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Originally Posted by 57taskforce
Last night my brother and I yanked the old nasty carpet out of it. Didn’t find much in the way of surprises other than a small hole in the passenger floor and a little rot in the drivers lower kick panel. Not enough to worry about right now. I’ll focus on getting it running and driving before I even begin to think about metal work. Also I believe the truck probably had a saddle interior originally, the visors are dark brown and the belts are a lighter brown. The in the picture has a 68 date code but the others have 69 codes and are the same color.
We also ran the suffix code on the engine... 1980 Camaro 305 rated at 155 hp. Yea... not even worth the time to get it running. I swore I was done building old small blocks in favor of the LS platform but I’ve got a couple decent vortec 350’s still laying around. I’ll swap the cam on one of them and slap it in with an HEI and carb manifold/ quadrajet and inline fuel pump and see how it does. I pulled the heads off of the swap motor a few months ago and the bores are perfect. Today I pulled the oil pan and main/rod caps and the bearings/crank show virtually no wear. So I’ll slap it back together with a bigger cam and new gaskets/seals and call it good. I’m gonna get my machinist I use for all the engines I build at work to go thru the heads. For less than $500 All in, (At work we pulled the 350’s off of natural gas compressors a few years ago and I was able to snag a few of them for free) I’ll have a virtually new motor. Can’t go wrong with that. Natural gas is quite a bit easier on the cylinders than gasoline because it doesn’t wash the cylinders or oil down so the engine lasts a whole lot longer. This will also be the perfect opportunity to swap to an aluminum hydraulic clutch bell housing (same deal have a ton of those floating around too) and the captain fab hydraboost and hydraulic clutch setup that I ran on my K20. Here’s some pictures
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Love the truck, looking forward to watching! Hey, use caution switching over to the aluminum bellhousing, it makes it pretty much impossible to pull the engine on a 67-72 4x4 without pulling the transmission as well. The oil pan hits the crossmember before the pressure plate clears the transmission input shaft, so the only way to remove it is to pull the pressure plate bolts and leave it sitting on the input shaft until the engine is out; and you can't really do that with the one-piece bellhousing. I love SM465, but they can be a PITA on these trucks. Good luck!