After reading several threads on this board over the last week or so, I see there is a lot of animosity towards Chevy's. :Smarty: Now people, we are all children of GM here aren't we? LOL! My dilema is this.. Several years ago there was a 69 GS at KK that ran on alcohol. I LOVED that car. Lately my husband got the bug to build a mild "outlaw" car - streetable, 10 second, bracket racer. I told him it had to be a 69 Buick. Lee's plan was to get a Skylark shell cheap, tub it and put a BB Chevy motor in it. He's had his 71 Chevelle since he was 15 and his Dad drove him and his buddies to the roller rink in it every Saturday night. He's been wrenching on that car for 20 some years. Chevy motors is all he knows. So, we bought the Skylark that turned out to be a p.o.s. and now we are just going to part it out. Then we drove our a$$es off and found a nice '69 GS with a '70 455 and a 400 tranny with a shift kit and a 12 bolt rearend. It's just going to be as is for the next couple of years because we spent most of the mill money on it. Anyhoo, help me talk him into building the 455! He thinks it's way more expensive and parts are way hard to find. He doesn't like the 455 already because it's stuffed in there so tight it's gonna be a bi!@# to work on. I need success stories and lots of good numbers here! Help!!
I've got a 455" (actually 467 ??) in my '69 GS400 Convert. and its no different than any big block in any of GM's A-Body cars (SS454 Chevelle, 455 olds 442, 455 GTO.....) as far as room goes - basic geometry 101.....frames are all the same as are steering ans suspension locations......bloscks may be a bit different from brand to brand, but still about the same. and Its No big deal space wise......compared to my Factory Small block LT1 Roadmaster its a DREAM !!! changing the plugs and wires in that is spec'd as a 7 hour job !!! As for parts cost....well.....you pay to have the BEST !! So What if you cant buy a set of CNC aluminum heads at WalMart......Id rather be the "OddBall" than the "Everyone Else" on Cruise nite when the hoods are all open. BTW Connie....I Like your Style in cars - wish you could inject some of it into my Wife. She's tolerent but certainly doesn't understand the obsession.
By the by, the BBB pound for pound is lighter- by about 100# - than your garden variety Chebbie BB. And putting a bow tie in a Beloved Tri-Shield is S-A-C-R-I-L-E-G-E anyway you spell it!!! This is what happens to people in the after life when they attempt it: :stmad:
So, you have a '69 GS that you want to cut up AND put a BBC in? Yikes!!! It makes me sick to hear that! Unfortunately, if your husband is a chevy guy, he probably has no appreciation for buicks, right? It will most likely be cheaper and easier to build a 10 sec Chevy motor than it will be to do a 10 sec Buick motor. The draw of the Buick motor is the originality of it. Don't get me wrong here- they are great motors, and capable of insane power. They are also very fussy in the way you have to put them together to hold up under high power. You have to do oiling modifications, block reinforcement, etc. It's not an off-the-shelf kind of thing like a chevy. Then again, not everyone and his/her brother has one either. You will have something more original. If you have time to spare, you can expect to see an aftermarket block in the near future which should hold up to about any amount of power you could ever want. There is the possibility of another block, aluminum, coming out sometime too. There are heads available to make the kind of power you want. In fact, there will be more head choices soon. I have even heard a rumor of a 4 valve head flowing 600cfm that is in developement. There are hydraulic, solid, and roller cams available. Basically, there are the parts easily available to do what you want to do. One thing you will find to be true is that most Buick people are more helpful and friendly than your average Chevy guy. I don't really have a problem with Chevy motors. I just don't think that they are any better than a Buick motor. In fact, with Buick torque, you won't have to spin it as hard to make the same power you would in a chevy. At the strip we always hear of people tearing down their motors a couple times a year. Buick motors often go for many years without problems. Maybe something to do with less RPM? I don't think we could convince a die-hard chevy guy to get on board with a Buick. You could always sell the Buick and get a chevy to put together. It would be better than cutting one up.
