[HO455]

Its been months since any noticeable progress has happened on the WMB. I had to get the final inspection on my house signed off and that involved building the banisters on the stairs of the house. Which for me was a large project that took a lot of time. But it is done with exception for some more coats of clear finish. When I could get away I was on the hunt for a used engine but after a bunch of calls and trips to look at used engines I gave up and ended up getting a low dollar rebuild from a local shop. It is a stock rebuild long block with the 67 300 HP 327 cam. Today I got most of the dead engine's connections removed or loosened up. After pulling the radiator I decided that it must be replaced. It looks as if it had been repaired at least once in the past and was not at all pretty on the inside.
Also up for replacement is the intake manifold. I had originally thought it was a single plane dominator but it is one of those terrible partially open plenum manifolds with divided runners that wants to be a dual plane and a single plane but ends up being neither.
The lower radiator rubber saddles were bad, one hard as a rock and the other one had been exposed to oil and was soft and spongy (probably from a tranny cooler line leak in the past as there is no sign of a leak now). So since I need new saddles and a radiator it is a good time to up my cooling game and go to the bigger four core size. I got new saddles at Dan's Classic, which is up for sale and downsizing and may end up closing, much to my dismay. The up side of this that everything is twenty percent off new parts and they are making deals on used parts. So I got a factory non EGR manifold and a good looking Qjet for $50. The manifold's threads all looked good but the surface where thermostat housing was little rough. I clamped it down on my little mill and cleaned the surface up. It interesting part is the factory machining was no longer flat. The area around the bolts was about .012-.014 higher than the front and back surfaces. (High spots circled in photo). Which makes me wonder how many I times I have cussed the thermostat housing for leaking and maybe the problem was the actually the manifold surface. The last photo is of a washer that is stuck under the intake manifold. I tried to pry it out but it is clamped down hard by the intake. Wasn't going to pull the intake off the engine when I returned the core, but now I just have to see if there was an vacuum leak around that washer.