As the deadline for Drag Week marches ever closer getting more things checked off the list.

Bolted up the trailer hitch. Only took about 20 minutes and went smoothly. Now I need to re-pack the trailer wheel bearings and do the trailer wiring.


Hiding my questionable welds, I've painted the engine bay exhaust parts in flat black and have started to put thermal wrapping on them. I didn't have long enough ties for both pipes so zip ties are standing in until I pick some up today.


Then because my good engine will not be out of the machine shop in time I looked around at my stash of engines and had two options. One is a 230 short block that still shows cross hatching on the cylinder walls and the other an un-opened 250. A 250 head on the 230 short block would put the compression in the 7's, so I pulled the oil pan off the 250 for a peek.


Looked clean enough. If the chevy rebuild orange wasn't obvious enough it had markings on the rods to indicate a rebuild at some point.




But things went downhill from there. Pulled the head and the pistons all had a bunch of trash on them. So I vacuumed it out, sprayed a bit of WD40 around the cylinder walls and gave the crank a turn, and it turned easily, and other than looking well used the cylinder walls looked surprisingly decent. So flipped it back over to check bearing clearances.




I pulled all the mains and they all showed copper, with the #1 main being a little rough, but figured I may be able to polish it up for a short term engine. Plasti-gaged them and the clearances were pretty consistent 0.004", which is out of spec but all the bearings were worn too. Then I moved on to the rods, and thats when I found #1 was completely trashed. Rocked loosely on the journal. The journal was just scar'd enough that even I wouldn't try to polish it at home and run it. The good news is it looks like all the bearings were standard size so the crank is salvagable for future use. Also the bearings are all dated 11-77, so its been a long time since it was rebuilt. I checked the clearance on two of the other rods and they too show copper and came in at 0.004".
https://www.facebook.com/randal.burns.3/videos/10215704167850869/?l=3136731384087063048




So my plan is now to use the engine that is already in the Firebird. I am a bit concerned about the oil pressure so I'm going to double check it with another gauge on it to verify the reading and probably run a very thick VR1 oil. Good news is it just free'd up time to work on the trailer. Plan on doing the battery disconnect switch, yanking the intake/exhaust manifolds off the car and finish wrapping the exhaust today.