My car is a 1977 Pontiac Ventura 2 door with a white landau top. The original color was buccaneer red,
but we painted it Massey Harris red over Christmas vacation 1997. As you can see it is almost a perfect
match. Tractor paint is very cheap, bought more than enough for $20.00
 |
The wheels are still regular Buccaneer red, and are 14X6 Pontiac Rally IIs. The interior is a nice black and white mix, black dash, steering column, carpet, and rear package shelf. All the seats, door panels, headliner and other trim pieces are white with woodgrain accents. The only real interior aftermarket items I've added are a shift light tach from Summit, a Pioneer CD Player, some Jensen 6X9 3-way speakers (junk),
|
cupholders, and a gauge cluster where the ashtray used to be. A Cobra 517 radar detector keeps the tickets down. I am hoping to get some pics scanned soon, so bookmark this site. The original engine was a Buick 231 V6. This was shot when we got the car in 1995. We did a little searching, looking at different possiblilities, including a Olds 350 from the early 80s. That would have been a heap of fun with my 2.56 rear end gears. We then thought of searching for a Chevy 305, but nothing suited our intentions. Then we found a 1971 Impala about a mile from our house with a 350 and TH350. We knew the person real well and bought the car for $125.00. We ripped the
 |
engine and tranny out, found out the engine was stuck, but started to tear it apart anyways. It was a mess. The engine had 130,000 miles on it when we got it. We got everything apart, and sent the block and crank to be cleaned up, it needed no boring, but I wish we would have, some tiny scratches on one cylinder. On the other hand, we used the block, crank, rods, and pistons, so that cut down on costs. We bought a set of rebuilt heads from a guy that worked at Big Wheel Rossi, small valves, and drove it quite a while, until we noticed that one of the valve guides were machined wrong, and that cocked the lifter over a little bit, which cut a channel in the rocker arm stud, which eventually locked the rocker arm solid, which bent a pushrod. The first time we fixed it we bent the rod |
back (stupid), and we didn't notice the bad machine job right away. So we got it all back together and test drove it, bent the rod worse, unrepairable this time. This time we also dropped a valve, so we pulled the head, bent the valve, but the piston was OK. A couple little dents, but more or less OK. Anyway, we ended up with another used head, good shape, new valve, new pushrods, new rocker arm, good shape.
Anyway, here are some other goodies we have put into the 350. A Comp. Cams 268 High Energy cam, a Weiand Action Plus intake, an Edelbrock Performer 600 cfm carburator, DynoMax headers with 2.5 inch collectors, and 2.5 inch exhaust all the way back with some turbo mufflers. The tranny was supposedly rebuilt when we got the car, so all we added was an adjustable modulator and a shift kit. The rear end hasn't been touched, but that will change this winter, we are putting in new seals, brake shoes, and other junk into it, but no gears yet.
I hope to get some more pics up soon, so check back often.