[jimmythompson1964]

The truck came with a "rebuilt" 327 and a 4 speed. When someone tells me its a freshly rebuilt engine that always worries me unless I know the builder, this time my worries were justified. On my first out of state trip from East TN to my home town in Sumter, SC I was showing off to my cousin and ran it through the gears when I shifted to 3rd it died like it lost ignition. it just shut down. when I tried to restart the engine sounded like it lost compression on a few cylinders and would not start. We towed it back to my cousin's shop & tore it apart to discover the timing chain broke. I found this strange as I never had this happen to me before. So went ahead and replaced the timing chain and still had no compression on the #1 cylinder so I decided the motor had to come out, but that would need to happen back in TN. My wife came to get me for the long silent ride home. The following weekend I drove my Z71 back and put her on the trailer for the long haul back to my house in TN. When I pull the motor down I found a lifter came apart and forced the exhaust valve into the piston and broke the timing chain & bent the valve, as I inspected the internals it looks as if someone did a cheap rebuilt kit on the 327, and the heads were junk as well, they weren't even a matched set. I debated on doing a total rebuild on the 327 but as it happens I had a low fairly new 383 stroker wrapped in plastic on the bench that came out of my 79 Z28 that was already planned on putting in the 62 Chop top project, so Game ON! I spent the next month ordering parts and planting some new power under the hood, and I ran directly into my next hurdle. This motor was a 99 truck block 4 bolt main with a 1 piece seal, so it has a after market 400 crank in it and was a turbo 350 in the Camaro so it needed a flywheel for the 4 speed. I ordered a billet flywheel and new clutch and installed it. Well...as soon as I drove it I felt a pretty good vibration that got worse the higher the RPM\. Yep you guessed it...I had my hot rod motor balanced so now I needed to balance my flywheel and that presented the next problem, if I didn’t want to tear down my engine I would need to find a machine shop that would match balance my new flywheel with the auto flywheel that was balanced with the motor. So I found a machine shop that could take my auto flywheel and match balance the manual flywheel. The problem was he needed a after market 400 crank like the one in my truck, he said I would have to wait on him to either have a customer bring one in for work or find one to use. Well that took almost a year....talk about a time stick in the spokes, all together it took my truck out of commission for a little over a year. so now I am just enjoying driving it to some shows and weekend duties when I come home on the weekends. I am fixing the small things that I can work on for a day or two and then drive it some more. I am in the process of planning out a new 30x60 shop this coming spring I hope, and then with a good place to work I will get busy with my truck body work and upgrading the suspension and so on. But for now I am planning on driving to the Pigeon Forge Rod Run in the spring, I hope to make the Hot Rod Power Tour in June and as many other shows as possible. Just enjoying my truck on the road any chance I get.