I would start by taking him to some buick events. Let him see some super fast buicks in person and talk with the owners. Buick motors have a way of converting people all by themselves. I have built and raced both motors. There is a 65' SS sitting next to my 69' GS stage2. I like to kid my buddy dave by telling him lets put the stage2 in your 65' and step the car up. He laughs but knows its true. His aluminum headed roller motor chevy is not really any more powerful and the car may indeed pickup with my motor. He runs 9.60s in the 65' SS at 2900#s. My buds fun car is a 71' skylark with 430 buick bored to rat size pistons and a load of nitrous. Proof positive that you can love both.:TU:
Thanks Alan :::blushing::: Maybe you just need to take her out on a country road and teach her how to do burn outs. p I'm sorry I didn't make myself clear Steve, the GS will NOT be tubbed. That was the old plan with the skylark body. Thanks for all the info on the aftermarket stuff coming out. It'll be a year or 2 before we do anything. Lee doesn't have anything against Buick motors, he just has no experience with them. BTW, his SBC motor has been going strong for 15 years now without being torn down once. He gained a whole second over the years by tweaking other things. It may get a new cam next spring just to keep him occupied. Good idea David. Anybody got a Buick event on tape to persuade him with over the winter. :Brow:
Don't know how many times I have been on the dyno, and as we finish up an start unhooking the motor, Ron (my dyno operator who has seen thousands of motors) sakes his head, and and says.. " Pump premo.." (And quotes cam specs..) " Flat tappet (or) hydraulic cam" "Single four.. (or) dual plane manifold.." (then Quotes HP/torque we just made..) And then says.. .... "you will never do that with a BBC" that would take a roller cam...
I was gonna say.... send him browsing to Jim's website. Take a look at the dyno numbers for some of those engines. 625+hp on pump gas, an engine that could live in a street/strip car for years and with the right driveline and suspension, put a car into the 10's. Then if you look at the prices and compare apples to apples, it really isn't much more at all. I just watched a buddy drop $9,000 into a 383 sbc. Come spring, he's gonna be seeing nothing but Buick taillights when he's runnin me:grin: I even told him I'd run him with the AC on, you gotta love a Buick:TU:
"1994-99 GS Nationals Offical videos for sale This six set series covers the years 94 thru 99 and each tape runs 1 /2 to 2 hours each. Each tape is in perfect as new condition with the original cases. $ 50.00 plus shipping. If you attended those years....you or your car might be on one of these tapes! Peace WildBIll" http://v8buick.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27393 would make a nice X-mas present for him....and You !!! If you do get them, I wanna "borrow" the '94 tape, as its the only year I showed my car.......Mybe Im in there ??? o No:
Animosity?! That's a very strong term for the mild Chevy bashing here. Animosity is a term for an active hatred. I don't see any of the "F&^% Chevy they s*&$ d@*^" nonsense here. I never have and I doubt I ever will. We aren't exactly children of GM, either...Buick was very much it's own division back than (made the 455 until '76 for example, and it is not a Poncho or Olds 455, it's completely different) and in fact after Billy Durant took over from David Buick, Durant used Buick as the money base for founding GM! The Chevy bros. raced Buicks, too. So we are Buick guys rather than GM guys in that respect, although many guys like me are GM fans in general. However I am a GM fan and a Buick Guy, which to me isn't quite the same as being a GM Guy. The Buick 455 in a '69 is a tight fit? I'm confused on this point. the frame is the same as the '70, and the 400-430-455 share the same dimensions. Which means that there is the same amount of room under the hood of my '70 Skylark with a 455 as a '69 with a 455 as a '69 with a 400...which is to say, roughly enough to put in another engine. I have headers on mine which causes a tight fit on the motor mounts. And by tight fit, I mean old American car tight, not new import tight:grin: many Buick 455 owners say the header bolts are tough to get at. I have timed myself on replacing header gaskets: 15 minutes per head. The trouble is having a wrench that fits in there right, not clearance. The Buick 455 is a relatively compact package for a large engine- witness 454 Chevies and 426 hemis for comparison. The Buick 455 with aluminum intake and tubular headers is roughly the same weight as a small block Chevy with iron heads, exhaust maniflods and intake, never mind the BBC Put that together with the facts that the Buick 455 engine responds to large cfm carbs so much better than a Chevy and that it can be built with similar specs to be MORE powerful than a similarly equipped BBC (horsepower and torque) and the higher cost of the Buick 455 parts is beside the point. It's simply a better engine in many respects than the Chevy. About the only thing better about a Chevy engine I can think of is that any dog armed mechanic can fix a Chevy engine while drunk because they are so well known. (not a knock on Chevy mechanics, just pointing out that just because the Chevy engine is more well