+/gal. Unless you have a local station that sells ethanol free gas. Just make sure to run Premium Tier 1 fuel in it. I personally prefer Exxon. Never been much of a Shell fan. And it was found by a guy I use to write progams for my truck, that he found that Shell Premium gas was causing the late model GM engines to report a knock retard. Which ultimately means Shell gas has a lower octane than what they are reporting, OR all the Shell Power cleaning crap they are adding to it is making their fuel less efficient. So I stick with my Exxon whenever possible. So far the GS has been running fine on the Exxon Premium. Once you get yours all setup, if it develops a knock, you might have to retard the timing a bit so it will play nice with the modern unleaded fuel. Haven't checked the timing on my GS yet, but so far it's running good. Considering I found that the Californians have disconnected the kickdown linkage on the carb and the switchpitch microswitch is out of adjustment. The land of fruits and nuts, you just never know what you are going to get. Hahaha. No offense to any memebers from CA.
^^^^^ Works for Shell and doesn't like the fuel either. I already use a non-ethanol gasoline where possible locally. By the way I emailed the gentleman and he will try to locate the receipts and send them to me. Todd
Whew, almost stuck my foot right in my mouth there didn't I. Lol. At my last job we built some downhole tools to Shell specs. Every time a customer would call and mention a Shell Spec we would cringe. Hahaha. We all did the same thing when someone mentioned a Chevron spec as well. In ways they were worse than Shell. But I don't work there anymore. I'm further on the Upstream end of things now.
The closest non-ethanol for me is 18 miles. I use Exxon/Mobil 93 octane with 10% ethanol. I've not had a problem with ethanol. But it might be that I add Stabil or Seafoam for the ethanol to each tank. And for the lack of lead, I had 4 ounces of Marvel Mystery Oil top cylinder lubricant to each tank of fuel. Dad ran Marvel Mystery Oil in the fuel of his flathead Fords and flathead Cadillac. He swore by the stuff.
Look around for articles by Dennis Manner, Chief Engineer for Buick Engines, and unless you are running any Buick engine hard with a trailer at over 5K RPM for a million miles, you will never see any valve recession, so there is no need to replace valve seats on any buick, the valves were plenty full of nickel and will not recede like chevies do, do the google search and believe me, duh,
