[spitfire_er]

That's when the **** hit the fan. Everywhere I looked inside the intake and the top of the heads was rusted, not good! took the heads off, and the underside of the heads were rusted! Inside of the cylinder walls rusted.

Even though it had the hood on and air cleaner on, I suppose over the course of 25+ years snow drifted up inside there and condensation crept in and wrecked the top end of the engine.

Even though the thing looked OK on the outside when I bought it and the oil looked good on the dip stick, I was thinking this was a possibility that I would have to replace the engine.

I then looked for about 4 months trying to locate a replacement engine for this thing. Now being that GMC use Pontiac engines in their trucks in the mid to late 50's, I had to find a 55+ year old engine to use somewhere. Being that I'm on a tight budget with this truck, I wanted to find a running engine which as you can imagine, was not very easy. I thought about throwing in a 327, but I wanted to try and keep the Hydra-Matic and i'm not currently wanting to throw a TH400 or 350 in there.

I got a phone call one day with a response to a wanted ad I place about a month prior. The guy said he had what he thought I was looking for and mentioned he read my ad a couple weeks prior and just ran across his note to call me about it. He had what he thought was a 57 GMC bus conversion. We talked, sounded like what I needed and I headed down a week later to pick it up. To this point I had found several other engines but they were 500-1,000 miles away. This one was only two hours away, and I had another erron to run that day so the stars aligned. Showed up and it was a 55 truck but the engine was several different colors, but was a Pontiac V8 of the era, and it spun freely and I was guaranteed it would run. It also had the heads rebuilt not too long ago so I'm a happy camper as far as the engine goes.

Got the engine home and got it all cleaned up and painted with a quickie paint job that should last for a couple years till I have more time to do it right.