Well, the day finally arrived for us to drive our new beauty home. My wife and I were both pretty excited. I was a little nervous too. I had noticed that the tires were pretty old (like 2008 old) and it was 2019 when we bought this thing. But, we figured we'd take it easy, it was only 75'ish miles and I'd just monitor them as we went along.
We got 6 miles down the road...and my first warning light came on! Water temp. It flickered on, then went out...that was odd, I thought. I kept driving and after a couple miles, the light was on solid. Gauge only read half, or maybe just over. But, being cautious, I kicked the heater on, opened the windows and nursed it another 4 miles to the next gas station. I needed fuel anyway. I filled the MASSIVE gas tank (this pig holds 50 gallons) and I started going over the engine bay. Right away, I noticed the overflow was empty. So, I pulled around to the side lot and we hung out waiting for the engine to cool off. After about a half hour, I popped the cap and noticed the radiator was low on coolant too. So, I bought a couple gallons of water and topped it off. We made it home fine after that, thank goodness.
Once home, I made an appointment with a local shop for some new tires and a pressure check of the cooling system. As I feared, it wouldn't hold pressure. So...here we go. I made a few calls and decided to have the radiator re-cored. As I started tearing the engine down, I kept finding shit that wasn't right.
Like a distributor that wouldn't advance
And exhaust manifolds that had stripped bolts, eroded gasket surfaces, and cracks...
I also found a ridiculously loose timing chain
My compression numbers were a bit wonky too...so, I decided that I was gonna tear the top end of the engine down and do a little refresh. I had the heads sent out for a valve cleanup. I decked the exhaust mounting surfaces, bought new manifolds, replaced the whole cooling system, put a new, custom mapped distributor in, new double roller timing chain, the whole nine. I even had to buy a new intake manifold. This emissions era BOP (Buick, Olds, Pontiac) engine has an exhaust cross-over in the intake to help warm the fuel. Warmer fuel atomizes better or something. Well, in the motorhome application, they run HOT...so hot that they have a tendency to crack the intakes. The central crack between the secondary bores isn't a big deal...The crack to the outside certainly is.
This took me a long time. Seems that every time I touched something, I needed to take it apart further and buy more parts. It got pretty expensive too. An edelbrock intake for a SBC is about 180 dollars. My Olds 403, which is nearly the same physical size, required an intake that was 450 bucks!
Here we are, all pretty'ed up and ready to purr.
And, in case anyone wants to hear what 403 cubic inches of American V8 sounds like after twin flowmasters and about 20 feet of 3" exhaust...
She's been running like a top ever since.