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May 5: Wow, lots of problems for the 'lil 427. We got the motor done and installed and made a glorious 7 minute run. Started up great, sounded insane coming straight out of the headers, but it died after 7 minutes. I think it was just some trash in the carburetor but it was a bit of a blessing in disguise. Took the valve covers off to see how things looked and re-tq the head bolts and BAM, stripped out ALL of the upper bolt threads. So the engine had to come back out for repairs. Jim came over to help heli-coil the damaged threads and we had lots of troubles. When we fixed the problem threads and tried bolting up the heads again a bunch more stripped out. I ended up driving all over town buying up all the 7/16"-14 heli-coils I could find and we re-threaded ALL of the head threads in the block.
You think that's the end of it, right? WRONG! After all this work we decided using the old bolts was not a wise idea so I ordered some ARP head studs. MORE problems. Apparently we didn't tap the holes straight enough and when we put in the studs it looked like a porcupine. We tried slipping the heads down on them but they were too misaligned. Ended up having to take the bad ones out and bend over the rest with a 5' x 1" thick solid steel pry bar. Wow, that was a little scary!
Well we finally got the heads on and the motor back in the vette in less than a week.
A HUGE thanks to Joe B, Rob N, Jim M, Tony A, and my Dad. |
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