dnuccio

In my auto shop class and eventually mechanical engineering class next (junior) year, we are building this 84 bird into a circle track/road course racer.

we have been working on it on and off all this past school year, but now since we have summer vacation, we have actually started to make decent headway on it. helps that now we can work on it for 5-8 hours at a time, rather than just 1 hour a day during auto shop.

ive been working on putting the engine together. its going to be a 305 SBC, what the car wouldve originally came with.

we started with a long block, and i bolted on the intake, water pump, and fuel pump.


here is our pile of parts for the motor


slightly unrelated, we started working on the brakes for a little bit. took this picture in the junkyard so we know the brake line routing.


that proportioning valve put up a good fight


OK back to the engine. we are using an edelbrock performer series carb. we need to use a spacer so the butterflys will clear the manifold. heres the gasket, as you can see it blocks a good part of the holes


port matched the gasket


carb bolted in place with its respective spacer. SHINY


holley air cleaner set on top just to see what it looks like


brand new distributer installed, just set in there, timing is not set yet.


new shiny water neck. they gave us bolts that were too long, so we added some washers to take up some space

you can also see the fuel line and filter installed.

fuel pump


this is how the car sits as of now.

4x Junkie

I would recommend doing more gasket "matching" so there are no disturbances in flow. For the water housing, find the right size bolts it will look better. I realize it is a HS project but that is tacky

dnuccio

made some progress the last 2 days

got the engine finished up


this is a different engine, it was taking up one of the engine test stands so we had to move it


our engine swinging


bolted into the test stand


went to pick n pull and found us a transmission. its a th350 from a 72 chevy pickup. cab was already off the frame, made pulling the trans really easy. up she goes


bolted to a stand back at the shop


engine fully plumbed, water pump pulley and belt installed, battery and electric fan wired in. the headers on it are just for testing, we are getting different ones for when it goes in the car. shes ready to run:


engine running video here:


you heard me talking about the head sealing. i noticed when we first started it that there was water coming out between the head and the block. i imeadiately suspected a bad head gasket. after running the engine for a while, the leak seems to have sealed itself, but we are going to re-torque the heads down, because i dont know if the person that assembled the long block did it right.

dnuccio

got more done today

exterior of the trans cleaned off. forgot to take a picture


pan pulled, looks super clean inside.


old filter on the right, new on the left


not too much crap on the magnet, thats good.


pulled the front pump to replace the seals





lookin good