known, that doesn't make it better) Buick 455 parts may be "hard to get" at a junkyard or the local parts store, especially compared to a Chevy engine, but there are very good places like TA Performance to get new aftermarket parts and calling them is a breeze. Building a good 455 with ~ 10:1 compression, 850 cfm+ carb, new SP1 intake, new TA Stage 1 heads and a cam that really compliments the new heads should produce a motor that puts serious performance 454s to shame. Head design has been a weak point until recently, but not anymore. But it will be more expensive to build. But only a bit. And the tolerances in a Buick engine are much closer than a Chevy's, so the machine work has to be on the money, and done by someone who understands that Buick's 455s were not built by Chevy and can't use their tolerances. The Buick engine should be your first choice because 1) it's already there 2) there should really be zero clearance and tight fit issues 3) if he does his homework and forgets Chevy bias he'll see that at worst the Buick 455 is as good as a Chevy 454 4) the name of the game is power to weight. The Chevy 454 is a heavier engine than a Buick 455 and is not a de facto superior motor for power. The Buick 455 doesn't have 4 bolt mains because it's block alloy is superior to a Chevy's. Same with the heads: ask anyone here about valve recession with unleaded gas on a 455 head with unhardened valve seats. they will report none, nada, zero recession. Cadillac got the best alloys, Buick was next. 6) the Buick tranny will not bolt up the the BBC 7) Check the now famous Big Block Shootout in car Craft a few years ago. Guess who won? Chevy? Wrong. The Buick 455. And they used a carburetor smaller than the Buick 455's stock Quadrajet because of the shootout rules. Buick was handicapped and still beat Chevy for HP and torque. The intake charge velocity on a Buick 455 means that larger cfm carbs are better; the Chevy can't follow that rule. 800 cfm at least is a good rule of thumb. The racers here prize their 1000 cfm Thermoquads. 8) everyone and their brother and his friend's Mom has a BBC. Big deal, another 454:sleep: 9) He'll get no respect from Buick guys by taking the "easy route" with a Chevy mill. Yoda says the quick and easy path leads to the Dark Side.:Smarty: He'd be better off all around with another Chevelle- the Chevy guys will say "What's with the Skylark?!" 10) I run a mild 455 with 10:1 pistons, smog heads, big tube headers, very mild cam, 2.5" exhaust, a Turbo 350 tranny, a 12 bolt 3.31:1 rear with an 800 cfm carb and the factory cold air indcution. The tranny kickdown is broken, it doesn't work. You'd never know from taking a drive in it. Torque is a fine, wonderful thing. The 455 has a nice flat torque curve. I pull just under 20" Hg at idle- I could use a MUCH bigger cam and still run power brakes without a reservoir 11) the distributor on a Buick 455 is where it belongs- in the front 12) External balancer, external oil pump on the Buick. Much more service-friendly the thing that knocks me for a loop is that the '69 has a 455 with a "tight fit" :shock: I can't imagine what he considers a tight fit. How about a picture?? That 455 should sit in there with zero trouble and look like it's supposed to be there- which it would if it were bored to 400. Shouldn't be a shoehorn job at all. I would really be interested in seeing just what is so tight in that '69's engine bucket. The 455 is compact compared to a BBC, so he'll gain no extra room by putting in the Chevy. The hardest thing on my engine was motor mounts after I put in headers. I simply bolt the motor mounts to the frame pads loosely, lower the engine onto the motor mounts, locate the tranny pin, and use a small curved drift pin to locate the two motor mount bolts on each side. You can reach right in between the cross member and the oil pan. No trouble. There are several Chevys I want. A '67 Camaro for one. I'd also like a '67 Firebird 400 and a '70 Road Runner 440 6 bbl. There's really only one Ford/Mercury/Lincoln I lust for: a 1940 Ford De Luxe or a 1940 Lincoln Zephyr. The only one of those cars that wouldn't have a "correct" engine would be the Ford or Lincoln if I had both: one would have a Mercury Flathead, and the other would have a Buick 455:TU:
Chris thank you so much for the nice post! I'm going to print it out and paste it to the inside of his eyelids. :grin: I guess I had a milder definition of animosity in mind. The tight fit complaint is the headers as you guessed. I have to go work on our dashlight issues now, wish me luck!
Excuse me while I pat myself on the back LOL! All dash light are working now and I exchanged the bezel and the heater controls for better looking ones. Luckily Lee didn't bust the dashpad because of the sneaky nut way back there. I let him do that part, no way did I want to take that responsibility! Now my only remaining electrical problem is the 2 thingies (technical term p ) under the hood for the heater. Can somebody please tell me what they are really called and where to get replacements?
That sneaky nut made me break the dash in our 71. Whoodathunkit was a nut back there, when all the other spots were clips? ou: :laugh: :beer
Two Thingies? Got me there... Possibilities - heater control valve? heater fan? heater hoses? wait, you said electrical - I'm mystified.
