Bonanza!

[fourspeedwagon]

The other day I saw an ad for a ‘79 C10 that looked ok, and looked really good for the price. Talked to the owner and he said the problem with it was a bolt hole for the starter had chunked and it only would start occasionally. Said he found a machine shop that would fix it for 150 but he was moving and wanted to sell it anyway so cheap.

Turns out the machine shops around here would begrudgingly fix it- if the engine is sitting on their welding table. I figure if I’m pulling the engine out I’m probably not putting the same one back in. It is a 350 but a 2 barrel version.

Truck is decently equipped- AC, ps, pb, tilt, full carpet, dual tanks, chrome bumper. I think most of that is part of the Bonanza package. Glovebox SPID is mia but the truck seems very original, I doubt any of the options were added later.

After checking all around I started looking for easier ways to repair the starter hole. Maybe a starter that used a different offset set of holes or something. What I came up with was an adapter plate made for tri5 chevys to use a later trans. Those engines didn’t have starter mounts, the starter bolted to the trans bellhousing. So I ordered that plate and am looking for the snout off that style starter to swap onto the (new) starter that’s already on the truck.
Hopefully this plan will work out.
Anyone ever used this method? Or maybe have a better idea for this common failure of SBCs?

Here’s a junky picture that is on my iPad that I saved from the ad for it.